Your journal is your garden's memory
Partly live · The memory card and the search read the labels we already hold: which plant a photo was filed to, what the app read in it, and the words of your notes. A photo filed to no plant cannot be found by name, and the screen says how many of those there are. The weather on an entry is the forecast we held for that day, so an entry backdated to before the app was watching your weather carries none.
Open Your journal from the Garden screen or the menu. The photo at the top is your own — this season's best moment, then the same week in earlier years. Under it, your record folds by week and then by month, photos first, with routine work like watering folded into one line you can open. Type a plant, a bed, a problem, a month or a word into the search field and it finds entries, photos and what the app saw. Days, Weeks and Months change how far out you are looking; Days is the full list you had before.
What it is
Your journal is the app's memory, made visible. It keeps three promises: it shows you everything you have seen, photos first; it finds anything by name, in one field; and it hands you last year without being asked, in the card at the top.
The record itself has not changed. Every entry still knows what it is about, when it happened, which plant and which bed. What changed on 7 September 2026 is how you look at it.
The card at the top
It is your own photograph, chosen for you today. The first slide is this season’s best moment with a picture on it — the biggest picking, the first flower. Swipe, and the next slides are the same week in earlier years. It changes every day, and it is why the page is worth opening when there is nothing to log.
Weeks, months, days
Weeks is where it opens: this week, last week, then the months before. Each one shows its photos first, then what was worth remembering, and folds the routine — the waterings, the feeds — into one line you can open. Months turns each month into a tile with its best photo and its one-line story. Days is the full list you had before, unchanged.
The doors
The chips under the card narrow the page to one part of the record: photos only, harvests only, problems only, milestones only. Plants and Places go to the garden itself. Written for you opens what the assistant wrote on its own, every line of it undoable; This week’s walk opens the last walk’s report; This season opens the year read back as one page. A door narrows every distance — Weeks, Months and Days alike — and the count on each chip is the whole record’s, so it does not change when you zoom.
Searching
One field. A plant’s name, a bed, a problem, a month, a word from a note. Photos come back as photos, in a grid, and entries as rows. Every word you type has to match — tomato July is the tomatoes in July, not the tomatoes plus everything in July. Tap the field and the subject chips appear under it: Pests, Watering, Harvest; and the kinds of statement — a diagnosis, a suggestion, a question nobody ever answered. Those two rows work exactly as they did before.
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.
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 in the Days zoom, and it is kept separate on purpose.
Undoing an entry you logged by mistake
Ask Rafe and he will — from 10 September 2026. Logged the same watering twice, or logged it on the wrong plant? Say so in the chat. Before this, Rafe told you he could not, and then described a screen to go and find.
He has to look the entry up first, and that is deliberate. Rafe can only undo an entry he has actually been shown in that conversation — so he reads your journal, finds the one you mean, and removes that one. He will not act on an entry he half-remembers from a chat last week, because a half-remembered entry and a real one look identical from the inside, and the wrong guess would take a real record out of your journal.
It takes the entry and nothing else. The plant it was about, and every other entry on that plant, stay exactly as they were. Removing a plant is still yours to do on the plant’s own page, where the app shows you what it is about to remove and asks you to confirm.
“Actually, scrap that” works too — fixed on 15 September 2026. Log a watering, then say a message later that you did not water it after all, and Rafe undoes the entry he just wrote. Until this he found the entry, named it the way the app shows it, and then could not match his own name for it — and told you something went wrong on my end. Driven on a real garden: three times out of three he now undoes the entry, where before it was none.
What is not built yet
Everything on the design for this screen has shipped: the memory card, the fold, search, the doors, one plant’s story in chapters, the season’s page, the suggested entry and the weather on every entry — all on 7 September 2026. What comes next is what you tell us after using it.
Rafe can search your whole journal too — ask “have I had this before?” and he looks through every entry, not only the plant you are on. What he cannot do yet is show you the photos the way this screen does; for pictures, search here.
Entries that name no plant are found as well — since 7 September 2026. A note about the garden as a whole, or one the app could not pin to a particular plant, is filed loose. This screen always showed those; Rafe could not reach them at all, by searching or otherwise. He can now.
Common questions
- What is "Worth a look today"?
One question the app already has, offered once a day — new on 7 September 2026. The app knows what stage each plant should be at and what has been seen, so it can ask check for sprouts or any flowers yet? at about the right time. The card on your journal is the first of those questions, with the same answers as the card on your daily list — say yes and the same observation is written either way. Not today puts it away until tomorrow. It never makes up a question of its own; if the app has nothing to ask, there is no card.
- Why is there a temperature on my entries?
Because a field notebook has the weather at the top of every page, and the app already knows it — from 7 September 2026. When you write an entry, the day's high, low and rain are stamped on it from the forecast the app holds for your garden: 86°F, 0.3 in rain. A watering on a 96° day and one on a 70° day are different facts, and in a year you will not remember which was which. It only stamps a day the app actually held; an entry dated from before it was watching your weather says nothing, rather than guessing.
- What is the photo at the top?
Your own photograph, chosen for you each day — new on 7 September 2026. The first slide is this season's best moment with a picture on it: the first harvest, the biggest picking, the day something flowered. Swipe and the next slides are the same week in earlier years, so on 8 September you see what 8 September looked like last season. A plant that died is never the first slide — it only appears on its own anniversary, and only there. In a first season with nothing notable yet, it is simply your latest photo, and with no photos at all there is no card rather than an empty one.
- Where did the long list go?
It is the Days zoom, one tap away, and it has not changed. The journal now opens on Weeks: this week, last week, then months, with photos first and the routine folded. Tap Days and you get the list exactly as it was — every entry, the tags, Mark or remove, and written for you on the ones the assistant wrote. Tap Months and each month is one tile: its best photo, or its one-line story if there is no picture that month.
- What does the line "and 4 waterings, 1 feed" mean?
Nothing is hidden — it is folded, and the count says how much. A season is a few hundred waterings and about nine things you will actually remember. The screen keeps the memorable ones up and folds the routine into one line per week, most frequent first. Tap the line and every one of them opens underneath.
- Which week does Saturday belong to?
Weeks run Sunday to Saturday. So on a Monday, yesterday's Sunday is already This week, and Last week ended on Saturday. That is the calendar most people keep on the wall, and it is the same one the app uses everywhere.
- I typed a plant's name and a photo I know I took did not come back. Why?
Because that photo is not on a plant. Search finds photos by the plant they were filed to and by what the app read in them. A picture taken from the Photos screen and never attached to anything has no name to find it by. The search results say how many of those there are and take you to them, so you can file them; hiding that would be worse than a shorter list.
- Why does August show three photos when I took nine that month?
Because the walk photographs the same bed every week. When several pictures are of one plant on one day, the journal shows one — the one an entry was written on, or the latest — and counts the rest on the corner of the tile. Tap it and they are all there.
- Does Rafe add the big moments to my journal himself?
Yes, from 7 September 2026 — and he no longer needs to be asked. When you send a photograph, he records the first-time moments he can see in it: the first sprouts up, the first flowers, the first fruit set, the first color on it.
He used to only note the one you asked about. So if you sent a picture wanting to know about a spot on a leaf, and that same plant happened to be in its first flower, the flower went unrecorded — the exact moment you would want back in January.
He marks how sure he is, and leaves it out when he is not. A guessed milestone is worse than a missed one, because it puts a date on something that never happened.
⚠ Nothing is added twice. If you have already logged that it germinated or flowered within a few days, his reading folds into yours rather than sitting beside it.
- 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?
Yes, and it can now search them itself. When you are asking about one particular plant, the assistant sees the subjects on that plant's entries alongside the entries themselves — that matters most for plain notes, where note is all the entry itself says. And asking have I had aphids before? now searches your whole journal, every plant and every season, rather than only the recent entries it was shown. This page is still the faster way to browse a subject; the assistant is the way to ask a question about one.
- I wrote something that did not name a plant. Can it still be found?
Yes — fixed on 7 September 2026. Some entries do not belong to any one plant: you say something about the garden as a whole, or you write a note the app could not pin to a particular plant, and it is filed loose rather than on a plant's page.
Those entries were being missed. The screen showed them, and the assistant could not find them — not by searching, and not among the recent entries it is shown at the start of a conversation. So a general observation, the kind you most want back in January, was the one kind it could not reach.
They are reachable now, everywhere. Nothing changed about how you write them, and nothing needs redoing — the entries were always there.
- One entry says "read from your photo" instead of "read by the app". What changed?
It now tells you what it was read FROM — new on 31 August 2026.
Entries whose words the app wrote have always carried a small read by the app mark. Correct, and it never answered the question you would actually have: read off what?
A sentence written from a photograph is a different thing from one written from what you just said. You watched the second one happen. The first, you might not remember at all — you took a picture, and a sentence appeared in your records describing something you never typed.
So an entry written from a picture now says read from your photo. Everything else the app wrote still says read by the app, and anything you typed yourself carries no mark at all.
Why it matters more than it sounds: your journal is your record. In three years you will read it back to decide something, and whether a sentence came from you or from a photograph is part of how much weight to give it.
Shipped 2026-08-23. Last checked 2026-09-29. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us — support docs going stale is a bug.