About Ortaia
It starts with potatoes.
How a kitchen garden close to Copenhagen became a gardening app.
Leo Jahl
Founder · Copenhagen
In my small kitchen garden, a kilo of seed potatoes went into the soil. By harvest time, that single kilo had become twenty — twenty kilos of food, from a patch of earth you'd walk past without noticing.
Ortaia started there — with the simple surprise that growing your own food is less mysterious, and less difficult, than it looks. A little timing, a little compost, a little patience. Most of what stops people from trying isn't lack of space or time. It's not knowing when to begin, what to plant, or what to do next.
20×
One kilo of seed potatoes.
Twenty kilos of dinner.
The surprise that started it all.
A tool for home gardeners
A year earlier, I had been volunteering at a market garden in Northern Zealand on my days off. What struck me wasn't just how good the produce tasted — though it did, in a way supermarket produce can't quite match. It was how much joy there was in the work itself: the crew, the rhythm, the quiet repetition of tending the soil. The season after, I started growing food of my own.
The first year was a surprise, mostly a good one. Most crops did better than I'd dared to hope, and I was amazed by how much food a small plot kept giving — week after week, meal after meal.
What was missing was a simple way to keep track — something that knew when to sow, when to transplant, when the last frost was likely, when the basil should go out and when it shouldn't. Not a generic gardening calendar for "temperate Europe," but one tuned to exactly where I lived. I couldn't find anything like it.
Ortaia is it.
What Ortaia believes
Food deserves to be taken seriously. How it's grown, what it costs (or saves), where it comes from, what it tastes like. Growing your own — even a little — changes how you look at it. You start paying closer attention to the weather and the seasons, and to all the life that moves in and on the soil — worms, beetles, bees, the quiet traffic that keeps a garden going. You learn patience. You taste the difference. You connect, in some small way, with how the people who grow food for a living spend their time — and you come away with a deep respect for the skill and care their work takes.
Gardening is also one of the most hopeful things a person can do. To sit down and plan a garden is to say, out loud, that you're excited about what comes next. Every seed you put in the ground is a small act of trust in the weeks ahead. And a season of home-grown meals is the clearest proof that small changes, done consistently, turn into something real.
A small team in Denmark
Ortaia is made by a small team based just outside Copenhagen. If you're into gardening, the best way to support the project is to use the app. And if you know someone else who might enjoy growing something, tell them — and send us the photo when their first radishes come up four weeks later.
Hope to see you in the garden.
Ready to start your first season?
Try Ortaia and plan your first bed in minutes. Or keep reading on the blog.