Eighteen places to go, and now a map to all of them
Live · This works today.
Tap the menu button at the top left of any screen; on Talk's screen it is Rafe, on the left of the top row. It opens a list of everywhere you can go, grouped, with a line under each one saying what that screen is for. The search box at the top matches those lines as well as the names, so typing what you want to do finds the screen even when you do not know what we called it. The five buttons along the bottom are the ones you tap every day: today, your garden, logging something, calendar and Talk. Your account is the leaf at the top right of every screen but Talk's. Above the buttons, one line says the thing that matters now — a frost warning, what is left to do today, a walk that is due — and there is no line when there is nothing to say, or on Talk's screen, which keeps the room for the conversation. On a plant's own page, once you scroll past the one word for how it is, that line becomes the plant's: its name, that word, and its button, like Watered it. From 10 September 2026 every row in the menu carries its own small picture, drawn in the same line as the buttons along the bottom, and no two rows share one.
The problem this fixes
GardenTrack has twenty-eight addresses. Before 31 August 2026, five of them had a button.
Not five useful ones — five out of twenty-eight, full stop. Garden mode, where jobs come one at a time in type you can read standing up in the sun. Catch-up, for the week you were away. Your photo roll. Your week in review. The hardening-off plan. All built, all finished, all working.
You got to them by stumbling out of another screen, or you did not get to them.
What the menu is
Tap the three lines at the top left. You get everywhere you can go, in five groups — your garden, this week, your journal, Talk, and your account — as a plain list of short names. Start typing and a line appears under each match saying what that screen is actually for.
That line is not filler. It is what the search box matches, which means you can look for a thing by what you want to do rather than by what we happened to call it. From 7 September 2026 it shows only while you search: at rest the menu is a menu, not a page of sentences.
What we left out on purpose
The app we were looking at for ideas greets you by name at the bottom of its menu, marks new features with a badge, and has a settings gear in the corner.
We have none of those three, and each is a deliberate no:
- We do not know your name. We never asked for one. Guessing it from your email address would be putting words in your mouth on the most personal line in the app, so the bottom of the menu shows the address you signed in with, which is simply true.
- A “new” badge would be lying within a month. Either we write it into the code, where it ages into a false claim, or we mark everything you have not opened — which on your first day is all eighteen. A marker on everything is a marker on nothing.
- We have no settings screen separate from your account page. A gear would be a second door into a room the bottom of the menu already opens, and that is how a menu starts making an app look bigger than it is.
The bar at the bottom, and which tab lights up
The five buttons along the bottom are the five things you do: today, your garden, a middle button for logging something, your journal, and Talk. Your account is the leaf at the top right of every screen but Talk’s, and the last row of the menu. From 22 September 2026 Talk’s screen gives its top row to the conversation: the sun and Rafe on the left to open this menu, and Chats ▾ and New on the right.
The lit one tells you which part you are in, not which page you are on. Open This week from the top of the home screen and the Today tab stays lit, because the week is part of today. Tap a plant and the Garden tab stays lit, because a plant lives in your garden. Only the middle button is different — it is a thing you do, not a place you are, so it never lights up.
This used to be wrong. The Today tab only lit on the home screen itself, so moving one tap sideways to This week left the whole bar dark and nothing said where you were.
Common questions
- I finished setup but did not save it. Did I lose my answers?
No, from 9 October 2026 the sign-in page says so. Your setup answers stay on this phone until you save them. The sign-in page shows Your setup answers are kept on this phone. and a Back to my plan button that takes you to your plan and its save step.
- A card appeared telling me what something is for. Is that a mistake, and will there be more?
No, and only one at a time — from 8 September 2026. The app never explains itself in advance. When something has just become true for your garden — a second pot that could be a garden zone, a first photo that starts your journal, a cold night in the forecast, three plants that make a walk worth taking, or a feature that shipped since you set up — one card appears on the screen where that thing lives, says what you can do now, links here, and offers one way in. It never sits above the day's jobs, never more than one on a screen, never more than one new one a day, and it never becomes a notification. Do the thing and it goes; tap Not now and it waits two weeks, and after a second Not now it stops for good.
A screen with nothing on it yet is not one of these. When your garden has no growing space, or your week has nothing in it, the card you see explaining what the thing is for is that screen's own empty state. It is always there and it cannot be put off, because there is nothing behind it to get back to.
- The sky on the Today screen keeps changing. Is it showing my actual weather?
Yes — your hour, your sky and your weather, drawn fresh. It is not a stock picture. The sun sits where it really is for your coordinates at that moment, it rises and sets with you, and after dark the moon shows tonight's real phase. Cloud, rain and haze follow the forecast for your garden.
Tap a day in the strip and the whole screen becomes that day — the sky, the light and the weather together, rather than opening a panel over the top.
From 28 September 2026 the picture is a cut-paper garden — mountains, a forest, a lit greenhouse and raised beds — relit for the hour, with the weather hung in the sky above it on thread: clouds, rain as a curtain of paper drops that falls into the valley and the garden, a paper lightning bolt under the lowest storm cloud, snowflakes, and the moon and stars at night, always behind the clouds. The clouds, rain and snowflakes sway with the day's forecast wind and the rain slants with it, so on a still day they hang nearly still. The sun, moon and stars hang still. The week's weather sits along the bottom of that first screen, just above the buttons, with each day's chance of rain.
- The menu rows have little pictures now. Do they mean anything?
They are there so you can stop reading. Every row has had one since 10 September 2026, drawn in the same line weight as the five buttons along the bottom — one stroke, round ends, and each shape different enough to tell apart at a glance.
No two rows share a picture. Two rows with the same shape would be worse than none, because you would learn the shape and then be wrong about it. Nothing is hidden behind them: the words are still the words, and the search box still matches what each screen is for.
- Where is the menu?
Top left of every screen, from 31 August 2026. Three lines. Tap it and the map slides in from the left; tap anywhere outside it, or the × in its corner, to close it again.
Since 5 September it sits in a bar along the very top rather than floating over the page. Once you scroll, that bar also tells you which screen you are on. It is on every screen, so you never have to get back to a particular place first.
- What are the five buttons along the bottom, and where did Profile go?
Today, your garden, logging something, your journal, and Talk — the five things you actually do. From 7 September 2026 the journal has the fifth button and your account does not.
The bottom row is for what you tap every day, and your account is not one of those. It moved to the leaf at the top right of every screen — the corner every app uses for you — and it is still the last row of the menu. One tap, from anywhere, same as before; just not in the row your thumb uses for gardening.
The menu is for everything else. There is a lot of everything else: eighteen places you can go, and until 31 August five of them had a button anywhere. Garden mode, catch-up, your photo roll, the week in review, hardening off — all built, all working, and reachable mostly by accident.
A gardener who has to open a menu to log a watering has been made slower. So the middle button stays where it is.
- There is a line just above the bottom buttons. What is it?
The one thing that matters now, on whichever screen you are on — and nothing when there is nothing to say.
It is chosen in a fixed order from things the app already knows: a weather warning for your plants first (frost tonight, a hot spell), then — on a plant's own page, once you have scrolled past the one word for how it is — that plant's line, then how many jobs are left today, then your garden walk being due — a week since the last one. Tap the line and you are on the thing. There is no dismiss, because it is a gauge, not a notification.
A plant's line is its name, the same one word (Dry · water today, Ready to pick, All good), and the button that answers it, like Watered it or Picked. The button does the job right there; tap the name and the page scrolls back up to how it is. Scroll back up yourself and the line goes back to what it was.
It never shows on the home screen, which already says all of that at length, and never during a garden walk or in garden mode, where you are in the middle of a job. When it has nothing to say, the line about changes waiting to back up shows there instead, exactly as it did before. Most days in July there is no line at all. That is the point — a light that is always on means nothing.
- What does the search box actually search?
What each screen is for, not just its name — and that is the whole reason it is there.
There are eighteen entries. You can see eighteen things without searching, so a box that only matched titles would be decoration.
What it matches instead is a line under each name that says what the screen is for — it appears while you search, to show you why a row matched, and stays out of the way when you are not. Type frost and you get Your location — the screen for pinning your garden on the map — even though the word frost is nowhere in that title. It is in the description, because pinning your garden is what makes your frost dates yours instead of a regional average.
Type undo and you get What Rafe did. Type arm's length and you get garden mode.
Every word you type has to appear somewhere. Two words narrows the list; it never widens it.
- One of the entries has a number on it. What is that?
A count of things actually waiting for you, and there is currently exactly one place that gets one.
Your photos shows how many photos you have sent that are not on a plant yet, because that is a real queue with something to do about it.
We deliberately did not put badges on everything. A marker that appears on every row tells you nothing — you stop seeing it by the second day. If a number appears in this menu, something is genuinely waiting.
- Some screens are not in the menu. Which, and why?
Ten of the app's twenty-eight addresses are left out, and each one has a written reason.
Most of them are pages about one particular thing — a single plant, a single growing space, one crop's page. Those mean nothing without knowing which plant you meant, so they are reached by tapping the plant rather than by picking from a list.
The rest: the sign-in screen appears whenever you are signed out, because the app needs an account before it opens; the page you land on coming from our website is somewhere you arrive rather than navigate to; and there is one screen used only for testing the app.
Every address is either in the menu or on that list. A new screen cannot quietly become unreachable — the check that runs before anything ships fails until somebody has decided which of the two it is.
- The Talk screen used to have this button and it did something else.
It did, and it kept its job under a clearer name.
The chat screen has had three lines in its top-left corner since it launched, and they opened your past conversations. The menu now uses the same corner and the same three lines on every screen — which would have meant two identical marks in one place meaning two different things.
So the chat's button says Chats now. It sits in the same spot and opens the same list. It is a better label anyway: three lines never said past conversations, it said menu, and it was not one.
Shipped 2026-08-31. Last checked 2026-10-09. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us — support docs going stale is a bug.