It knows what day it is, what you planted, and what you did last week

Common questions

It used to list which of my notes an answer was based on. Sometimes there is nothing there now.

**That list is only ever entries we actually handed the assistant, and from 26 August 2026 we check that rather than trusting it.** When it answers, it marks the journal entries it drew on, and the app shows them under *It used what you had written down*. ⚠ **We were not checking those marks against what we had sent.** So an entry could appear on that list when it had played no part in the answer at all — most likely one it had seen earlier in the same conversation and remembered, rather than anything it made up. **A list you cannot trust is worse than no list.** The whole point of it is to let you check the answer against your own record, and that only works if every line on it is genuinely what was read. **So sometimes you will now see fewer entries, or none.** ⚠ **None does not mean the answer ignored your garden** — a great deal of what we send is your plants, your dates and your beds rather than individual notes, and only notes can be listed this way. **It means nothing on that list would have been honest.** **Nothing about the answer itself changed.** The same information goes to the assistant as before; only the list underneath is stricter.

Profile says there is no limit on questions. Is that literally true?

**Not quite, and we changed the wording on 24 August 2026 rather than leave it standing.** If you are on an open plan, there is no limit you will meet by gardening. Ask as much as you like — that part is real and it is not going to be quietly withdrawn. **But there is a safety ceiling behind every account, including paid ones.** It exists so that a bug in our code, or somebody else getting into your account, cannot run up an enormous bill overnight. It sits far above anything a month of gardening comes near, and we do not expect anyone to meet it. **If you ever do, get in touch and we will sort it out.** It is not a plan limit and it is not something you did wrong — meeting it means something unusual happened, and we would want to know about it. We are not putting a number on this page. **The reason the sentence changed at all is that “no limit” is an absolute**, and it was the one thing the app said that our own metering contradicted on every request. A promise we cannot keep in every case is worth one extra sentence.

A question failed and said something broke on your end. What does that mean?

**It means the fault was ours rather than the answering service’s, and we would rather say which.** Three things happen when you ask a question. We count it against your account, we look up whatever the question needs from your own records, and then we ask the model. **Only the last one is the answering service.** ⚠ **Until 27 August 2026 all three failed with the same sentence** — “could not reach the answering service” — so if the first two went wrong we were telling you the model was down while it was answering everyone else perfectly well. **Now it says whose fault it was.** If it was ours, it says so plainly. **Either way, trying again is worth it** — most of these last seconds rather than minutes, and nothing you typed is lost. ⚠ **If it keeps happening, tell us.** A message about our end means something on our side needs looking at, and we would rather hear it from you than find it later.

Can a long conversation get too full? Other AI apps show a bar that fills up.

**No, and not because we have not got round to building the bar** — the app is put together so a conversation here cannot get too full for the assistant to handle. Every message you send carries the recent part of the conversation with it, so the assistant knows what you were talking about. **We cap that at the last dozen or so exchanges**, and each one is capped in length too. Photos ride on the message you attached them to and are described rather than re-sent afterwards. **Add it all up and the very largest thing we can ever send is around a fifth of what the assistant can hold** — and that is the ceiling, not a typical day. It does not creep up on you, because it cannot. ⚠ **So there is nothing useful for a bar to show.** A gauge that can never move is not telling you anything, and the apps that show one need it because there you genuinely can run out. **We would rather say the true thing on this page than draw a dial that only looks reassuring.** One practical note: **a very old thread does forget the early part of itself.** If you started a conversation in April and come back to it in August, ask your question freshly rather than saying “like I said before” — or just start a new chat, which costs you nothing.

How can I tell which journal entries the app worked out and which ones I logged myself?

**By reading them — the entry says so, from 20 August 2026.** An entry the app read rather than one you tapped ends with where it came from: *"Aphids — from what you told the chat"*, or *"Seen when the plant was added — from your photo"*. Anything without one of those is something you recorded yourself. **It is in the words rather than an icon on purpose.** A little marker on every row clutters the thing you came to read, and it only helps on the screen it was built for — the note travels with the entry everywhere the entry goes. **Why it matters more than it sounds:** the whole point of this app is that it remembers your garden so you do not have to. Reading back through October, *"I watered this on Tuesday"* and *"a photo suggested the soil looked mulched and I agreed"* are not the same kind of fact. They age differently and they are worth different amounts as evidence. You should never have to wonder which one you are looking at. **Nothing is ever written without you agreeing to it first**, and that has always been true. This is about what you can tell later, not about what gets saved.

What do the three buttons under the chat box do?

**They write the question into the box for you, and you send it. That is all they do — changed 19 August 2026.** They are there for the same reason a menu is: so you can see what this thing is good at without having to guess. Tap one and the words appear in the box; edit them first if you like. **One of them used to behave differently, and it was a mistake.** "What did I miss?" looked exactly like the other two and instead took you to a separate screen about the jobs that come round once a year — pruning, winter spraying. If you were growing lettuce and tomatoes that screen correctly told you it had nothing for you, so you would reasonably conclude the app had nothing to say. **Meanwhile the same four words typed into the chat gave you a full run-down of your garden** — every plant, both beds, what you had watered, what had come up, what was due and anything running late. So the button now asks the chat, like its neighbors. **The once-a-year screen has not gone anywhere** — it does a real job, and you reach it from **This week**, under your trees and bushes, where the rest of that kind of work already lives. It only appears once you are growing something that has a yearly job, because offering it to a garden of lettuce would be a door into an empty room.

I told the chat my carrots had their proper leaves. What happens to that?

**It gets recorded, and any jobs that were waiting on it come straight back to your list.** You do not need a button — say it in your own words and the reply tells you what changed: *"Noted — thin seedlings is back on the carrot's list."* If nothing was waiting on it, we record it and say nothing, because "noted" on a list that has not changed is the app taking credit for filing. **If we are not confident about what you meant, we record nothing rather than guess.** **One thing worth knowing, because it was wrong for the first hour this was live.** A message like that did not carry which plant you meant — it was filed against whichever plant the conversation was already about. So mentioning your carrots in a thread about the tomato put the note on the tomato, and the app then offered jobs for leaves that plant had never grown. **Nothing about the record looked wrong afterwards**: right observation, right date, wrong plant. **Now, if we cannot tell which plant you mean, we hold off instead of filing it somewhere plausible.** Name the crop and it records exactly as before. This is the same rule we already use for pests — guessing which plant a problem belongs to is worse than asking.

I have a lot of plants. Does the chat see all of them?

**Up to forty at a time, and from 26 August 2026 it tells you when there are more.** Every question you ask sends the chat a list of what is in your garden, and that list is capped so the answer stays fast. **Under forty plants — which is most gardens — it sees everything and nothing here applies to you.** **Over forty, what changed is which forty.** It used to send the forty most recently planted, **so the first thing dropped was whatever had been in the ground longest.** An apple tree planted five years ago fell out before this spring’s lettuce did — and the answer would come back as though the tree did not exist, which reads as the app having forgotten it. Now it takes **twenty from each end**: the twenty longest-established and the twenty most recently planted. What gets left out is the middle of the season, where one row of beans is much like another. **It is not a judgment that trees matter more than lettuce** — it is that cutting from one end always loses something you would have wanted. **And it now says when the list was cut**, so the answer can tell you it might not be seeing a plant rather than quietly assuming that plant does not exist. **The same applies when you ask about one bed.** If a single bed holds more than forty living plants, the chat lists the forty oldest and tells you how many are in there altogether — so the number you see is the number in the bed, not the number we sent.

I grow carrots in two beds. Does the chat know which one I mean?

**If you tell it, yes. If you do not, it holds off rather than guessing — and that was wrong until 18 August 2026.** In a conversation about your front bed, saying *"the ones in the back have their leaves"* filed that note against the **front** bed. The check we had just added let it through and was right to: the crop matched. Carrots are carrots. **What it could not see was which carrots** — the part doing the filing only ever looked at the crop, even though the app knew both bed names the whole time. **Now it only holds off when you actually have more than one planting of that crop.** If your carrots are all in one place, *"the ones in the back"* is just how people talk, and refusing to record it there would make the app tiresome for everybody to protect a case that cannot happen to them. **Name the bed — "the back bed carrots are up" — and it records straight away either way.**

I said my tomatoes had gone orange and it did not offer to log the harvest. Why not?

**It should now, and until 17 August 2026 it often did not.** When you describe what you can SEE — *"they have gone properly orange"* — the chat writes that down as an observation rather than as the word *ripe*, which is the more precise thing to record and the right thing for it to do. The button that offers to log a harvest was only watching for the word. It now reads the observation too, through your crop's own stages: orange fruit on a tomato lands between *ripening* and *harvest window*, and **both of those mean pick it**, so the offer appears. There was a second half to this, fixed the same day: the chat sometimes filed that observation under the wrong heading, and the app threw the whole thing away rather than reading it — so the same sentence worked one time and not the next. **The app now repairs that on the way in instead of asking the chat to be more careful**, which is why it is reliable rather than usually right. **What has not changed is the part that matters:** the app still checks its own calendar for YOUR garden before offering. If the plant is nowhere near its harvest window, describing it as ripe gets you no button — the chat does not get to decide that on its own, because only the app knows when your plant was put in.

In the evening the chat said I planted something yesterday when I did it today. Why?

**A real bug, fixed 17 August 2026, and it was worse than a wrong date on screen — it reasoned from it.** Our server works in UTC, and after about six in the evening in Colorado it is already tomorrow there. So the chat was told the wrong day and then explained your own garden back to you from it: things you did this afternoon became *"yesterday"*, and one afternoon could be split across two days, with a watering at 4:27 reading as today and one at 7:22 as tomorrow. **Every interval it quoted was out by one as well** — days since planting, days to harvest, days until frost. Your phone now tells us which timezone you are in, so every date in the conversation is the date on your wall. *"Two days ago"* also means two dates ago rather than forty-eight hours, which is what people actually mean. **If you ever catch the chat and the This week screen disagreeing about what day it is, tell the chat — that reaches us now.**

The chat and the This week screen said different things about whether my tomato would ripen. Which is right?

**They cannot disagree any more, and until 17 August 2026 they could.** The app works out, for every plant you have, whether it finishes before your frost — using your dates and the day you sowed it. The This week screen was reading that answer. The chat was not: it was handed the raw growing times and did the sum itself, which is how it once said *"plenty of time"* about a tomato the screen had already called too late. It is now given the same verdict the screen shows you, word for word, and told it is settled. **If you ever see the two disagree again, that is a bug worth telling us about** — say so in the chat and it reaches us.

It told me my tomato will not finish, then said I could pick some before the freeze. Which is it?

**Neither half was wrong on its own and the pair could not both be true — fixed 17 August 2026.** When the answer is no, the app now supplies the honest consolation itself: *they will keep growing and the app will keep tracking them, but the season runs out before they finish, unless you can give them some protection.* Those are the same words the This week screen shows you, and there is deliberately nothing after them about a partial crop — **if the first fruit is due after your frost, there is no early handful to promise.** The reason it happened is worth knowing, because it is a general risk with any assistant: **a flat no with nothing after it is an empty space, and something will fill it.** Ours filled it with an encouraging sentence that its own arithmetic, one line earlier, ruled out. The fix was not to forbid softening — it was to put something true in the space.

I added seeds for tomorrow, then told the chat I planted them. Does it know that is the same plants?

Yes, from 20 August 2026. When you add a plant with a date in the future, the app treats it as a plan rather than a record — it waits, then asks on the day whether it happened. Telling the chat *"just planted those seeds"* now answers that question directly, instead of offering to add a second set of the same plants. **Why it matters more than a tidy list.** Every date the app gives that plant — when to expect it up, when it is ready, when to feed it — is counted from the day it actually went in. Until something confirms that day, all of those are guesses. And if it had added a second set, you would have had two records for one real thing, with the reminders arriving twice. **If you said how many, it takes that too.** "Planted four of those seeds" puts four on the plant if no number was there before. It will not overwrite a number you typed yourself. **It is the same button as the "Did it happen?" card on Today**, so answering in one place clears it from the other.

I asked about a plant I already have and it offered to add it to my garden. Why?

It should not, and from 20 August 2026 it does not. It was only checking whether you had that plant's page open on screen — so asking from the chat, where nothing is on screen, looked to it like you were talking about a plant it had never heard of. It now checks the garden itself. **Two things it goes on, because your name for a plant is often not the catalog's.** One is the crop, so asking about your lavender finds your English Lavender. The other is what you called it: we hold Bush Bean as a crop and no wax variety at all, so a plant you labeled Wax Bean is only findable by your own words. Both are checked. **Saying you planted something still adds it**, even when you already grow that crop — a second row of beans is a second row of beans. The offer only goes away when you merely mention a plant you have, which is what asking a question about it looks like.

I asked how to start a plant and it said we had not written that up. Had we?

For some plants, yes — and that is fixed as of 20 August 2026. Our plant records hold how each of the 152 crops is started, sourced from US extension services, and none of it was being handed to the chat. Somebody asked whether sweet potatoes with shoots on them could be planted. Ours says sweet potatoes are grown from cuttings, and shoots on a stored root are exactly what those cuttings are. It had the answer and could not see it. **A second thing went with it, and it was bigger.** When you named a plant, it only recognized the exact name in our list — so "tomato" worked and **"tomatoes" did not**. 136 of our 152 plants could not be found by their own plural, which meant a question like *can I still grow tomatoes this year* reached the part that answers it without knowing which plant you meant. Both plural and singular now work everywhere. **One limit worth knowing:** what it tells you is what our record holds, not everything that is possible. A method we have not written down means we have not written it down — never that it cannot be done, and it will say so rather than implying otherwise.

Can it tell me which varieties would still ripen before my frost?

Yes, from 20 August 2026. Ask something like *are there faster tomato varieties that would ripen in my season* and it counts the days between today and your first frost, then lists the ones that fit, fastest first, with how many of the whole list that is. **The important part is a catch we had to design around.** A variety's day count is measured from one of two starting points — from sowing a seed, or from setting a young plant out — and which one it is varies by variety, not just by plant. **A third of our plants have both kinds among their own varieties.** Ranking those together would put a 50-day figure that starts at sowing next to a 50-day figure that starts weeks later, and confidently recommend the wrong one. So when a plant is measured both ways you get **two lists, never one**, each saying what it counts from. Tomatoes happen to be measured one way throughout, so that question gets a single clean list. **And a day count is a catalog figure for a good season, not a promise.** A cold August slows everything down, and it will say so rather than letting the number stand on its own.

I told the chat my seedlings have their proper leaves. Did that do anything?

From 20 August 2026, yes. Say what you see and the app writes it on the plant and puts back any jobs that were waiting on it — the same as tapping *yes* on the card on Today. Two doors to the same place. **It was not working before that, and it is worth being straight about it.** The feature was built and shipped, and it needed the conversation to be attached to one particular plant — which nothing in the app ever did. So it quietly did nothing every time. It now works out which plant you mean from what you actually said. **And when it cannot tell, it asks.** If you have two sowings of beans and you say *the beans are flowering*, it will not pick one. It asks which, by name, and writes it down once you say. Guessing would put a job back on a plant that never showed anything, and tell you it had done the right thing. **If you mention a plant you do not have, nothing is written.** That is deliberate too — it would rather record nothing than record something true about the wrong plant.

Is it too late to sow something? Can it tell me the last date?

Yes, from 20 August 2026. Ask *is it too late to sow radishes* and it counts back from **your** first frost by how long that plant needs, and tells you the date and how many days are left. **Why it works this way rather than from a planting calendar.** A single fall sowing date only means something where the fall is long. The published tables we hold are one southern state's, and printing them at somebody in Minnesota would be worse than saying nothing. Counting back from your own frost date works wherever you are. **Seven plants get a straight “we cannot tell you that”, and it is worth knowing which.** For artichoke, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, sage, sweet potato and tomato, every source we hold measures the days from **setting a young plant out**, not from sowing a seed. Working a sowing date back from that number would need us to guess how long the seedling stage takes, and being wrong there costs you a season. So it gives you the set-out date instead and says plainly that it cannot give you a sowing one. **And for things you dig or cut** — radishes, greens, carrots — it says that sowing past the date still gives you something smaller, rather than nothing. That date is not a cliff for every plant.

What does it say when it is genuinely close?

**Both halves, and on purpose.** *It can work, and an early frost ends it.* A plant that needs nearly all the time left before your frost is a real gamble rather than a yes or a no, and picking the cheerful half of that is how you end up covering plants in October that were never going to make it — or pulling ones that would have. The honest answer to a close call is that it is close.

There is a conversation in my list about one of my beds and I never started it. What is that?

**The app looking at a photo you uploaded.** When you add a picture of a plant, it has a quick look and writes down what it can see — the stage it is at, whether anything has changed since the last picture of that spot. Those notes go into a conversation named after the bed, so everything about that bed stays in one place instead of making a new chat for every photo. **It will not message you, buzz your phone, or take you anywhere.** It is a notebook, not a conversation waiting for a reply. You can open it, read it, and ignore it entirely.

Can I turn that off, or delete one?

You can delete the conversation like any other, and it will start a fresh one for that bed next time you add a picture there. **There is no setting to stop it yet** — and we would rather say that plainly than pretend there is. It only ever looks at photos you have already chosen to add, and it only ever writes into that one place.

Does it use up my questions?

**No.** Looking at a photo you uploaded is not a question you asked, so it is not counted against anything. It is also a much smaller job than a conversation — it is only being asked what it can see, not to talk to you about it.

What happens if I type a question before signing in?

**Nothing is lost, and nothing is sent.** Ask needs an account, so pressing send takes you to sign in rather than trying and failing. Your question is kept while you go, and it is sitting in the box waiting when you come back — you press send yourself, because a question fired off by a redirect is a question you did not choose to spend. The box stays open the whole time: you can write and edit freely while signed out, since typing was never the part that needed an account.

Do I need an account to ask a question?

**Yes — Ask is the one part of the app that needs one, and from 13 August 2026 the screen says so before you type.** Everything else genuinely works without an account and without a signal: adding plants, logging what you did, photos, hardening off, all of it saves to your phone the moment you tap. **Asking is different because the answer is worked out on our side**, against the copy of your garden in your account — so there has to be an account for it to read. Until this week the requirement was invisible until you had already written a question and pressed send, and then the failure explained it. **That is the wrong order** — being taught a rule by having your work refused is not being told. The empty Ask screen now says *Asking needs an account — everything else works without one*, with a link straight to signing in. **You are not blocked from typing.** Somebody signed out with a real garden is a real gardener, not a lapsed one, so the box and the suggested questions stay exactly where they were.

I just installed it, and Ask only offers "Add your first plant". Where are the suggested questions?

**They come back the moment you add one plant. They are held back because on an empty garden all three were dead ends.** *What did I miss* lands on a screen about yearly jobs like pruning, which belong to trees and bushes you have not got yet. *When will things be ready* has no plants to have dates. *What should I do this week* has no jobs to list. **Three doors, all painted on** — so the screen offers the one thing that makes every one of them work instead. **The wording changed with it, and the first attempt at that was ours to fix too.** This screen used to greet a brand-new phone with *"It knows what day it is, what you have planted, when it went in, and what you wrote down"* — describing the app it becomes after you have used it, to the one person who had not. **A gap is a gap; a claim is a lie**, and that was a claim. We replaced it with a sentence that opened by telling you what it could not do: honest, and about as welcoming as a closed shop. It now leads with what it is for and ends with the tap that gets you there. **Nothing is hidden and nothing is switched off.** The typing box works, the microphone works, and you can ask anything you like at any time — the suggestions are simply not offered when we already know the answer would be empty.

The suggested questions give shorter answers than my own. Why?

**Because we know in advance what those two are asking, so we can promise a shape.** Tap *What should I do this week?* and **the app itself draws the list** — one line per job, most overdue first, straight from the same task list your Today screen uses. The AI writes one short sentence above it and nothing more. Tap *When will things be ready?* and **the app draws a harvest card** — a chart of every plant’s picking window against your first frost, then one row each in date order. Same thing: the AI writes one line above it and stops. **A question you type yourself gets no such shape**, deliberately: we do not know what you are asking, and forcing a list onto *"why are my tomato leaves curling"* would be worse than letting it answer properly. **What changed is only the shape, never the facts.** The jobs and the dates come from the same place either way — your own garden — and the promise attached to a button just stops the answer wrapping three jobs in four paragraphs. **It only applies to the button.** Edit the words before sending and it becomes your question again, answered normally.

I tapped "When will things be ready?" and got a chart. What am I looking at?

**Your harvest, drawn instead of typed out — new on 21 August 2026.** The bar across the top is your season: last frost on the left, first frost hatched on the right, today marked with a line. Each bar on it is one plant’s picking window, so you can see at a glance which ones land with room to spare and which ones run off the end. **Underneath, one row per plant, soonest first.** Each says how far away it is — *picking now*, *in 25 days* — the actual dates, how it comes out against your frost, and the day-count we used with what that count is measured from. Tap any row to open that plant. **Three things get said differently on purpose, because they are three different facts.** A fruit tree or a lavender gets a picking season rather than a countdown, under *Every year, around here* — those windows come round annually and are about your area, not about the age of your plant. A plant with no planting date is listed by name with a link, because that is one tap from being answerable. And a crop we do not carry in our records at all says exactly that, rather than pretending we are missing your plant’s timing. **Since 21 August 2026 each of those yearly rows also says how long that plant takes to start bearing, and where yours is against it.** *Bears 2 to 5 years after planting · 1 season in, not old enough to crop yet* — and a row like that is no longer marked as ready to pick, because you cannot pick it. We hold that figure for 29 of the 39 plants that answer this way. For the other ten we say so by name at the bottom of the card rather than leaving a blank. **Why it changed:** this is a question we wrote and pinned to the top of the screen, so it is a promise. It was coming back as four lines of plain text, in whatever order, with the AI asked to sort your dates for you. **Sorting dates is not a job for the part of this that guesses** — the app had already worked all of it out.

The chat gave me a different ready date from the one on the plant's own page. Why?

**It should not have, and from 13 August 2026 it does not.** The plant page used the figure for the variety you picked — Cherokee Purple, 80 days — and the chat used the range for the crop it belongs to, tomato, 52 to 90 days. Same plant, same afternoon, two answers: *ripening 1 November* on one screen and *typically ready 4 October to 11 November* on the other. **The chat was throwing away the variety you took the trouble to choose**, which stings more than it sounds like: this is the second time in a week we have lost that same choice, the first being a bug that never carried it off your phone at all. Both read the variety now, and both fall back to the crop range when we hold no figure for the variety. **It is worth more than tidiness.** Across the catalog the middling gap between varieties of one crop is about 30 days, and at the extreme it is Purple Sprouting broccoli at 220 days against Melody at 24 — the same crop record. **One thing it still refuses to do:** if a variety's figure is counted from sowing and its crop's is counted from transplanting, it keeps the crop range rather than convert. Those two differ by the entire time a plant spends indoors, six to eight weeks on a tomato, and a converted guess presented as a variety's own number is worse than the honest range.

I told it I planted something and got a button with no words. Was it ignoring me?

**It was not, and it should never have looked that way — fixed 24 August 2026.** When you tell the app something rather than asking it something, two things happen: the assistant writes you a reply, and it quietly files what you said so the right buttons appear. **Occasionally it did the filing and skipped the reply.** You would see a card offering to add your plant and not a single word above it, which reads exactly like being ignored by something that is supposed to be listening. The app now checks before your answer reaches you: if there are no words, it writes a short line itself from what it just filed — *Written down — watered the tomatoes*, or *Got all 3, check them over below*. **It is a floor, not a substitute.** A one-line receipt is worse than a real reply, and the assistant is still expected to write one; this only makes sure a silence never reaches you. **The odd part is that half the app already did this.** The check existed on one of the two ways an answer can arrive and not the other, so whether you saw words depended on which path your question took — something no gardener could have known or reported.

It told me my beans would not beat the frost, and the dates it gave me say they will.

**That was real, and it was our fault rather than the assistant being careless — fixed 21 August 2026.** The app works out your ready dates in code, from your own planting date and a sourced day-count, precisely so nobody has to estimate. It then handed those dates over with the instruction *never do this arithmetic yourself* — **and no answer to the one question that matters.** We only ever spoke up when the frost won. When the plant won, we said nothing, so the comparison was left sitting there undone. Given two dates, told not to compute, and given no result, it computed, and got it backwards. **Now the line says how it comes out, every time.** Comfortably clear, and it says how many days clear. Tight, and it says so rather than promising. Ending on your frost date, and it says that in those words. Straddling it, and you get **both** ends of the window with the judgment handed to you, because a range that starts before your frost and finishes after it genuinely depends on the autumn. **And it does not round a hair-thin margin up into a yes.** A day-count is a catalog figure for a good season; a cool month moves it, so anything inside a week of your frost is described as tight, not as safe.

It offered to put something on my list without me asking. When does that happen?

**When the answer told you to do something — new on 21 August 2026.** Before this, the app only offered a reminder if you asked for one, or if it had spotted a pest or a disease worth a second look. So a beta tester who was told to shade his potted beans from 2 to 5 PM through a heat spell had nowhere to put that, and said so: *this would have been a great place for it to remember to remind me later.* **The test is whether the answer told you to DO something, not whether it put a date on it.** Feed it, shade it, net it, repot it — those are jobs, with or without a time, and each can become a dated task in one tap. If a time was given, the task carries it; if not, it does not invent one. **What it deliberately will not do is offer on every answer.** *Beans like full sun* is information, not a job, and gets no button. We checked that against the real assistant rather than assuming: an offer under every reply is worse than no offer at all, because it is the kind of thing you stop reading.

It says it has no timing for my orange tree. Do you not have data on fruit trees?

**We do, and saying otherwise was our mistake — fixed 20 August 2026.** Until then, asking when things would be ready could answer *no maturity window in our data* for a fruit tree, a citrus or a lavender. That reads as a hole in our records, and it was the opposite: somebody had sourced that plant, decided that a days-from-sowing figure is meaningless for it, and written down why. **A home orange is a named variety budded onto a rootstock** — nobody grows one from a pip and gets the same orange — so counting days from a seed would answer a question no gardener is asking. **We checked how far this went before changing anything.** Of our 152 plants, 41 carry no day count. Thirty-nine of those say plainly that the field does not apply, and **thirty-nine of them hold the answer in the form perennials actually use: a picking season.** The two left over are cover crops — ryegrass and vetch — which nobody harvests. So nothing was missing. The question was being asked of the wrong field. **What you get now is the season.** For an apricot, when apricots are ready around you; for a navel orange, a winter window that lands in the following year and says so. **And it is careful to say what it is not.** A picking season repeats every year and is a fact about your area, not about the age of your tree — so it is never handed to you as a first-harvest date. **The age is answered separately, and from 21 August 2026 it is answered properly.** Until that day the app said it did not know how many years a young tree needs, which was our mistake twice over: we had held that figure for years, and it was sitting in the same records the season came from. An apricot bears 2 to 5 years after planting, a pear 3 to 10, and a lemon grown from a pip 7 to 10 against the 2 to 3 of a grafted one — so the answer now says the figure and where your plant stands against it.

I asked when something would be ready and got "a couple of weeks". Can it do better?

**It can now, for most crops.** We hold a sourced days-to-maturity window for 111 of our 152 crops — a range like *52 to 90 days*, with the thing it is counted from written down, because that matters more than the number. Fifty-two days from **sowing** and fifty-two days from **transplanting** are different dates, weeks apart, on exactly the crops people care about. **The app now does the arithmetic itself** and hands the answer over as real dates: your own planting date plus that window. So you get *"typically ready 5 September to 13 October"* rather than an estimate. **We deliberately do not let the AI do the sums.** Adding fifty-two days to a July date is the sort of thing a language model gets right most of the time, and most of the time is not good enough for a date you might plan around. **Two honest gaps.** Forty-one crops have no window in our data, and a plant with no planting date recorded cannot be worked out at all — in both cases it will tell you that rather than guess. **And since 17 August 2026 it picks the right one of two figures, which on some crops is a month apart.** A pepper takes 100 to 120 days from sowing a seed, or 70 to 85 from setting out a plant you bought — the gap is the six or seven weeks somebody else spent raising it. We hold both numbers for 56 crops, and the answer used to take whichever one the crop record listed first, for everybody. Now it uses what YOU did: sow it and you get the from-seed figure, buy it and you get the from-transplant one. **Nothing in the plant data could have fixed this** — which figure is right is a fact about your planting, not about the crop, so only the part of the app that knows how you started it can choose. The answer says which one it used, so you can see the reasoning and not just a date.

It offered to write down a pest it had just reminded me about. Why?

**That was a bug and it is fixed as of 13 August 2026.** Somebody asked when things would be ready to pick, and the answer helpfully mentioned the codling moth they had logged the week before — which is exactly what the app is for. Then a row of buttons appeared underneath offering to record a codling moth, as though it had just been spotted. **Remembering something is not seeing it.** Your journal is handed to the AI so it can answer using your own history, so naming something out of it is really quoting you back to yourself — and offering to save that would file the same sighting twice, on a date it never happened. The buttons now only appear for something it can actually tell from the message you just sent or the photo attached to it. **If it genuinely spots a new pest in a new photo, you still get the button.**

Why do answers sometimes have stars and dashes in them?

**They should not, and from 13 August 2026 they do not.** The chat screen prints an answer exactly as it is written, character for character — there is no formatting layer, on purpose, because adding one would mean shipping a sizeable chunk of extra code to every phone just to turn stars into bold. So when the AI reached for formatting, you got the punctuation instead of the effect: two stars, a word, two more stars. **The fix was to stop it reaching for them**, which also fixed the thing that actually bothered people. Bold headings over short sections turn a two-sentence answer into a page, and you end up reading all of it to find the part that mattered. Answers now come back the way somebody would say them out loud: a few short paragraphs, and then it stops.

The mic stops listening when I pause. Can I make it wait longer?

**No, and that is the browser rather than a setting we have hidden from you.** The part of the browser that turns speech into words has eight things you can set — the language, whether to show words as they come in, a few others — and **not one of them is how long it waits during a pause**. How patient it is, is up to your phone. On Android specifically, the setting that would keep it listening is documented as having no effect at all. **So we stopped pretending it does not happen.** When it stops, the box stays open, your words stay in it, and the button says **Keep talking** — tap it and carry on, and what you say next is added to the end rather than replacing it. **We could have made it restart itself**, and chose not to: Android plays a beep every time the microphone opens, and that beep cannot be turned off by a website. Somebody pausing to think would be beeped at for thinking. **A button you tap when you are ready is better than a noise every time you stop to look at a plant.**

Does the chat know which day of hardening off I am on?

**Yes, and until 12 August it did not — it asked you.** Somebody told it they had taken their plants out and got back that it could not look up the hardening-off schedule, and then *which day are you on?* — about a ten-day run the app itself was driving for those exact trays. **The app was keeping count and the chat could not see the count.** Now it is handed the same thing the Harden screen shows: which day of how many, what today's step is, how long they have been outside today, and how cold is too cold for that particular crop. Ask *which day am I on* and you get a number. **It comes off your device rather than being worked out again on our side**, which is the reason the chat and the Harden screen cannot disagree — there is one count, and the chat is reading it rather than guessing at it.

Can the app stop me recording something that could not have happened?

It can now, for five things that are physically impossible rather than merely unusual. You cannot harden off a plant you have said is in a bed — it is rooted, you cannot carry it. You cannot log something onto a plant you have recorded as finished (a **note** is still allowed, because *pulled it out and the roots were knotted* is worth keeping). You cannot date something in the future, though we allow a day's slack so a gardener in New Zealand tapping **today** is never refused. Sprouting cannot be dated before the seed went in — by DATE, not by the order you type things, so catching up on Sunday about Thursday is fine. And an amount needs a unit: a bare **4** against a watering is four gallons or four minutes forever, and the record cannot say which. **Three more rules were proposed and thrown out**, which matters more than the five: a plant can go backwards, because one that is cut back or hailed genuinely does; a harvest needs no flowers first, because most crops are leaf and root; and a move need not say where it went yet, because forcing that answer makes people invent a bed. **A rule that fires on real gardening gets switched off, and then it protects nothing.**

If I tell it a plant died, does the plant actually go away?

Yes, from 11 August 2026 — and until then it did not, which was the bug. The **It died** button on a plant's page closed the plant out properly. Typing **my basil died** into the chat wrote the sentence into your journal and left the plant alive on your list, still being handed watering jobs for something you had just said was gone. Two ways to say one thing and only one of them was heard. Now both close it the same way, dated to the day you said it happened rather than to today, so catching up on Sunday about a Thursday still reads Thursday. **It only acts on a card you pressed Save on**, naming the plant — never off a guess about a sentence. If it got the wrong plant, **Reopen** on that plant's page brings it straight back.

It asked me to photograph something and I said remind me later. What happens when I do it?

You get taken back to the conversation that asked. Finish the job on your list and there is one extra button — back to the chat — and tapping it opens that thread with your photo already attached, under a line saying which day it was and what you were asked. So a question you started on Tuesday and answered on Friday carries on where it stopped, instead of you having to explain it again from the beginning. Two things it deliberately does not do. It does not throw you into the chat the moment you close the job, because you were partway down a list and being moved somewhere you did not ask to go loses your place. And it does not send the photo for you. It sits in the box waiting for you to tap send, because a message that appears in your voice should be one you actually sent. **And if you finished the job without taking a picture, the way back is still there** — you tap it and the thread opens saying pick up where you left off, because the answer to what it asked may be something you can just type. Closing a job with no photo means no photo, not no conversation.

Do I have to say it the way you say it?

No, and that is deliberate. You can name a job by the thing you touched rather than by a gardening verb — "pulling weeds", "threw a sheet over them", "stuck a cane in next to it", "put compost round them", "snipped the tops off" all land on the right entry. You can say it mid-job as easily as after: "watering the beans" works the same as "watered the beans", and "my lettuce is going to seed" the same as "gone to seed". And if you learned to garden somewhere else, we understand that too — "earthing up the spuds" is hilling potatoes as far as the app is concerned, even though we would never write it that way ourselves.

I said I picked my first tomato and it recorded the plant fruiting. Why?

That was a real bug and it is fixed. "Picked the first tomato" was being written down as the plant SETTING its first fruit rather than as you harvesting one — so a moment worth remembering was filed as the wrong thing entirely. **The cause was that we had a short list of fruit words** — fruit, tomato, pod, bean — that meant "the plant is fruiting", and that list beat the word "picked" sitting right next to it. Which is why **"picked the first strawberry" worked fine**: strawberry was not on the list. Now the verb decides. If you picked it, pulled it or harvested it, that is a harvest whatever the fruit is called — including fruits we have never listed. If there is no picking word, "first tomato" still means the plant is setting fruit, which is also worth recording.

My sunflower flowered and the app called it a problem. Why?

It should not, and it no longer does. Bolting — a plant shooting up and flowering — ends the crop on a lettuce, a spinach or a cabbage, so the app treats it as bad news. On a sunflower, a cosmos, lavender or chamomile, flowering **is** the crop arriving, and on a cover crop it is the signal to cut it down. The app now checks what the plant is actually grown for before deciding whether flowering is good news, using what it already knows about that crop. 28 of our 152 plants are grown for their flowers. The reverse holds too: if a lettuce **flowers**, that is bolting under another name, and the app says so instead of congratulating you.

What can I just say to it, and what does it not follow yet?

You do not need the gardening word for it. "Put some radish seeds in", "put straw round the apple tree", "cut some branches off the plum", "the beans have come through" all land the same as the proper terms — we went and checked how people who have never gardened describe these jobs, and taught it those. Most of the ordinary jobs: planting and sowing, watering, feeding, pruning and pinching and deadheading, thinning, weeding, staking and caging, covering and uncovering, hilling up, mulching, dividing a clump, taking cuttings, harvesting, moving a pot, hardening off, and treating something — spraying, traps, picking pests off by hand. It also understands what the PLANT did, not just what you did: "beans are up", "lettuce has bolted", "first flower on the zucchini". We measured this rather than guessed: 56 real sentences, 80% understood today — it was 57% a week ago and 43% before that, and once you have answered the one question below it is 84%. **Anything it does not follow is still saved in your own words as a note** — nothing is lost, it just does not count towards a total yet. There are two it asks about instead of guessing: "planted out" and "set out" mean the transplant to some gardeners and carrying the tray outside for the day to others. It asks you once — in the ground, or out for the day — and then it knows what you mean forever, because that does not change between Tuesday and April. Until you answer, those save as your words. **It also stopped caring where you put the little words.** "Laid down woodchip" used to become a plain note while "laid woodchip round the beds" was logged as mulching — same job, same material, and the only difference was which side of it the word "down" sat on. Now both count, along with "put down bark", "tipped a barrow of compost out" and "chucked down some grass clippings". **"Got our first zucchini" counts as a harvest.** Nobody says picked, harvested or dug about their first one, and that sentence used to record nothing at all — or worse, record the plant setting fruit rather than you picking it. Not the two things you also get your first of that are not a harvest: a frost, and a flower. **And you do not need to know what is eating it.** "Something is eating my kale", "bugs on my beans", "holes in the leaves" and "the leaves are getting eaten" now count as a pest sighting on that plant, with your words kept as written. They used to be plain notes, because the app was looking for the NAME of the pest — which is the one thing you do not have when you are asking. What it will not do is invent a sighting from you eating your own dinner: "we ate the first tomato" is not a pest, and neither is digging holes for the tomatoes. **And there is an honest floor to this.** "Cleared the bed" and "emptied the pot out" stay notes on purpose, because a bed is a place rather than a job — clearing one could be weeding, digging, or pulling out a crop that had finished, and we would rather keep your words than pick one and be wrong.

Can I ask it about the app itself?

Yes. Ask how the free questions work, whether it needs signal, where your photos are kept or what changed recently, and it answers from these help pages — the same words you would read here. If we have not written a page about what you asked, it says so instead of guessing. That is deliberate: it can only tell you things we have actually written down and checked, so the worst it can be is out of date, never invented.

What happens to a question it could not answer?

It becomes the note about which help page we write next. If you ask something about the app and there is no page for it, your question is passed to us in your own words — not a tally, the actual sentence you typed, because that is the thing worth reading in three months. You do not have to do anything and it does not tell you it has done it. One person asking once is just a question; the same question turning up three times is a page we owe you.

Will asking about the app confuse it about my garden?

No, and the two are kept apart on purpose. "Where are my photos stored?" is about the app. "Why does it think my tomatoes need water?" only sounds like it is — that one is about your plant, its dates and your own notes, and it is answered that way. If a question genuinely has both in it, you get both answers and it says which is which.

I said I built a bed and planted things in it. Why were the plants not in the bed?

They are now. Say "I built a new raised bed and put a row of lettuce, spinach and kale in it" and you get one bed with three plants drawn inside it, straight away — you do not have to answer the size question first. **That used to arrive a turn late**: the first card showed three loose plants and a Save all button, and the bed only appeared after you said how big it was. Anyone who took that button ended up with three plants sitting nowhere and a bed that had to be joined to them afterwards. **The two are different kinds of thing.** That the plants went in the bed is something you already told us; how big the bed is, is a detail we can ask for after. Waiting for the second before showing the first meant offering you a version of your own sentence that was missing half of it.

It told me a crop would not finish. Does that really mean I get nothing?

**It depends on which part of the plant you eat, and from 14 August 2026 the answer says which.** **For anything you dig up, running short of days means a smaller crop rather than none.** Sweet potatoes want about 90 days for full-sized tubers. If you have 61, the tubers keep growing right up until the frost kills the vines — and killing the vines is when you dig. **So what is in the ground that night is what you get: small, and real.** The same is true of anything you cut: baby kale is a crop. **For anything that has to ripen, it really does mean nothing.** Green tomatoes do not ripen after the vine dies, an unfilled pod stays empty, and there is no small version of a broccoli head that never formed. Those still get a plain no. **The app will not make the call for you.** Where it is a smaller crop, it says so, says why, and leaves it there — worth doing if you want any at all, not worth it if you were counting on a proper harvest. **That is your decision and it depends on things we do not know**, like whether you have somewhere better for that bed. This came from a gardener pushing back on a flat no, and he was right to.

The round button in the corner was half off the bottom of my screen.

**Fixed on 14 August 2026, and it was covering part of the Profile tab while it was there.** That button floats above whatever is at the bottom of the screen, and on the Ask screen it works out where to sit from the height of the typing bar. When that measurement came back wrong it did not just sit in an odd place — it sat **below the bottom edge**, clipped, on top of the corner of the Profile tab underneath it. Profile still opened from its left side, so it was partly stolen rather than dead, which is the sort of thing you feel as the app being slightly broken without being able to say why. **It now has a floor it cannot go below**, set to the same distance it uses on every other screen — the one that clears the tab bar. Whatever the measurement says, a button that is meant to be raised can never end up lower than an ordinary one.

There used to be two microphones on the Ask screen.

**There is one, and only one, from 14 August 2026: the microphone in the typing bar.** That is the one that dictates your question. The round floating button — the one for telling *us* about the app when something looks wrong — **is simply not on the Ask screen any more.** It sat a thumb away from the composer doing an entirely different job, and briefly wore a pencil to tell them apart, which was still one button too many: **the typing bar is already the way in on that screen.** It is on every other screen, unchanged, where nothing competes with it. So if you want to report something about the app while you are in a chat, step out to any other screen and it is one tap. That is a real trade and it is the right way round — the chat is where you talk to your garden.

The chat showed my question twice, once as a heading and once as a message.

**Fixed on 14 August 2026.** A conversation is named after its first message, which is exactly right in the list of past conversations — it is how you recognize one among twenty. Inside the open conversation it sat directly above the same words in your own message bubble: **two identical blocks of your writing before the answer began**, which on a phone is most of the screen. The heading now just says *Ask*, and the conversation keeps its name where that name does some work.

I asked in one message and answered in the next, and it lost the thread.

**Fixed on 14 August 2026.** Somebody asked whether sprouting sweet potatoes could go in this year, got a question back, and answered it — and by then the check that works out whether a crop can finish had gone quiet. **It was reading only your newest message.** On its own, *"I have a sweet potato in my kitchen and it is the one growing off shoots"* asks nothing, so nothing fired. **It now reads the turn before it as well**, which is how conversations actually go: you name the plant in one breath and the details in the next. **Two things it deliberately will not do**, both because a stale answer attached to a new question is worse than no answer. It only looks back **one turn** — six messages ago is usually a different subject. And it only carries on when you are still talking about **the same plant**: ask about sweet potatoes and then say *"what is eating my kale"*, and you get an answer about kale rather than a planting verdict about sweet potatoes. The first version of this did exactly that, and we caught it before it shipped.

I asked whether I could plant something and it did not seem to notice the question at all.

**That was a real hole and it closed on 14 August 2026.** The app works out for itself whether a crop can finish before your frost — but only once it recognizes that you are asking. It was checking for a short list of ways of asking: *can I*, *should I*, *is it too late*, *when*. Somebody who wrote **"am I able to plant these this year"** — a planting question in plain English — matched none of them, so the whole check stayed silent and the answer came back as ordinary encouragement. **It now recognizes intent as well as questions.** *"I want to plant this"*, *"thinking about putting in some kale"*, *"planning to sow spinach this weekend"* and *"is there still time to start beans"* all count, because somebody saying what they are about to do has not done it yet — and telling them it will not finish is the entire point. **What it deliberately still ignores is anything already in the ground.** *"I planted the beans in June, when will they be ready"* is a question about a plant that exists, and answering it with *no, that cannot finish* would be the app arguing with something you watched happen. Measured across 11,166 sentences of real gardener writing, widening this made the check speak up six more times — and it recovered the question it had been missing.

I asked if it was too late to plant something and got a wishy-washy answer. Has that changed?

**Yes, from 13 August 2026, and it was a real mistake rather than a vague one.** Asked whether sweet potato slips were worth planting in mid-August, the chat replied that there were 61 days until first frost and that this was *"tight but workable"* for a crop needing 90 to 150 days — then suggested planting them as soon as possible. **61 days against a 90-day minimum is 29 days short of the fastest variety there is.** Not a smaller crop. No crop at all. Every number in that answer was right and the conclusion drawn from them was wrong. **The app works it out now instead of the AI.** When you ask whether you can still grow something, your frost date and that crop's own days-to-maturity are compared before the question is even sent, and the answer is handed over as a settled yes, no or risky. The reply leads with it and then explains — and when the answer is no, it tells you what you *can* do instead, like potting the slips up for next spring. Measured on that exact question: the honest answer came back 4 times in 15 before, and 14 times in 15 after. **And the wrong day count is fixed too, as of 14 August 2026 — the cause turned out to be ours.** The AI used to write its own countdown to frost and get it wrong, saying 69 days where the real figure was 61. We had assumed it simply could not do the subtraction. **In fact we were handing it a sentence beginning "Only 61 days remain..." and then, two lines later, telling it never to state a number of days.** It was copying the shape we had shown it. The answer now names the frost date instead — *the first frost comes Oct 13* — which is exact, checkable against your Today screen, and nothing has to be worked out. **Measured on the same question: a wrong countdown in 15 rolls out of 15 before, and 0 out of 15 after.** It can still occasionally slip one into an answer about a crop you dig up, which we are still on.

Can I fill in a detail about a plant I already have, just by saying it?

Yes, from 13 August 2026 — four things: **which kind it is, the day it went in, how many, and which bed.** Say *"I put six Red Russian kale in the back bed on Saturday"* about kale already in your garden and one card appears listing exactly what it is about to write, with one button. No going into the plant, no form. Naming the crop is the surest way — the app matches that word against what you are actually growing. **But it no longer depends on you saying it.** If you name no crop and only one plant in your garden is missing everything you just mentioned, there is nothing left to guess and the card appears anyway. If two plants could be meant, it stays quiet rather than picking one. **Until this week none of that did anything at all.** The app could record all four while you were *adding* a plant, and could record none of them on a plant it already had — so the only way to fill a gap was to go and tap into the plant, which is exactly the tapping the chat exists to save you. **It only ever fills blanks, field by field.** Say four things about a plant that already knows three of them and only the empty one is carried; the card cannot become a correction, whichever ones you happen to mention. **The date is shown as a real date before you save it** — say "Saturday" and the card reads *9 August 2026*, because a plant quietly dated three days off is worse than one that asked. Words that name no day at all, like "in the spring", write nothing. More on [Which kind is it?](/help/which-kind-is-it/).

What do I get back when I tell it four things at once?

One card, not four forms. Your beds are drawn as beds with the plants sitting inside them — six tomato icons in the back bed, three peppers beside them — and anything that is not a plant gets its own line underneath. One button saves the lot. The point is that you can check it by looking rather than by reading: a pepper drawn in the wrong bed is wrong before you have read a word, where ten lines of correct-looking text just get a tap.

What if it gets one of them wrong?

Tap the row to open it and fix it, or tap the small ✕ to throw that one away. The rest stay. That matters more than it sounds — without it, one invented plant would force you to either accept it or abandon the four correct things beside it, and both are worse than checking a card.

Can I make it stop asking?

Yes. There is a "don't ask me again" box on the card itself, so you can check it the moment you have watched it work and decided you trust it. After that it saves right away — but it still tells you: a one-line "4 things saved" with an undo next to it. You can turn the card back on any time under Profile. A setting you cannot reverse is not a setting.

If I say I watered the cherry trees, does it know which trees?

Yes — it attaches the watering to the actual plants, one entry each, so each tree can answer for itself when you ask what it has had. It matches on the crop, and on the place when you name one. If everything of that kind is in one spot you do not need to say where. **If it is not certain, it asks rather than guesses** — say "the two cherry trees" when we hold three and you get the three offered to pick from. A number you stated is something you know about your own garden, and a watering attached to the wrong tree is never noticed.

Can I tell it several things at once?

Yes, and that is the point. "I put in six tomatoes and three peppers on Saturday, built a bed out back, and remind me to net the cherries in June" comes back as four cards — two plantings with their counts and their date, the bed, and the reminder — each with its own button. Nothing is written until you press one, and you can press some and ignore the rest.

Will it put the wrong number on the wrong plant?

No, because it will not put a number it is unsure of on anything. When it can tell that the six goes with the tomatoes and the three with the peppers, both cards arrive filled in. When your sentence is genuinely ambiguous, both cards still arrive — with the number box empty for you to fill in. An empty box is a question you answer in a second; a wrong number is an answer you would never think to check.

How is this different from asking a normal AI chatbot?

A general chatbot starts from nothing and answers about the species. This one opens already knowing today's date, your frost dates, every plant you have with the day it went in the ground, and the last dozen things you did in the garden. So 'will the tomatoes ripen before frost?' comes back with your frost date and your planting date, not a paragraph about tomatoes in general. Ask it something it has no note about and it says so rather than making something up.

If I ask what powdery mildew looks like, where does the answer come from?

From text we wrote off a named source — a university extension service or a plant clinic — and it tells you which one, with a link, so you can go and read it yourself. We hold descriptions for 138 of the problems our plants get, which covers a bit over four-fifths of the times a plant in our database names a problem. Ask about one we have not written up and it says so rather than filling the gap from memory. **The limit is worth knowing:** these say what each problem looks like on its own, not what tells it apart from the one beside it. So if you ask about "mildew" you get both the powdery and the downy kind, and it says plainly that it cannot rank them for you — because telling those two apart from a description is a thing we cannot honestly do yet, and guessing would be worse than saying so. **Where we know a problem is tied to one crop, it says that too** — the fusarium wilt that kills tomatoes is a tomato-only strain, so if it took your tomatoes it is not coming for your beans next, and that is usually the thing you actually wanted to know. And where the page we learned from covers something narrower than your plant, the answer tells you that as well, rather than quietly applying a pepper study to your beans.

It said it could not see my task list, but Today is showing me jobs. Which one is right?

Today is right, and you should go by it. Your task list is worked out on your phone, and the chat is sent a copy of it with your question. If that copy cannot be built for any reason, the chat now tells you so and sends you to Today — because the alternative is worse. It used to go quiet instead, and a missing list looks exactly like an empty one, so it would answer "nothing is due this week" in a week that was full. A chat that admits it cannot see something is safe; one that confidently tells you there is nothing to do is not. Anything you asked for by name still comes through, because those are yours and do not depend on the list being built.

Does it remember what I said earlier in the conversation?

Yes. You can say 'and which of those is furthest along?' and it knows what 'those' means. It carries the last dozen turns, so a long conversation loses its oldest end rather than its most recent — which is almost always the part that matters.

Can I have more than one conversation?

As many as you like. The menu in the top left holds every past conversation, newest first, named after the first thing you said in it. Tap one to pick it back up, or start a new one. They stay there, so the conversation about the peach in August is still there next August.

Can I send more than one photo at a time?

Up to four in one message, and it reads them as one set rather than four separate questions. That matters more than it sounds: the top of a leaf and its underside are two views of the same problem, and a lot of things — mites against rust, for instance — cannot be told apart from one angle. When you send several they are numbered, so you can say "the second one" and it will know which you mean.

Can I show it a photo?

Yes — the camera button in the message bar takes one, and the button beside it picks one you already have. Attach a photo HERE, in the chat, and it looks at it straight away — handing a picture to a conversation is itself the question, so it does not stop to ask. (A photo taken on a plant page is the other way round: it asks first. [Asking about a photo](/help/asking-about-a-photo/) covers that.) It looks at the picture alongside that plant's own history. A question with a picture in it goes to a stronger model than a typed one, because working out what is in a photograph is a harder job than looking something up in your records.

What are the buttons under an answer?

Next steps the answer opened up. Show it a plant it has no record of and you get "Add this apple to my garden". Show it a pest it can name and you get "Log codling moth on your apple tree" — one tap, no form, because everything a form would ask has already been said. Show it damage it cannot name and you get "Check it for pests and disease" instead, with the exact photos to take. Ignoring them costs nothing, and nothing is saved until you tap.

Why does it offer to log a pest sometimes and to look for one other times?

Because those are different situations and only one of them is a question. If it can name what it is looking at, the useful thing is to write it down. If it can only say something is wrong, the useful thing is a closer look — and it tells you exactly which photo would settle it. It will not ask you to go hunting for a pest it has just identified, which is the sort of thing that happens when a chatbot picks its own buttons. Ours does not: it reports what it can see, and the app decides what that makes possible, using things the chat cannot know — whether that plant is in your garden, whether you already logged this one this week, whether a job is already on your list.

It saved a note and I could not tell which plant it went on, or change what it said.

**Both are fixed as of 21 August 2026, and the second one is the bigger change.** **The note now opens before it is saved.** Tap the plant and a small card appears with the sentence the app is about to write, in full, in a box you can edit. Change any of it, then save. Nothing is stored until you do, and the card says so in as many words — because a card showing a finished sentence is exactly the sort of thing you would reasonably read as done. **Why it needed to open at all:** the button could only fit about forty characters, so most of the sentence was never on screen. You were agreeing to words you had not read. And once a note is in a plant's story there is nowhere to edit it, so the moment before saving is the only chance there is. **And the tick afterwards names the plant and links to it** — *"Noted in Bush bean's story. Open it"* — where it used to say *"Noted in this plant's story"*, which names nothing and points nowhere. A confirmation that will not say where something went is the same thing as a note filed on the wrong plant: nothing looks broken and you cannot find it later. The same is now true of a pest, a disease and a harvest. **Saving does not end the conversation.** It never did on its own — but the app reloads itself when an update lands, and until now that dropped you back to a blank Ask screen. The conversation you have open is now part of the address, so a reload puts you back in it. Starting a new chat still leaves the old one, exactly as before.

How does it pick the variety?

From a list of the ones we actually hold for that crop — 59 for apple, and it pre-selects whichever one it guessed from your photo so most of the time you change nothing. If yours genuinely is not in the list, there is a link to type it in by hand. That name is saved on the plant but it will not drive your ripening dates, because a variety we do not hold has no dates to give — and we log it so we can go and add it properly. Same if the chat names a variety we are missing: that is the more useful signal, because it means our list is behind what people are growing.

Can it add a plant for me?

Tap "Add this apple to my garden" and you get the details filled in — what kind of plant, what to call it, where it is, the variety if it has a guess. Edit anything wrong and save. Nothing goes into your garden until you do, which is the point: it can be wrong about an apple, and you will see that it is before it becomes a record.

Why does it not just add it itself?

Because a wrong answer you can see is fine and a wrong record you cannot see is not. It once told a gardener it had added his apple tree when it had done nothing at all, and there was no way to tell from the screen. A card cannot fail that way — it is either there or it is not, and everything it claims is sitting in a box waiting to be corrected.

Can it remind me to do something later?

Yes, the same way it adds a plant — it offers, you save. When an answer depends on something you cannot check right now, it puts up a card with the job, when to do it, and how to do it properly. Change the day with one tap and add it to your list, and it appears on Today when the day comes. The how is the part that matters: a reminder that says "photograph the leaf" gets you another picture of a whole tree, and one that says "hold it flat, underside up, in shade, fill the frame" gets you an answer.

Do reminders sync to my other devices?

Not yet — they live on the phone you set them on. Everything else in your garden backs up to your account; reminders are new and their half of that is still being built. The app says so on the card rather than letting you find out.

Can it log a job or a harvest for me?

No. Adding a plant and setting a reminder are the only two things it can offer. For anything else it will tell you plainly that it cannot and point at where you can. If it ever claims to have done something in the app, that is a bug worth reporting — it is built not to say that.

What will it not tell me?

It will not name a chemical, a product or a dose — timing you can have, but what goes on food you are going to eat is your decision. It will not tell you when something was planted or how old a plant is unless you told the app first. And it will not tell you how a plant looks unless you show it a photo, because a watering note says somebody watered it, not that it is doing well.

How many questions do I get?

**Twenty questions, once.** Not twenty a month — twenty in total, counted from the day you make your account, and they do not refill. The ten photo answers are separate and work the same way. When they are gone they are gone until you upgrade. **Profile tells you where you stand**, as a plain number of questions left. There is no bar or gauge anywhere: watching a number fall is not something this app asks you to do. If the server reports a different number for your account, that number is what you see — a fact about your account beats a general statement about the tier. **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; an assistant you have learned not to consult is not an assistant. Refusals and errors do not count against you. **And when you reach the end, it tells you plainly**, with no Try again under it, because trying again cannot help and a button that cannot work is worse than no button. **Writing in your journal never needs AI**, so running out never stops you recording your garden.

If I tell it my seedlings have their first true leaves, does that get saved?

Yes, as a stage on that entry — alongside what our model expected on the same date. **True leaves, cotyledons, setting fruit, heading up, bulbing, pods filling, starting to ripen, curing, gone dormant** all land as observations. Flowering, bolting, germinating and fruiting already had their own entries and still do. **What it will not do is take a stage out of a question.** *"Should I pinch the flowers off?"* has the same word in it as *"it is flowering"*, and only one of them is you telling us something. Plans, worries, conditionals and "not yet" all record nothing — your words are kept as a note instead, which loses nothing. **A wrong stage in your journal would be permanent and invisible**, and a note is neither. One exception worth knowing: *"the peppers are setting fruit, is that early?"* does count, because you told us something and then asked about it.

Does it know what stage my plants are at?

Yes, and it reads what was written down at the time rather than working it out now. Every entry you log records **what stage the plant was in** and **what stage our model expected** on that date. Ask how something is doing and it can tell you both — *"watered while it was flowering, where the model expected leafy growth"* — and you draw your own conclusion. **It will not tell you that you are ten days ahead**, because that is not a thing the record can support: the stages are not a single ladder every crop climbs in the same order, and we do not save the dates we would need to count from. Stating both and stopping is the honest version. **And when there is no stage it tells you why.** *We hold no growth-stage model for this crop* is a different problem from *our dates for this crop did not line up with your planting*, and you can act on the difference. Anything logged before 11 August 2026 has no stage on it at all, and we do not go back and guess.

It said it did not know my frost dates, but the home screen shows them. Which is right?

Both were, which is the annoying part, and it is fixed. Until you give a ZIP the app uses the typical frost dates for your zone — the home screen shows them and says they are typical. The chat was never told about them, so it honestly said it had no note of them, **and then it explained itself by inventing a setup step you never did** and pointing you at a settings screen that does not exist. Now the chat is sent the same line the home screen is showing, and where the dates came from. Ask it today and it gives you the date, tells you it is the typical one for your zone rather than yours, and says that adding your ZIP gets you your own.

If the app is already warning me about something, will the chat still say it is fine?

No, and that is deliberate. When you ask about a plant, the chat is told about anything the app is already telling you to look at on that same plant. It will not agree that it is nothing to worry about, even if you ask it that way — and people do, because "that is just old leaves, right?" is how anyone would ask. It will say it can be more than that, name the two or three things it could be, and tell you the one detail that separates them. Two parts of the same app disagreeing about your plant is worse than either one being wrong on its own.

So does it just tell me to worry about everything now?

No. It only holds the line on signs the app has actually flagged on that plant. Everything else is answered normally, and telling you something is perfectly normal is still the most common true answer there is — about half of all of them. When it does reassure you, it should say what the plant is DOING, not just that it is fine. Being told not to worry is not the same as understanding why.

Can I just tell it what I planted instead of filling in a form?

Yes. Say something like "I put in two rows of Sungold on Saturday in the back bed" and it offers to add the plant — with the crop, the variety, the bed and the date already filled in. Nothing is saved until you check the card and tap the button, and every field on it can be changed first.

How does it know which Saturday I meant?

It works it out from today and shows you the actual date on the card before anything is saved, labeled with the words you used. If you said something it cannot pin to a day — "in the spring", "a while back" — it leaves the date empty rather than guessing, because every job the app ever gives that plant is worked out from that one date. A missing date is fine. A wrong one is not.

I said two rows. Why did it not fill in how many plants?

Because two rows is not two plants, and we have no idea how many plants fit in your row. Rather than invent a number that would sit in your records forever, it leaves the box empty and tells you why. Type it if you know it.

Can it add a bed or a job too, or only plants?

All three. "I built a raised bed out back, it is 4 by 8" offers to add the bed with its size already in. "Remind me to prune the apple tree in December" offers to put that on your list, dated. Same rule every time: it fills the card in, you check it, nothing exists until you tap.

Why does it care how big my bed is?

Because width and length are the only facts about a bed the app will ever need, and once the bed exists nothing will ever ask you again. They are what spacing advice runs on. If you give the size in meters or inches it will leave the boxes empty rather than convert — a bed recorded as 4 feet when you said 4 meters is not a small mistake, it is a garden that does not fit.

I said remind me at some point. Why did it ask when?

Because a reminder that goes off on a day nobody chose is worse than one you have to date yourself — the wrong day is the one you will trust. It will not pick a date for you. Say a month, a weekday, or something like in two weeks, and it will work out the day and show you.

Can I just tell it what I did instead of tapping through the app?

Yes, and this is the one people will use most. "I watered the tomatoes this morning, gave them about two gallons" offers to write that down as a real watering — on that plant, dated this morning, two gallons — not as a sentence you have to re-read in three years. Same as always: it fills the card in, you check it, nothing is saved until you tap.

What if it cannot tell what kind of entry I mean?

It saves it as a note in your own words and tells you that is what it did. Nothing is lost. We would rather file something loosely than guess wrong — "I pulled the dead tomato out" is not a harvest, and a wrong entry is worse than a vague one because it does not look wrong later.

I said I gave them a good soak. Why is the amount empty?

Because there is no number in that. The whole point of recording how much is being able to compare one year to the next, and a made-up figure would quietly break that. Type it if you know it, or leave it — the watering is recorded either way.

I described a bed and the plants in it. Do the plants go into that bed?

Yes. Say "I built a raised bed by the fence and put four tomatoes and some basil in it" and the tomatoes and the basil are filed into that bed, not left loose in the garden. Two cases where it will not guess, on purpose. If you name a different spot for a plant — "the basil is on the kitchen sill" — your words win over the bed you were describing. And if one message sets up two new beds, it files nothing and asks, because a plant put in the wrong bed is worse than one not filed at all: an unfiled plant looks unfinished and you go back to it, while a wrongly filed one looks done.

My own messages were washed out and hard to read. Was that me?

No, it was us, and it is fixed. For a few hours on 13 August the bubble your own words sit in was filled with a pale lavender that is meant for text on a dark page, not for a background — so white words on top of it were close to invisible in both the light and dark themes. Nothing you typed was lost or changed; it was only the color behind it. If you are still seeing it, close the app fully and open it again so it picks up the new version.

I opened my past conversations and the list was blank. Where did my chats go?

Nowhere — they were all still there, you just could not see them. For a few hours on 13 August that panel painted itself the same color as its own writing, so the list looked like an empty rectangle. It is fixed. Nothing was deleted and nothing needs restoring: open the panel again and your conversations are where you left them.

If I tell it why I want a reminder, does that make it more urgent?

No, and that is deliberate. Say "remind me to water the tomatoes Thursday, I'm away for the weekend" and your reason is saved with the job and shown when Thursday comes — so you see why you asked instead of a bare instruction you have to work out again. What it does not do is push the job up the list. An urgency someone set by hand goes stale, and then it sits above a real frost warning, and then nobody trusts the top of the list at all.

More on this

• Asking about a photo
• Hardening off
• Your garden dates
• Photos