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

When you sign up for Microgreen Tracker, you do not land on an empty dashboard. Before your 7-day free trial starts, the app walks you through a short series of setup questions about how you grow, and your answers configure the account so it is ready to plant in before you ever get inside. For a lot of growers, those questions cover most of the setup.

This post is for everyone who wants to understand what those answers did, or who would rather add their own seeds, mediums, and tray setups by hand. It follows exactly what we did on camera with a tray of Mammoth Red Rock cabbage on Happy Frog soil, in the same order. If you have not seen what the app does 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.

What Happens Before You See the Dashboard

Tap Start My Free 7-Day Trial, create a login, and guided setup begins. You choose how the app looks, then answer a short series of questions about how you grow. Pick Track Everything if you want the full picture, including your supplies and costs, or Keep It Simple if you just want the basics.

Either way, guided setup ends on the plan screen, where you pick a plan and enter your card to start the trial. Nothing is charged until the seven days are up, and you can cancel any time.

Your answers become your starting catalog, so by the time you reach the app it is already set up for the way you grow and your first tray is one tap away instead of an afternoon of data entry. The trial is the whole app, and everything you record stays on the account when the subscription begins. Anything you skipped, or want to change later, lives in My Catalog. That is the manual side of the app, and it is the rest of this post.

Growing One or Two Trays? Simple Mode Is Built for You

Not everyone wants cost per gram and supply inventory. If you grow one or two trays on a kitchen counter and just want to know what needs doing today, Simple Mode is built for you. It gives you a plain daily task list, a simple way to plant a tray starting from the seed, and none of the numbers you did not ask for. Choosing Keep It Simple during setup turns it on, and it is a good match if you are brand new. Pair it with our Learn page and beginner's guide and you have the app and the growing basics covered.

Simple Mode is a setting for each person on the account, and you can switch it off the day you want the full app. One grower told us, "The app is very easy to use plus I enjoy clean look that it has."

Watch the Full Walk through

If you want the manual route, or you just want to see what the setup answers are doing behind the scenes, here is the whole process start to finish in our grow space, from an empty catalog to a planted, watered, and labeled tray.

We filmed this before a round of interface updates, so a button or screen may look a little different from what you see on camera. The logic is the same: add a seed, add a medium, build a tray setup, plant. More videos are coming soon.

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 add or change anything about what you grow, 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. If you went through Track Everything during signup, a lot of this is already filled in, so skim each section and add only what is missing. Fill these 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.

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. Not sure where to buy seed or which crop to start with? Our microgreen seeds page covers both.

The built-in crop library holds 81 crops and 286 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.

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, 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. Once you add a fertilizer and set its mix rate, the app can fold it into your cost per tray. Equipment is where lights and fans go, with wattage and hours per day, and it is what lets the app fold electricity into that cost too. Our Microgreen Lighting: Best Grow Lights After 7 Years of Testing guide has the wattage details, and our grow lights and setup page covers shelf layouts.

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. If guided setup already built one for you, you can skip ahead to Step 4.

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, 7x14, 5x5, the 4.5x7.5 small sprout size, the 8x10.5 large sprout size, and custom, so the 7x14 OTG Microgreen Tray Kit and any oddball tray you own are both covered. Our trays and kits page compares the options, and 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. (In Simple Mode, planting starts from the seed and is even shorter.)

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 part of the app on every plan, 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.

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 watering at the morning and evening times you chose. These are real web push notifications, included 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.

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 14 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.

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.

Open any tray and the detail page shows exactly where it stands. This one is a black oil sunflower tray from our own account on day 3 of 8, with 125 g of seed sown, five waterings logged, and the water used so far. The estimated cost lines for seed, medium, and fertilizer build as the tray grows. Our sunflower microgreens guide covers the growing side of that crop.

By the time you harvest 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, and the app calculates your yield ratio live as you type. Because seed, medium, and fertilizer prices are fixed at planting, your history stays honest even when prices change later. Each tray gets one harvest, so a finished tray is a finished record.

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.

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. Simple Mode keeps the numbers out of your way.

If you do want the numbers, the app builds a cost per tray from what you actually spend on seed, medium, fertilizer, and power. Here is the cost analysis from our own account. Your numbers will be different, since they come from your supplies and your setup.

On our screen, that works out to $71.85 spent, an average of $3.96 per tray, and about 1.7 cents per gram, with $0.58 lost to one failed tray. Those are our figures from our own grows, shown as an example and not a promise of what yours will cost.

Grow Stats, cost analytics, and CSV and Excel export are all included in the 7-day free trial. After the trial, Starter is $3.95 a month or $39.95 a year, which saves about 16%, and covers 25 active trays. Paid plans have the same features and differ only in tray capacity and seats, so you move up when your rack gets bigger, not to unlock anything. Whatever you record during the trial stays on the account, so nothing starts over when the subscription begins. If you want costs, enter your bag prices from the first tray, since those prices are fixed at planting.

If costing trays out is genuinely useful to you, it is usually 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

What are the setup questions when I sign up?

Guided setup asks a short series of questions about how you grow, lets you choose Track Everything or Keep It Simple, and ends on the plan screen where your 7-day free trial starts. Your answers set up the account so it is ready to plant in.

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

You need a seed and a tray setup at minimum, and guided setup can add both for you. Adding a seed automatically creates its grow recipe, so doing it by hand takes about a minute. If you turn on Simple Mode, planting starts from the seed and basic mediums are already there, so you can plant without opening Supplies at all.

Is there a free plan?

Every new grower starts a 7-day free trial of the complete app, with a card taken on the plan screen at the end of guided setup and nothing charged until the seven days are up. After that, Starter is $3.95 a month or $39.95 a year. You can cancel any time.

What is Simple Mode?

Simple Mode gives you a plain daily task list and a seed-first way to plant, without the numbers and costs. It is meant for people growing one or two trays. Each person on an account chooses for themselves, and you can switch it off at any time.

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 remind you to water at a morning and evening time you choose, and they arrive aggregated, 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

Most of the setup in Microgreen Tracker happens before you ever reach the dashboard, and the rest lives in My Catalog, where 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.

It is easy for new growers to pick up. Niki A. wrote, "The app is great! Just subscribed today and super excited to keep track on the app and get rid of all my pieces of paper! Thank you!" If you have been keeping grow notes on a whiteboard, in a notebook, or in your head, answer the setup questions, plant one tray, and see how it feels. Start Your Free Trial and the whole app is yours for seven days.

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.

Related Blogs You Might Enjoy

• Microgreen Business Planning With Microgreen Tracker
• Meet the Microgreen Tracker: The App We Built to Track Our Grows
• Meet Sprouting Tracker: The Sprouting App We Built for Our Own Jars
• How to Grow Microgreens: A Complete Step-by-Step Guide From Microgreen Experts
• How Many Types of Microgreens Are There? What You Can Grow
• Microgreen Seed Quality: Why It Matters and How to Choose the Right Seeds
• How to Build a Professional Microgreens Grow Rack: Complete Step-by-Step Guide
• Top Microgreen Growing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Microgreens and Mold: The Complete Guide to Prevention, Identification, and Treatment
• What Works Best for Harvesting Microgreens: Knife vs Scissors vs Electric Trimmers
• How to Grow Sunflower Microgreens: Complete Step-by-Step Guide
• Best Fertilizers and Nutrients for Microgreens (Soil + Hydroponic)
• 7x14 Microgreen Tray Kit: Complete Growing Guide for Beginners
• Humidity and Microgreens: How It Affects Your Grow and How to Manage It

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.

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. Plans and pricing described here were accurate when this post was last updated, so check microgreentracker.com for the current details.

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. Comments quoted from growers are their own words and are not a promise of your results. 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 and the cost figures shown here are what we paid or recorded at the time 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!