GardenYour journal, all of it, in one place
Partly live · The filters read what the app can work out from your entry — its type, and the words in a typed note. A note that never names its subject is still searchable by its words, but it will not appear under a filter. And the chips are subjects, not plants: filtering to one plant is what that plant's own page is for.
Tap the number of entries on your Garden screen to open your journal. It holds every entry from every plant and every season in one list. Search it by what you wrote or by a plant's name, and filter it by what entries are about — pests, watering, feeding, harvest, and a few more. GardenTrack works out the subject as you write, from the kind of entry it is and the words in it, so nothing has to be tagged by hand.
The problem this fixes
A plant's page shows that plant. A bed's page shows that bed. There was nowhere at all that showed everything — so a question like “what did I write about aphids last year?” could only be answered by opening plants one at a time and reading.
Your journal is the point of this app. It should not be the hardest part of it to look at.
What the chips do
Every entry carries what it is about, worked out when you write it. Tap a chip and the list narrows to that subject — across every plant, and every season you have used the app.
The clever part is the plain notes. An entry like “sprayed neem for the aphids” is just a sentence you typed. It shows up under both Pests and Treatment, because the app read the words as you wrote them.
Only subjects that exist in your garden get a chip. A row of fifteen buttons where twelve return nothing teaches you not to trust the other three.
Two kinds of label, and they are not the same thing
What an entry is about is worked out for you: pests, watering, harvest. It is a fact about the subject, and the app can tell.
What an entry meant is yours: a win, a setback, lost it, best yet. Nothing can compute that — only the person standing in front of the plant knows whether losing it was a shrug or the end of a plan made in March. That is the Mark or remove link on each entry, and it is kept separate on purpose.
Searching by words
The search box matches what you wrote and the plant's name. Type tomato and you get everything on any plant you called a tomato; type compost and you get every entry that mentions it.
It searches the words on the screen, not our field names. Searching for seen will not drag in every pest entry just because we happen to store them as pest_seen underneath — you would have no way of knowing why those were there.
What is not built yet
The assistant reads these for the plant you are asking about — since 24 August 2026. Ask about one plant and the subjects on its entries go to the assistant with the entries. It helps most on plain notes, where the entry type says only “note” and the subject is the only thing that says what it was about.
It cannot currently search by subject. Finding every note about aphids across all your plants is what this screen does; the assistant is not doing that yet, and it will not pretend to.
And there is no year-in-review. That is a separate piece of work — timelines covers what already exists for it and what does not.
Why searching by subject is coming, and what changed on 26 August
Nothing on this screen behaves differently today. This is groundwork, and it is written down because the next thing you will notice depends on it.
Every entry in your journal now records which garden it belongs to. That sounds obvious, and it was always knowable — the app could work it out by following an entry to its plant, the plant to its bed, and the bed to your garden. But working it out is not the same as being able to look it up. It meant a question like every note about aphids had to walk through three separate lists of things before it could even start, and that gets slower every week you keep notes.
Now it is recorded directly, so the question can be answered by looking rather than by walking. The existing entries were filled in too — by following that same chain, never by guessing. An entry we could not trace was left alone rather than assigned to a garden it might not belong to.
What this does not do yet: search by subject. That is still not built. This is the part that had to come first.
Telling apart what you wrote and what the app wrote
Some entries in your journal were written by the app rather than typed by you — a reading taken from a photo, a note the chat offered and you tapped to keep. Those carry a small read by the app badge, so you can always tell which is which.
Every one of those was still your decision. The app wrote the words; you tapped the button. Nothing reaches your journal today without you agreeing to it.
What changed on 26 August is preparation, and nothing about it is switched on. We are building towards the assistant being able to write things down for you — noting a watering while you are talking to it, rather than making you log it separately afterwards. That will come with a choice about how much it may do without asking, and it is not built yet.
The part that had to come first is the record. If the assistant ever writes something without asking, that entry has to say so in the entry itself — not in a message that flashes past while you are outside. Otherwise there is no way to show you a list of what it did, and no way to undo any single item. That marking now exists, and it is deliberately separate from the read by the app badge above: those two things mean different things, and an entry you approved must never be mistaken for one you did not.
Common questions
- Where is my journal?
- **On your Garden screen, the entry count is the door.** It reads something like *"3 spots · 214 logged"* — tap the *214 logged* and you get every entry you have ever written, newest first, across every plant and every season. Before 23 August 2026 that number was not a link and there was nowhere to see the whole thing: a plant's page showed that plant, a bed showed that bed, and the only way to find something was to remember which plant it was on.
- How do I find everything I wrote about aphids?
- **Tap the *Pests* chip.** It gathers every entry about pests, whatever plant it was on and whichever year — including plain notes you typed yourself. A note reading *"aphids all over the kale again"* has no special type and no tags on it, and it still lands there, because the app reads what you wrote at the moment you write it. You can also just type *aphids* into the search box, which matches the words themselves.
- Do I have to tag things for this to work?
- **No, and you are not asked to.** The app works out what an entry is about on its own: from the kind of entry it is — a watering is about watering — and from the words in anything you type. The tags you *can* set by hand are a different thing entirely. Those say whether something was a win, a setback or the best yet, which is the one judgment no app can make for you.
- What are the subjects it can spot?
- Pests, disease, feeding, watering, weather, harvest, soil, pruning, planting, growth, weeds and treatments — plus three about the entry itself: whether it was a diagnosis, a suggestion, or a question you never got an answer to. **Only subjects that actually appear in your own garden get a chip**, so you never tap one and find nothing behind it.
- What is "Never answered"?
- **Entries where you wrote down a question and nothing settled it.** A note that ends in a question mark, or says you were not sure, gets filed there — *"yellow patches on the lower leaves, what is this?"* is the shape. It is the one filter that finds things by what kind of sentence they are rather than what they are about, and it is there because those are the entries you most want to find again in January.
- Why not let me write my own tags?
- **Because free text stops being searchable within about a month.** You write *aphids*, then *aphid*, then *APHIDS*, and the fourth one is a different tag from the first three. A short fixed list is the difference between something that can group a whole season and something that is decoration. Your own words are still searchable as words — nothing about them is thrown away.
- Does any of this use my AI allowance?
- **No. None of it touches AI at any point.** Working out what an entry is about happens on your own device as you write, with no network and no model. That is deliberate: the free allowance is a one-off that does not refill, and searching your own journal is not going to be something that stops working when it runs out.
- Will this help when I ask a question about my own notes?
- **Partly, as of 24 August 2026.** When you are asking about one particular plant, the assistant now sees the subjects on that plant's entries alongside the entries themselves. That matters most for plain notes — a note about pests and a note about feeding look identical to it otherwise, because *note* is all the entry itself says. **It cannot currently search.** Asking *show me everything about aphids* across every plant and every year is this screen's job, not the assistant's, and we would rather say so than let you assume it will find something it never looked for.
Shipped 2026-08-23. Last checked 2026-08-26. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us — support docs going stale is a bug.