Point the camera, and it answers from your own notes

Common questions

Can I add more than one photo at a time?

From your photo library, yes, since 5 September 2026. Pick as many as you like and they come in one after another. The camera still takes one shot at a time, because that is what a camera does.

It used to ask me to confirm things like "true leaves" after a photo. Now it does not. Why?

Because those were not news — since 3 September 2026. The first thing it ever asked one gardener was whether his beans have leaves, five times, on a healthy three-week seedling. A sign the plant is expected to show at some stage — seed leaves, true leaves, fast new growth, flower buds — is a plant doing what plants do, so confirming it settles nothing you wanted settled. The app keeps the reading and stops asking. It still asks about anything the crop's record lists as a warning sign (bolting, yellowing lower leaves, tops falling over), anything it cannot place, a reading that says the plant is not doing well, and a change of stage.

I took a closer photo of the same leaf and it told me the plant got worse. Did it?

No — and since 3 September 2026 it will not say so. A closer photograph always shows more, and more visible is not more wrong: at four feet a yellow edge is a smudge, at one foot it is three blotches, and nothing spread. When the earlier photo was from further away, or you say you stepped closer, the app now withholds a better-or-worse verdict and says the two photos were taken from different distances. What it saw is still shown; only the verdict is held back. Two photos from the same distance, a few days apart, are what tell you whether something changed.

A question about my plant disappeared before I answered it. Did I lose something?

No. Nothing is deleted — it just stops being put in front of you.

From 1 September 2026 two things retire a question on its own.

One: it got old. Asking how a plant looked, or how far along it was, a month after the photo is a question about a plant that has moved on. Those stop being asked after a few weeks. Questions about something the plant DID — its first true leaves — never expire, because that either happened or it did not.

Two: you told us the plant is further along. Once you have confirmed it is fruiting, being asked whether you can see its first true leaves is a question about a plant that no longer exists.

It only counts what YOU have confirmed, never what our calendar expects. ⚠ If your plant is running behind what we predicted, your answer is the thing that tells us — and going quiet on the strength of a guess would throw that away. So it does very little at first, and more as you answer things.

There was a question on my plant page for weeks. Where did it go?

We stopped asking it, from 1 September 2026.

When the app looks at a photo it sometimes asks you to confirm what it thought it saw. Those questions had no expiry, so one from four weeks ago sat next to one from this morning and nothing told them apart. Asking how a plant looked a month ago is not a question anybody can usefully answer.

Now it depends on what the question is about. How far along a plant is, or how it looks, goes out of date in a few weeks — those stop being asked. Questions about something the plant DID — its first true leaves, its first flower — never expire, because those either happened or they did not, and a month later the answer is exactly the same.

Nothing is deleted either way. An old reading is still the best thing we know about your plant. We just stop putting it in front of you as a question.

The app asks me to confirm what it saw. Why does it ask about some things and not others?

Because it only asks what you can settle by looking at the plant.

When it looks at a photo it writes down several things — what it can see on the plant, how far along the plant is, how it looks, which crop it thinks it is, how big the pot seems. From 1 September 2026 the first three are put to you on the plant page, in the block under its photo, each with a yes and a no.

Until then only one of the three appeared. The other two were written down, saved, and shown to nobody — which is why some of them sat unanswered for weeks.

It does not ask you to confirm which crop something is, or how big the pot is. Those are not questions you answer by looking at a plant, and a question nobody can answer just sits there forever. They get filled in as blanks instead — an empty field gets a value, and anything you already put in is never overwritten.

I told the app which plant a photo was of, after the fact. Does it still know what it saw back then?

Yes, from 1 September 2026.

When you send a photo, the app looks at it and writes down what it can see — the stage it is at, how it looks, where it is growing. It does that even when it does not yet know which plant the picture is of.

Until today those notes had nowhere to go. They were attached to the picture and to no plant, so no plant page could show them, and there were twelve of them sitting like that. They were never lost — each one had always known which photo it came from. Nothing had ever thought to follow that back.

Now, the moment you say which plant a photo is of, everything already noticed about it comes along. A picture you file a week later brings its notes with it, and nothing has to be looked at a second time.

Notes that already belong to a plant are never moved. If something put a note on a plant, it knew more about that than this does.

It asked me which plant the photo was of, but I had already attached that plant.

Fixed 1 September 2026 — it no longer asks when you have already told it.

If you attach a plant to the chat and then send a photo, the photo goes straight onto that plant and no question appears. Before today it asked anyway, and the list it offered included every plant in your garden — fruit trees and all — even when the reply above it had just named the right one.

The question is still there when it is genuinely needed, because most photos arrive with nothing attached, and it is still the fastest way to get a picture onto the right plant. What changed is that it stops asking things you have answered.

If you attach nothing, it still asks rather than guessing. A photo filed against the wrong plant is worse than one that asked — the reading, the growth stage and every later comparison would all be about a plant you never photographed.

The plants it offered had nothing to do with my photo. Why?

Fixed on 1 September 2026 — it was offering your most recently touched plants, in that order, and nothing else.

So a photograph of beans could come back offering an apricot and an orange tree, with the answer directly above it saying "that bean is coming along". The app had worked out what it was looking at and then ignored itself when drawing the buttons.

Now it offers the plants it thinks it is actually seeing. If the answer names a bean and you grow beans, you get your beans — not everything you have touched lately.

If you have more than one of that crop you get all of them. We will not choose between your two bean plants: a photograph cannot tell them apart, and picking one would look like an answer rather than a guess.

And there is always a way out. A different plant is there whenever the list has been narrowed, however short it is — so if we have guessed the wrong crop entirely, one tap shows you everything. If it cannot work out what it is looking at, it shows you everything to begin with.

It asked me which plant the photo was of. Do I have to answer?

No, and nothing is lost if you ignore it. The picture stays exactly where it is — you can still put it on a plant later from Profile → Photos with no plant. There is no "no" button because not answering is the no.

Why we ask at all: when a photo is tied to a plant, it goes in that plant's own run of pictures, and the next photo of the same plant can be compared with it. A picture tied to nothing can only ever be looked at once.

It only asks when we genuinely do not know. A photo taken from a plant's own page, or one where you picked the plant with the + button first, is filed without asking you anything.

And it never holds up the answer. It appears underneath the reply, after you have been told what we can see.

I asked about a photo. Why did it not show up on that plant's page?

It does now, from 1 September 2026, whenever you told us which plant it was.

There are two ways to tell us which plant. Tap Ask Rafe about this plant on the plant's own page and it comes with you — you will see it named at the top of the box, and you can switch it off if you meant something else. Or use the + button in the chat to pick one. Either way, if you send a photo it is filed to that plant — it appears in the plant's own run of pictures, dated the day you took it, and it comes with you to another phone.

Before this, we kept your choice on the message and not on the picture. So the answer came back about the right plant and the photo itself belonged to nothing — which is also why the app never compared it to your earlier shots of the same plant. That was the cause under several things that looked like separate faults.

A photo you take from a plant's own page was always filed correctly and is untouched by this. And if you did not say which plant, nothing is guessed — the picture stays where it was.

Rafe seems to have made his own chat full of my photos. What is that?

It is Rafe's notebook, and from 1 September 2026 it no longer sits in your list of chats.

When you add a photo to a plant, Rafe looks at it without being asked and writes down what he saw. That note is doing real work — it is how the app knows a picture has already been looked at, so it does not look twice, and it is what lets it compare this week to last. It has always been kept.

What was wrong is where it appeared: in among your own conversations, as a chat you never started. Nothing has been deleted and Rafe has not stopped noticing anything. The notes are just filed as notes now.

Those notes were also written in our shorthand — one could read "first_true_leaves" rather than "first true leaves". Anywhere Rafe writes for you to read, he uses words. If he sees something we have no plain name for, he describes what he saw and leaves the label out, rather than showing you a piece of our code.

Why did Rafe ask me for a photo when he already has some of that plant?

Because until 1 September 2026 it genuinely did not know they existed.

When you ask about a plant, Rafe is handed that plant's record — when it went in, what you have logged, what it has been told. Photographs were not in that handful. So he could tell you the planting date and the last note and still ask you to go out and take a picture, of a plant he had three pictures of. That was our gap, not him being unhelpful.

He is now told which photographs that plant has and when each was taken, and told plainly not to ask you for one he is already holding.

He can now open one too, from 6 September 2026 — including an older one.

Ask "is this getting worse?" or "what did that spot look like three weeks ago?" and he can go back to the picture from three weeks ago, rather than only the newest. He will always tell you which photograph he looked at and when it was taken, so if it is the wrong one you can say look at a newer one.

He can only open photographs of the plant you are asking about. If he reaches for one that belongs to a different plant he says so and shows you that plant's most recent instead — he will never quietly swap one picture for another, because an answer about a photograph you are not looking at is worse than no answer.

I sent a photo of my plant. Where did it go?

Onto that plant — as long as we are sure which one it is. A picture you send in a question used to be stored and filed against nothing. It was reachable, but only from a list of unfiled photos under your account, which is not where you are looking when you are standing at the plant. When the answer names a plant you are growing, and only one of your plants matches that name, the photo now goes into that plant's own photo strip. Opening it says what we saw, including the stage — first true leaves, flowering — in words rather than in our own shorthand. There is also a link back to the conversation, and that is deliberate: we keep a few specific things about a photo, and plenty of what is worth saying fits none of them. That your mulch is working. That a few chewed holes are not worth treating yet. Rather than invent a catch-all field that would mean nothing, we keep the words and take you to them. When we cannot tell which plant it is, we leave it unfiled rather than guess. If you grow two things with the same name, or the answer never names a plant of yours, the photo stays in the unfiled list. A photograph on the wrong plant is a mistake you would have no reason to go and check.

It described "dark spots with yellow halos on the lower leaves". Is that kept anywhere, or just said?

Kept, from 2 September 2026 — as that sentence, on the plant.

When Rafe looks at a photo he writes down what he can see in the app's own short list of growth signs (first true leaves, flowering, and so on). Anything he sees that has no name on that list — spots, halos, rings, curling, chewed edges — used to reach you as words and then vanish. Now it is kept as Rafe's own sentence on the plant's record, and Rafe reads it back later: ask about that plant in a few weeks and "has this happened before?" is answered from what he wrote at the time. We chose to keep the sentence rather than invent a list of disease codes, because a code narrower than what the picture shows would have turned "dark spots with yellow halos" into something vaguer and called it data.

Rafe said he could see my plant was in the ground, or what kind it was. Where do I say whether it was right?

On the plant's own page, from 2 September 2026 — a small card that says when and from what.

From the photo on 2 September, Rafe read: In the ground · Little Gem — right? Yes writes it on the plant — a kind you confirm is matched against the variety catalog the same way the fill card matches it, and one the catalog does not know is kept as what was said; no means it will not come back, and you can set the field yourself above. It sits next to the list of things Rafe noticed about the plant (a yellowing leaf, a flower) but it is kept apart from that list on purpose: those are things he saw, and this is a claim about what your record should say. Before this, a reading like that was shown once, in the photo answer, and never asked about again.

It said it could not read the answer to my photo. What happened, and was I charged?

The model's answer came back in a shape the app could not read — rare, about one photo in fifteen when it was comparing two — and from 2 September 2026 the app asks once more before it tells you.

When the first answer is cut short (the model ran out of room), the second ask gives it twice the room; when it was simply garbled, the second ask is a fresh try. Only if both fail do you see the error, and either way it counts as one look against your allowance, not two. We also now write down what went wrong each time, so the cause can be found rather than guessed at. If you do see the error twice on the same picture, send it into the chat instead — that route asks a shorter question.

Can a photo tell you how tall my tree is, or how old it is?

How tall, yes — how old, no, and that one is on purpose.

Ask about a photo — send it into the chat — and if the picture shows roughly how tall the plant is, we offer that as something you can tap to confirm. Confirming it writes the height onto the plant. The same button appears when Rafe answers a question like how tall is my tomato getting? by looking at a photo it already holds (from 2 September 2026): Record it as about 10 in tall, one tap, and the plant knows. It reads in feet and inches and it says about, because it is an estimate from a photograph rather than a tape measure.

Both routes give a height now — from 2 September 2026. A photo you add straight to a plant is looked at for what is happening to it, and since 2 September that look also notes how tall the plant looks: the reading shows under the photo in How it has looked (day 12 · ~5 in) and Rafe can read it back later, but it does not change the height on the plant's card by itself — only confirming one does. Before 2 September that route gave no height at all, and for a while this page described it more broadly than it worked. It also helps to stand back and shoot from the side, with the pot or your hand in the frame, so there is something to judge the size against.

Age we will not guess, ever. A photograph of a tree with nothing beside it for scale cannot tell you whether it is three years old or six, and every date we work out for that plant hangs off its age — when it should fruit, whether it is old enough to prune hard, what its first season should look like. A wrong age there is wrong in a way you would have no way to spot. So it stays a question we ask you, and "I bought it at about this size" is a perfectly good answer.

The same rule covers when it was planted, and whether a cane fruits on old wood or new. Those three we ask; everything else a picture can honestly see, we offer.

Does it know when I planted the thing in the photo?

Only if you told us, and from 24 August 2026 it is told which of those it is. When we hold a planting date, the photo answer gets it — that is what lets it check the stage it can see against your own calendar. When we do not, it used to get nothing at all: not a date, and no mention that there was no date. A gap where a fact should be is the easiest thing in the world to fill in, and filling it in is precisely what we do not want. It is now handed date not recorded in plain words, which is a fact rather than a hole. Knowing when it went in is still not knowing how old it is, and it will not tell you that either way — a tree bought at three years old went in the ground last month, and nothing we hold can tell those two apart. One thing came back with this fix. How a plant was started — sown where it stands, or raised somewhere and moved — was only being passed along when a planting date came with it. That is one of the more useful facts there is when something looks wrong at the base of a young plant, because transplant shock and damping off look alike and start differently. It now goes with the photo whether or not we know the date.

Do I have to go to the Talk screen to photograph something?

Not any more. The round microphone button in the corner of every screen has a camera in it. Standing at a plant, tap it, tap Take a photo, and send — the box already knows which plant you are looking at and says so, so the answer comes back about that plant. A picture with no words is a complete question. The Talk screen is still there and unchanged; this is a shorter way in from wherever you are standing. See Talking to your garden.

Where do I add a photo in Talk?

Tap the + beside the message box. It opens Add to the chat, with four choices: Camera takes a new picture, Photos picks one already on your phone, and A plant or A growing space tells Rafe what the question is about. You can send up to 4 photos with one message.

Can it tell me what a plant IS, not just what is wrong with it?

Yes, as of 14 August 2026, and it starts on the Add a plant screen. There is a camera beside the What is it? box: photograph the plant and it opens a conversation with your picture already in it, asking what it is. You do not have to type a name you do not know.

It answers in the same voice as everything else here — it will say what it thinks and what it read to get there, and if it genuinely cannot tell, it says which two it is choosing between and what would settle it. A leaf laid flat, the underside, a fruit cut through the middle.

This is a bigger deal than it looks, which is why it took a decision to ship it. A wrong diagnosis gets checked against the plant standing in front of you and corrected in a minute. A wrong identification becomes the record — every date, task and frost warning after it is worked out for a plant you do not own, and nothing about that looks broken from the outside. It is quietly wrong all season.

Will it add the plant to my garden by itself?

No, and it is built so that it cannot. A photo opens a conversation, and a photo on its own never adds a plant. When Rafe can tell what it is, he offers Add a plant like this, which opens the Add screen with the kind filled in, and you confirm the kind and the bed there. Nothing is added until you do.

That is deliberate rather than cautious. We would rather ask you a question you can answer in a second than write a confident guess into a record you will be reading in October.

One photo, one plant, for now. If you photograph a bed with four things growing in it, expect it to talk about the most obvious one. Handing back four plantings from one picture is a different screen and a different set of questions, and it is worth doing properly rather than quickly.

It told me my plant looks fine. Is that a real answer, or did it just fail to work out what is wrong?

It is a real answer, and it is the commonest true one. Tested against fourteen photographs from a real garden, about half of the honest replies were a version of this is normal — spent blooms, a seed head, new growth coming in pale, the oldest leaves yellowing with age. People photograph a plant because it looks odd to them, not because it is sick, and those are two different things.

This needed fixing, and it was fixed on 13 August 2026. Before that the answer was framed, in effect, as find what is wrong — so on healthy plants it found something anyway. A perfectly good sunflower came back with a fungal leaf spot. A healthy corn plant was said to be losing out to a nearby tree's roots. Fluent, specific and wrong, which is the worst shape a wrong answer takes, because nothing distinguishes it from the ones that are right.

There are three answers now, not two. It can tell you what is wrong; it can tell you nothing is wrong and say what you are actually looking at; or — when it genuinely is not sure — it can name what it might be and tell you what to look for.

That middle answer is the one we care most about getting right. "I cannot tell, send me a better photo" is the app asking you to do work for its benefit. So an unsure answer now has to carry three things: the likeliest candidate named, in might be language; the signs on your own plant that would confirm it or rule it out; and what to do if it turns out to be that. Something you can act on this evening, rather than a shrug.

In practice that reads like: this might be peach leaf curl — watch the new growth as it comes in, puckered and thickened and often reddish rather than just pale, worst after a cool wet spring. None of it makes the app slower to spot a real problem, and it is not permission to hedge something obvious. It was never being too cautious; it simply had no way to say a plant was fine, and no shape for saying it was unsure.

The same damage is not the same problem on two different plants, and what decides it is what you are growing the plant for. A leafminer tunnels between the two surfaces of a leaf, where nothing sprayed on the outside can reach it. On spinach or lettuce that is the crop ruined — you cannot cut around a tunnel and serve the rest. On a sunflower or a tomato it is a few marked leaves on a plant carrying hundreds, and it changes nothing about what you pick. So the first gets told to you as a problem and the second gets mentioned as something worth knowing, with nothing to do about it.

And "fine" comes with its reason. The lower leaves are yellowing, which is what a tomato does to its oldest leaves all season is worth more than the word healthy on its own, because next August it will look just as alarming.

I typed what the nursery tag said and it made the whole thing the variety name.

Fixed 20 August 2026, and the reason it matters is not tidiness. A tag reading apricot Mormon semi dwarf is two facts: the variety is Mormon, and semi-dwarf is the rootstock — the root system the tree was grafted onto. The app used to store all of it as the variety name. The rootstock is a field we already had, and it decides real things: how big the tree finally gets, how far apart to space it, and whether it will throw up shoots from the base at all. Buried inside a variety name, none of that can be read, so the advice you get about spacing and suckers would have been wrong for the life of the tree. It now splits the tag and files each part where it belongs. Two things it deliberately will not do. It will not guess: a tag that names no rootstock leaves the field empty rather than assuming a standard one, because we would rather know nothing than record something the app will act on. And it only splits for plants that actually have a rootstock — the eleven grafted tree fruits and citrus we hold. Your lavender is called Munstead Dwarf and that is its real name, so nothing touches it.

I photographed a plant I do not own and it asked which of my plants to log it against.

It should not have, and it no longer does — fixed 20 August 2026. The app had just told you what the plant was; offering to file it against your unrelated plants is the app ignoring its own answer. Now there are three cases and each behaves. If the photo matches one plant you own, the note goes there and you are not asked. If it matches a plant you have several of — two sowings of the same bean — you are offered only those two, which is a question worth asking rather than a guess. If it matches nothing you grow, no plants are offered at all: the only sensible thing to do with a plant that is not in your garden is add it, and that button is already on screen. We did not simply shorten the list. Five unrelated plants would be the same mistake, only quieter — the question is whether a plant could be the one you mean, never how many fit on a row. And a second fault came out with it. With two plantings of the same crop, the app used to pick the earlier one and write to it without asking. A record filed against the wrong plant looks exactly like one filed correctly, so nobody would ever have noticed.

I picked a plant to log the note on and afterwards there was no note. What happened?

You did everything right and the app was waiting for a second tap it never told you about — fixed 20 August 2026. When the app could not tell which plant the note was for, it showed your plants as a row of buttons. Tapping one did not save anything: it swapped that row for another button, in the same place and the same shape, and waited. So answering the question looked exactly like finishing it. Choosing the plant now writes the note there and then, and if it cannot save, it says so on that same row instead of leaving you to find out later.

I photographed my seedlings and the app was still asking whether they had come up.

It should not have been, and it no longer is — 21 August 2026. When the app is not sure whether a sowing has come up, it puts a short question on your Today list. A beta tester photographed his bean pot, and the answer was exact: the one on the left has its first true leaf open, the one on the right is just breaking the surface. The app had answered its own open question and did not notice. The reason was smaller than it looks. The photo's reading was recorded correctly against the right plant — but it recorded first true leaf, and the question was waiting for first seed leaves. Nothing joined the two, even though a plant with a true leaf has certainly come up. Later signs now prove the earlier ones, so photographing a seedling closes the question about whether it sprouted, and a photo of coloring fruit settles that it flowered and set. Only where it is certain. A plant can grow all season and never flower, so being knee-high proves nothing about flowers, and the app will still ask. And it does not rewrite your record. Only what the photo actually said is stored; the rest is worked out when it is read, so a year from now you can still tell what was seen from what was inferred.

The buttons asking which plant appeared while the answer was still being written.

Fixed 1 September 2026. They wait for the answer to finish now.

When we cannot tell which plant a photo is of, a short row of buttons appears under the reply. It was appearing as soon as the reply started arriving rather than once it had finished — so the words and the buttons landed together.

⚠ The reason that matters is not tidiness. A beta tester told us he could not work out whether tapping a plant had caused the rest of the answer to appear, or whether it had simply arrived at that moment. A button whose effect you cannot be sure of is worse than no button, because the next time you are not sure what you changed.

Nothing else about it changed — the same question, the same buttons, and ignoring it still costs you nothing.

What is it doing while I wait for an answer?

From 1 September 2026 it tells you, when there is something to tell.

If you sent pictures, they go up one at a time — so the screen says which one it is on: Sending photo 2 of 3. On a slow connection in the garden that is most of the wait, and it changes as each one finishes.

After the pictures are up it says Thinking, and that is the honest word for it. We measured where the time actually goes before writing any of this. A question with no pictures takes somewhere between one and four seconds, and nearly all of that is waiting for the answer to start coming back — the work your phone does is about a twentieth of a second.

So we did not add a list of steps. Some apps show a run of messages while you wait — reading your photo, checking for pests — that are not tied to anything actually happening. Those would have been made up, and a made-up progress message is worse than an honest one, because after the second time you stop believing any of it.

It kept asking me to confirm things that were obviously true.

It should not have, and from 1 September 2026 it depends on how sure we are. When we look at a photo we note what we can see on the plant, and each of those used to come back to you as a question — including the ones nobody needs to be asked. A gardener photographed a healthy young bean and was asked five times, in different words, whether it had leaves. Every one of those readings was correct. That was the problem: a thing we are sure about should not arrive as a question.

Now the sure ones are statements. They read as what we noticed — Rafe noticed first blooms — with Sounds right to agree and Actually, no if we got it wrong. The unsure ones still ask properly, because there your answer really does decide something.

Either way it is one tap and it does not come back. Agreeing lets the app use it; disagreeing means it will not be raised again, and it is also the most useful thing we collect about our own accuracy.

And you now see each thing once. Photograph the same plant three times in a morning and we may notice the same thing in all three — that used to be three cards saying the same sentence, so answering one left its twins behind and it looked like the card had come back. Answering once now settles every copy of it.

And from 2 September 2026 one photograph makes one card per thing seen. The look at a picture could say the same thing three ways — actively growing true leaves, vigorous leaf expansion, new leaflets expanding — and each wording became its own card, which is how one bean photo asked three times whether it had leaves. The first wording is kept and the repeats are not written down at all.

The note says "Diagnosis" or "Suggested" now. What are those?

They say what kind of thing the note is, which it used to leave you to guess — 21 August 2026. A note reading nitrogen or micronutrient (iron/manganese) could be three different things: something we spotted, something we advised, or something you already did. A season later that difference is the whole point of having written it down. So the note now opens with which it is — Diagnosis, Suggested, Normal for now, or Looked healthy. We also took the app out of the sentence. Notes used to end with from what you told the chat, which is about our plumbing rather than about your plant. Whether a note came from you or from the app is still recorded, and shows as a small read by the app label beside the entry — it just is not part of the sentence you read any more.

What does the Note button actually write down?

What the answer said — and until 20 August 2026 it could literally write the word "note". The button is offered in two situations: when we tell you something you were worried about is normal, and when the plant simply looks fine. The first one always had words to save. The second one had none, so the entry that landed in your plant's story was the four letters n-o-t-e, and the button would not tell you that beforehand either — it just said Note this on your Wax Bean. Now the button shows you the sentence it is about to save, and if the answer had no short summary of its own, it saves the useful part of what was actually said: that is a bean seedling at the cotyledon stage and it looks healthy, the mulch is doing its job. Next August, that is the entry that settles the question. It is still marked as coming from the chat rather than from you.

I tapped "Have a look" on a photo and never saw an answer. Where did it go?

It was answered, and until 13 August 2026 there was no way to reach it. The button on the plant's page sent your photo off and then cleared itself, and the reply landed on a screen nothing in the app linked to. So the answer existed, on your own device, and you could not get to it by any route. The plant's page now shows a line for it — what we made of your photo — from the moment you ask. It says we are still looking while we are, and turns into the way in once the answer is back, so a reply that arrived while the app was shut is still there when you come back. This is also the only place you can tell us which parts of an answer are right, and that matters more than it sounds. Confirming where it is growing, which crop or variety it is, or anything about its health changes the plant's own record — the app stops guessing at those. Confirming what stage it has reached is remembered, but does not yet move its schedule; that still runs off your sowing date. Asking in the chat gives you the answer in words; confirming it is what turns some of it into something the app acts on.

How does it work out how far along a plant is?

By what it can see, not by counting days. Our own record for sweet corn says the seedling stage runs from about day 7 to day 31 and the next stage from day 14 to day 55 — they overlap by more than two weeks, and 64 of our 66 crops overlap the same way. That is honest: on day 20 a corn plant really can be either, depending on the spring. So counting days cannot settle it, and until now the app settled it with a rule in the code rather than anything about corn. Now it asks what is visible — first true leaves, fast new growth, stems ankle high — and every crop’s record already says which stage shows which of those. "Several true leaves" is past the first and short of ankle-high, which is exactly the thing a date cannot tell you.

What if the sign it sees belongs to two stages?

Then it says both, and does not pick. Some signs genuinely belong to more than one stage — sweet corn lists silks under two of them, because silks appearing and silks drying are both worth noting and there is only one word for it in our list. When that happens the app names both stages rather than choosing, and it will not question your photo on the strength of a reading it cannot place. Picking one would look more confident and be less true.

Can it tell what stage my plant is at from a picture?

It has a go, and the more useful half is that it checks the answer against your own dates. We know when you planted — nothing else looking at that photo does. So there are three things it might say. If the picture and your dates agree, it offers to write the stage down. If they differ but your calendar could plausibly put the plant there around now, it says both and records nothing: "that looks like fruit set to me — your dates put it around leafy growth." And it will sometimes ask whether it is the same plant — but only when it is on solid ground. That happens when the stage it sees is one your crop genuinely goes through and your dates put it in a completely different part of the year: fruiting on something you sowed eleven days ago. At that point the photo is telling us about the photo — a neighbor's plant, last year's picture, the wrong bed. It never says you are wrong, and it never writes anything about the plant. What it will NOT do is question your photo because it could not follow its own answer. If it describes the plant in words we do not recognize — and it often does, because it writes like a person rather than picking from a list — it says what it sees and leaves it there. Failing to understand ourselves is not evidence about your picture. We shipped it the other way round for a few hours on 11 August and a photo of a corn plant caught it. And if you have already told us a stage, the picture does not get a vote — your words stay the record and the photo becomes a question for you.

I took a photo of my plant. Will it look at it?

It asks first — on a PLANT PAGE. Take a photo on a plant's page and you get one line — want me to have a look at that photo? — with a yes and a no. We do not read it unless you say so, because most photos people take of their plants are records rather than questions: the tomato getting big, the first flower, what the bed looked like in July. An answer nobody asked for is the app talking when it was not spoken to. The exception is a photo we asked you for. If the chat said photograph the underside of that leaf and you went and did it, the asking already happened — coming back and asking again would be the app forgetting its own question. Those get looked at, and so is any photo you send straight into the chat — handing a picture to a conversation is itself the question.

Does it know what the weather is doing?

Yes. It is sent tonight's actual forecast low and the next few days from the National Weather Service for your grid square — not a thirty-year average for your date. That matters for anything about watering, frost or heat: the difference between "it can get cold in August" and "41 tonight". If we have no forecast for where you are, it says nothing about the weather rather than guessing.

What is the question box above the camera button for?

Anything you want to ask about the picture you are ABOUT to take. Type it, then take the photo, and the two travel together. Leave it blank and the question is "what is wrong with this?", which is the right one most of the time. Pressing return in the box opens the camera, so you never have to reach for the button.

Why does it tell me a second thing it could be?

Because one answer invites you to act; two invite you to check. A photo is not a lab test, and the failure that matters in this kind of app is not being unsure — it is being confidently wrong. If there genuinely is no plausible second answer it says that instead, rather than inventing one to look thorough.

Does it know what the plant looked like last time?

Yes, when you have photographed it before. It is sent the earlier picture alongside the new one, both labeled with when they were taken, and it tells you whether the plant is better, worse, or not really changed. It picks a photo at least ten days older on purpose — two pictures three days apart show the light moving, not the plant. And "no real change" is a proper answer here rather than a blank one: a plant that looks the same three weeks on is usually a plant that is fine.

What makes this different from a plant identifier app?

An identifier looks at the picture and nothing else. This reads the picture alongside that plant's own history — the day it went in, what you fed it three weeks ago, the note where you said the lower leaves were yellowing, whether it is in its first season or its third. When an entry of yours explains what it is seeing, the answer says so and shows you the entry with its date. If it cannot point at your history, we have built a worse identifier, so we show you when it does.

How fast is it?

A few seconds. You ask, it thinks, it answers — the same as any chat app you already use. Most gardens are well within reach of a phone signal or the house wifi, so that is what it is built for.

What if I am somewhere with no signal?

It still takes the question. The photo and what you asked are saved on your phone the moment you tap, and it sends itself as soon as you are back in range — a community garden plot, a walled garden, a high tunnel with a metal roof. You will not lose the question and you do not have to remember to come back and ask again. This is the exception rather than how it usually goes.

It recognized a plant I have not added yet. Can it add it for me?

There is a line under the answer offering to add it, and tapping it opens the normal add-a-plant screen with the crop already filled in. It does not appear for a plant that is already in your garden. What it will NOT do is guess when you planted it — that question is asked, the same as always. Every date the app works out for a plant hangs off its planting date, so a wrong one is not a wrong box, it is a wrong calendar for the whole season. A date filled in for you gets tapped past; a question gets answered.

What will it refuse to tell me?

It will not name a chemical, a product or a dose. Timing you can have — there is exactly one week a year to treat peach leaf curl, and that is worth knowing — but what goes on food you are going to eat is your decision, not ours. It also refuses to guess when a planting went in or how old a tree is, at any confidence, because a wrong planting date silently spoils every date the app works out afterwards.

What happens if it cannot tell?

It says so, tells you what would settle it — a closer photo, the underside of a leaf, the base of the stem — and does not use up one of your answers. Refusing well is the point. A confident wrong answer is worse than no answer, because you would act on it.

Why does it sometimes link me to one of your guides?

Because on a handful of problems we have written the long version, and an answer on a phone screen is not the place for it. The link only appears when the answer has already named something we have a page about — it is a lookup on what the answer said, not a menu of diseases shown to the app beforehand. Four problems have one so far: tomato hornworm, squash bugs, and yellowing leaves on tomatoes and on cucumbers. Everything else gets no link, because a link to a page that is not quite about your problem is worse than no link at all — you would trust it and stop looking.

Where does that guide link take me?

To the guide on our website, which opens in your browser. It is the same page anybody can read without the app. Until 7 August it did not — the link quietly reloaded the app instead of leaving it, because the app and the website live at different addresses and the link had only been told half of one. Nothing errored and no page went missing, which is why it took a while to notice: you tapped, something loaded, and it was us. That is fixed for every link out of the app now, not just this one — the list of which addresses belong to the website is built from the website itself, so a page we add tomorrow is covered the day it exists rather than the day somebody remembers it.

It told me to mulch a tree that is already mulched, and the mulch is in the photo.

That is the complaint that started this, and from 14 August 2026 the photo gets read. When the picture shows the soil surface, the card comes back with Mulched already ticked and a line saying the soil looked mulched in your photo. If it looked bare, the line says that instead and the box is clear.

It is not cosmetic. How often we suggest watering already depends on whether the ground is covered — mulch is one of the four things that decision turns on. So a photo that can see the answer is answering a question the app was otherwise guessing at, and a tree told to mulch a surface that is plainly bark-chipped is the app not looking at what it was sent.

Only when it can actually see the soil. Leaves over the surface, or a frame that stops at the foliage, means nothing is ticked and nothing is claimed — not being able to see it is not the same as it being bare, and that difference is exactly what decides whether you get sent to do a job you have already done.

I sent a photo of plants in pots and it still asked whether they were in the ground.

Fixed on 14 August 2026. If the photograph shows where the plant is sitting — a pot rim, a nursery container, a seed tray, bed timber, open soil — the card comes back with that already selected, and it says from your photo underneath so you know why. Change it if we read it wrong; it is not written until you press Save.

The odd part is that it was mostly seeing the pot all along. Measured on a real photo of a potted citrus: it identified the pot in two rolls out of three even before this change. The app simply never read the answer, and asked the question anyway. It is not that the camera could not tell — it is that nothing was listening.

When the photo does not show the base of the plant, nothing is pre-selected, on purpose. We could not see it is not the same as in the ground, and a guess that looks like an answer is worse than a question.

How many can I ask?

On GardenTrack Free, 2 diagnoses, once. Not 2 a month. It's 2 in total, counted from the day you make your account, and they never refill. Comparing two photos of the same plant uses one. The free account also comes with 2 photo adds (adding plants from a photo or a label), 1 garden walk and 5 Talk credits, about two dozen messages, and they're one-time too. On a paid plan, photo checks come out of your weekly credits instead.

Why once rather than a monthly allowance: a small number each month teaches you to ration and wait, and a gardener with a sick plant in week two does not ask. We would rather you spend them on the weeks that actually matter. Refusals and errors do not count against you.

Everything that costs us nothing stays free forever: your plants, your dates, your journal, your reminders and the plant database. And writing in your journal never needs AI at all, so running out stops you asking questions, not recording your garden.

Why does it call some damage a problem and other damage just worth knowing?

Two questions, in order. First: will it spread or get worse? A disease, or an insect that breeds on the plant, is a problem wherever it lands — peach leaf curl sits on the leaves of a tree you grow for fruit, and it still matters, because a tree that loses its leaves loses the fruit. Only once damage is local and finished does the second question apply: does it hit the part you grow the plant for? A leafminer trail on a sunflower leaf is over — the grub has done its tunneling and the plant is fine, so you are told about it and left to decide. The same trail on spinach is a problem, because there the leaf is the thing you were going to eat.

It said my plant might have one of two things. Which is it?

It will now tell you how to check — from 31 August 2026.

Some plant troubles genuinely look alike. Early blight and septoria leaf spot both make dark spots with yellowing on the lower leaves first, and from a photograph the honest answer is often it is one of these two. ⚠ Refusing to pick is the right call — a confident wrong answer is worse than an uncertain right one, because you act on it.

But being told it is one of two things, with no way to tell, is a coin flip — and the two are treated differently, so the coin decides what you put on food you are going to eat.

So when it is not certain it now says what to LOOK AT: concentric rings like a target inside the spot point to early blight, while tiny gritty black dots in the center of small round spots point to septoria. That is a ten-second check with the plant in front of you.

⚠ We were holding that answer the whole time — it comes from the same extension sources behind every crop page. The field existed and was described as being for when we cannot tell at all, so it got filled only when the app was refusing outright and left blank in exactly the case it was written for.

When the answer really is certain, it stays empty. Inventing a test to fill a box would be worse than nothing.

Is my photo used to train anything?

No. Your photos are sent to the model to answer your question and are not used to train it. They stay in your garden, on your phone and in your own account's storage, and are never on a public address.

The little ✕ that takes a photo back off a question was hard to hit. Is that fixed?

Yes — 9 September 2026, and nothing about it looks different.

The ✕ sits in the corner of the photo you attached, and it was twenty pixels wide. Our own floor for anything you tap is forty-four, which is roughly a fingertip. It had been on a list of known exceptions since August with a note saying the fix was owed — and the note was the only thing holding it.

It is forty-four across to your finger now, and still small on screen. That is deliberate: a full-size circle there would cover the picture it belongs to, so the part that catches your tap is bigger than the part you can see.

Nothing moved and nothing changed color. If it felt fiddly before and does not now, that is the whole of it.

It said "holes on the lower leaves, scattered — a leaf or two". What is that?

The reading, spelled out. When Rafe judges that a plant has pest or disease damage, he now says where the damage is (which part, the lower or the new growth, at the edges or between the veins), what it looks like (holes, stippling, blotches, wilt — a list, because one leaf can carry two), and how much of the affected part is affected right now: a leaf or two, some, about half, most. The words come from extension diagnostic guides and a published severity scale, so they mean the same thing every time. He will never say "spreading" from one photo — that takes two looks, and the app keeps each look dated so they can be compared.

More on this

• Photos
• Your garden dates
• Telling us what is wrong