How to Set Up the Microgreen Tracker App and Plant Your First Tray

August 11, 2026

The first time you open Microgreen Tracker, you land on the dashboard and it is empty. That is normal. Before the app can track anything, it needs to know two things: what seed you are planting and what you are planting it in. Once those are in, planting a tray takes a few taps and every watering, stage change, and cost after that gets recorded for you.

This walk through follows exactly what we did on camera with a tray of Mammoth Red Rock cabbage on Happy Frog soil. Same order, same screens, same tray. If you have not seen the app itself yet, start with Meet the Microgreen Tracker for the full overview of what it does and why we built it, then come back here to set yours up.

CJ from On The Grow introducing the Microgreen Tracker app tutorial in the grow tent with trays and seed ready

Watch the Full Walk through

Here is the whole process start to finish in our grow space, from an empty catalog to a planted, watered, and labeled tray.

Start in My Catalog, Not on the Dashboard

The dashboard is where you live once you have trays going. It is a daily worklist, not a setup screen. To get your first tray planted, head over to My Catalog instead.

My Catalog looks busy the first time you see it, but it is really just three things: your seeds, your grow mediums, and your tray setups. Fill those in once and the app stops asking you the same questions every time you plant. If you are brand new to growing in general, our beginner's guide to growing microgreens covers the physical side of the process that sits underneath all of this.

The My Catalog screen in the Microgreen Tracker app showing tray setups, seed inventory, grow mediums, fertilizers, and equipment

Step 1: Add Your Seed

Scroll to the seed section and tap Add Seed. Choose your crop first, then your variety. Our example was cabbage, then Mammoth Red Rock, which is the same brassica we cover in our red cabbage growing guide.

The built-in crop library holds 80 crops and 284 varieties. Every one of them carries a recommended sow weight, days to harvest, germination days, blackout days, presoak hours, and expected yield, all pulled from real growing data. That is why the sow weight fills itself in the moment you pick a variety. You are welcome to override it with your own number, and your override sticks. We wrote more about where that data came from in our Microgreen Tracker overview post.

Sow Weight Scales to Your Tray Size

Sow weight is stored as a density per square inch, not as a fixed gram number. The app shows it the way growers think about it, in grams per 10x20 tray, then scales it to whatever tray you actually pick. A recipe set at 30 g on a 10x20 tray becomes 15 g on a 10x10 automatically. One recipe covers every tray size you own.

If you want to sanity check the app's numbers against ours, our free tray-specific seeding guide lists rates by tray type and variety.

Choose How You Want to Track That Seed

Next the app asks how you want to track this seed. There are three options and they matter, so pick deliberately:

Untracked. No cost, no count. The app just knows this tray was Mammoth Red Rock cabbage. Fine if you only want a grow log.
Cost only. The seed carries a price but no quantity. Useful if you buy in bulk and do not want to maintain a count.
Full stock. Cost plus quantity. Every planting deducts the seed you used from what you have left.

We picked full stock. From there you enter the supplier, and ours is True Leaf Market, whether the seed is organic or standard, the bag size, and the bag cost. Ours was a one pound bag at $19.63 at the time we bought it. Switch the unit to pounds and the app handles the conversion.

Expiration date, lot number, and low stock alerts are optional. We left them blank for this demo, but the lot number is worth filling in if you sell. Stock is tracked per purchase batch, so a tray points back at the exact lot it came from and a lot points forward at every tray it grew. That is real traceability, and it becomes important the first time a bag under-performs. Anyone buying seed by the case will want to read our notes on buying microgreen seeds in bulk.

Tap Add Seed to Inventory and you are done. Adding a seed automatically creates its grow recipe, so you never face an empty picker later.

Adding Mammoth Red Rock cabbage seed in the Microgreen Tracker app with sow weight pre-filled at 30 grams per 10x20 tray

Step 2: Add Your Grow Medium

Scroll down to Grow Mediums and tap Add Medium. Same three tracking modes, so we chose full stock again.

Type the name of your medium. Ours was Happy Frog, categorized as a soil and specifically a potting mix. Then enter the package size and cost. Ours was a 12 quart bag at $19.97 from HEB, and we had one bag.

The last field is usage per tray. For a standard 10x20 we use about eight cups, so that is what we entered. Watch what happens next: the app auto-populates a cost per tray for your medium based on the bag price and how much you use. That number updates on its own every time you restock at a different price.

Reusable mediums work a little differently. If you grow on our 10x20 reusable silicone grow medium, the app tracks reuse cycles and amortizes the purchase across every grow it serves instead of charging the whole price to one tray. Since the 1.2mm standard silicone is rated for 20 to 30+ grow cycles, that spreads out fast. Just keep up with the cleaning and sanitizing routine between crops so those cycles actually happen.

Fertilizers and equipment sit right below mediums in the same section. You can skip both for now. Equipment is where lights and fans go, with wattage and hours per day, and it is what lets the app fold electricity into your cost per tray later. Our Microgreen Lighting: Best Grow Lights After 7 Years of Testing guide has the wattage details if you go that route.

Adding Happy Frog potting mix as a full stock grow medium in the Microgreen Tracker app with bag size and cost entered

Step 3: Build a Tray Setup

Scroll back to the top of My Catalog and open Tray Setup. A tray setup is the hardware side of a planting: what size tray, what medium, and how much of it.

We grow on a lot of different tray sizes here, so our real account has several setups saved. For a fresh account, start with one. Pick the standard 10x20, select the medium you just added, and enter your cups per tray. Grow type is optional. We chose standard grow and created the setup.

Tray sizes available are 10x20, 10x10, 8x10.5, 7x14, 5x5, 4.5x7.5 and custom, so the 7x14 OTG Microgreen Tray Kit and any oddball tray you own are both covered. If you are still deciding what to grow in, our 10x20 tray guide walks through the standard setup.

Seed added, medium added, tray setup created. That is enough to plant.

Step 4: Plant Your First Tray

Tap Add Tray. Because we only have one tray setup, it pre-populates automatically. Pick your seed from your inventory and you are basically done.

Advanced options are there if you want them, covering fertilizer, tray color, label generation, waterings per day, tracking preset, and beginning stage. We left all of it alone to keep this simple.

On the right side of the screen you will see a tray batch preview. If you were creating several trays at once, or several different crops in one batch, they would all list there. We were only creating one, so we tapped Stage This Tray to line it up, then Create 1 Tray.

Two useful options sit on that screen. You can generate a barcode label for the tray, and you can save the setup if it is something you plant often. Barcode labels and scanning are available on every plan, including Free, which makes more sense the bigger your rack gets.

The moment the tray is created, the app deducts the soil and the seed from your inventory and starts assigning an estimated cost to that tray.

Mammoth Red Rock cabbage seed spread evenly across Happy Frog soil in a 10x20 microgreen tray before the first watering

Step 5: Water It, Then Log the Watering

Now go plant it for real. Eight cups of soil, 30 g of seed spread evenly, then a heavy first misting. That opening watering matters more than most beginners expect, and our How to Water Microgreens: The Complete Watering Guide From 7+ Years of Growing covers volumes and timing for every phase.

Back on the dashboard, tap the tray's card. You get two options: change stage or water. Tap water and pick your method and slot. We logged a heavy mist and marked it as the AM watering since it was still morning.

That records one of the day's two waterings. The app supports up to two per day, and it splits the task list into AM and PM slots so you can see at a glance what is still outstanding. If you only water once a day, you pick a single slot and the second one never nags you. You can also skip a slot, which records an honest dismissal rather than a watering you did not do.

If you have push notifications turned on, the app will remind you about the evening watering at the time you chose. These are real web push notifications, free on every plan, and they arrive as one aggregated reminder per slot rather than one buzz per tray. Forty trays due gets you one notification, not forty.

Then get the tray under weight and the physical work is done. Our 4-tray weight experiment explains why we do that, and our weight vs. blackout guide covers when to lift it.

Heavy first misting over freshly sown Mammoth Red Rock cabbage seed on soil in a 10x20 microgreen tray

Step 6: Add a Tray Color So You Can Tell Trays Apart

We forgot to assign a tray color during planting, which is an easy fix and worth showing. Open the tray, tap View Full Tray Details, and you land on the page where you can change anything you missed during setup.

Scroll down and pick a color for the tray identifier. There are 12 to choose from, and they exist specifically to match the physical clip on your tray. We put a white Microgreen Tray Clip Labeler on the tray and selected white in the app. It saves immediately, and back on the dashboard that tray now carries a white line down its left side.

Once you have a dozen brassica trays that look nearly identical, this is the difference between knowing what is what and guessing. The clip labelers were CJ's original design for exactly this problem, and we wrote about how they came together in our tray clip labeler blog.

White On The Grow tray clip labeler attached to a green 10x20 microgreen tray for color coded tray identification

What the App Does for the Rest of That Grow

From here you are mostly reacting to the daily task list. The app tells you when a tray is due to change stages, records every watering, projects an estimated harvest date, and keeps a running tally of what went into that tray.

By the time you cut it, you will know how much seed, how much medium, and how much water that specific tray used, plus the total cost it carried. At harvest you log the weight and a quality grade, the app calculates your yield ratio live as you type, and it freezes a permanent cost snapshot so your history stays honest even when seed prices change later.

Multiply that across a season and you stop guessing which crops are worth your shelf space. That is the same reasoning behind our radish and broccoli cornerstone guides, just automated. The rest of what the app can do, from succession waves to order-driven planting plans, is laid out in our full Microgreen Tracker breakdown.

Microgreen Tracker dashboard on a phone held in front of a grow rack of radish and kale microgreens

Do You Have to Track Costs?

No. Untracked and cost only exist for a reason, and plenty of home growers never need a dollar figure attached to a tray.

Here is the honest version of how costs work on the free plan. Free covers two active trays and gives you most of the app, including supplies and inventory, customers and orders, succession planting, barcode labels and scanning, the full crop library, Simple Mode, Spanish, and push reminders. The statistics and cost analytics, along with CSV and Excel export, are hidden on Free and unlock on every paid plan starting at $3.95 a month.

What most growers do not expect is that the free plan still captures your cost inputs behind the scenes. It just hides the outputs. If you enter your bag prices from day one and upgrade six months later, your whole cost history is sitting there waiting. You do not start from zero.

If costing trays out is genuinely useful to you, it is because you are selling or thinking about it. Our complete guide to selling microgreens covers the pricing and permitting side of that decision.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I have to add supplies before I can plant a tray?

You need a seed and a tray setup at minimum. Adding a seed automatically creates its grow recipe, so those two steps take about a minute. If you turn on Simple Mode, planting becomes seed-first and three basic untracked mediums are already there, so you can plant without opening Supplies at all.

Do I need to download anything?

No. Microgreen Tracker is a responsive web app that works in any phone or desktop browser. If you want it on your home screen, you can install it there directly. There is no app store listing to hunt down.

Will it remind me to water?

Yes, if you opt in. Web push notifications for watering and tasks are free on every plan, at a morning and evening time you choose, aggregated into one notification per slot. They are push only, so there is no email or text message involved. You enable it in the settings area.

What if I forgot to set something during planting?

Open the tray and tap View Full Tray Details. Stage dates, tray color, notes, waterings, tracking mode, and per-tray overrides are all editable after the fact. That is how we added the white tray color after the tray was already planted and watered.

Where can I read more about what the app does?

Our Meet the Microgreen Tracker post is the full overview: the built-in crop data, the stage model, Simple Mode, the tools for growers who sell, and the story behind why we built it in the first place.

Final Thoughts

Setting up the catalog is the only part of Microgreen Tracker that takes real effort, and you only do it once. After that, planting a repeat tray is a handful of taps and the record keeping happens whether you think about it or not.

If you have been keeping grow notes on a whiteboard or in your head, start with one crop and one tray setup and see how it feels. Create a account and add your first tray.

For everything on the growing side that sits underneath the software, the Microgreen Masterclass covers every method we use, and our video library has the full tutorials.

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This post contains affiliate links. We may earn a small commission on qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we use and recommend. See our full affiliate disclosure.

The Microgreen Tracker is a separate product with its own website at www.microgreentracker.com. All accounts, subscriptions, billing, and support for the app are handled there, not through our main store at www.onthegrow.net. You cannot start, change, or cancel a Microgreen Tracker subscription from onthegrow.net.

The results, costs, and opinions shared in this post are based on our own first-hand testing in our specific, controlled grow space. Any mention of a brand or product reflects our own experience, not a sponsored or definitive review. Your climate, water, seed, and setup are different from ours, so your results can vary. We always encourage you to run your own experiments and see what works best for you.

The seed and medium prices shown here are what we paid at the time of purchase and are for illustration only. Local food safety, licensing, and business requirements vary by location. Always verify current rules with your local health department and department of agriculture before selling.

Happy growing!