Hardening off

Common questions

Days I already marked done are showing as not done. My run started in early March.

**Fixed 26 August 2026, and your records were never lost — only mislaid.** If your run crossed the March clock change, every day after it read back as blank. Measured on a ten-day run starting 4 March: five of the ten. The days were saved correctly the whole time; the app was looking for them at the wrong moment and finding nothing there. **Why it happened.** To work out each day of the run, the app added twenty-four hours at a time to the start date. The day the clocks go forward is twenty-three hours long, so from that day on every step landed an hour off — and it went looking for your record at 1am, where there was not one. **Why this hit the people it hit.** Hardening off is a spring job and the clocks move in early March, so in the milder parts of the country a run straddling the change is the ordinary one, not a rare one. Nothing needs doing on your side: open the run and the days are there. **And no dates moved.** The ramp is counted the same way it always was.

It keeps telling me a hardening day is "a morning job" and never lets me do it.

**That was a real dead end, and it now tells you the time — 19 August 2026.** Late in the ramp there is a twelve-hour day outside. Twelve hours from mid-morning finishes well after dark, and sunlight is the whole point of the exercise, so the app would say it was a morning job and stop there. **The trouble is that tomorrow at the same time it said exactly the same thing.** Meanwhile the calendar kept moving — the ramp counts days that have passed, not days you managed — so that step could go by without ever being done, and nothing told you which hour would have worked. It now says it: **out by 8am and it fits.** The Not-today button carries the same time. Nothing else changed — if you open the app early enough, the day is simply offered as normal. **And if the morning is gone, you have not broken anything.** A missed day is recorded as missed and the ramp carries on; the app will tell you plainly how many days it saw rather than moving your dates around.

I have two trays of the same thing and the bring-in reminder named it twice.

**Fixed 26 August 2026.** If you had not given your trays their own names, each one was labeled with its crop — so two trays of carrots made the reminder read *"Carrot and Carrot are outside."* True about your trays, and not a sentence anybody would say out loud. **It now names each thing once.** *"Carrot is outside"*, however many trays of carrots are out there. The button still says bring **them** in, because there are still two trays to carry. **If you gave your trays their own names, you still see both** — Sungold and Brandywine stay two names, because they are two different things.

Should a seed tray really be left outside overnight?

**Nobody publishes an answer to that, and we would rather say so than invent one — 19 August 2026.** The last step of hardening off is a night outside, and the guidance genuinely splits. **Illinois Extension** says that after your plants have done 10 to 12 hours a day for a few days, you *"leave the plants outside for 24 hours for a couple days"* — with no temperature condition attached. **Minnesota Extension**, describing the same stage, says to *"bring them back inside before temperatures start to drop at night."* Iowa State does not mention nights at all. **And not one of them mentions how much soil is around the roots.** A cell tray holds very little, so it cools to whatever the air does — there is nothing buffering it the way a full pot would. That is a real difference and no extension service we could find puts a rule on it. **So when the plant we are asking about is still in a seed tray, the app tells you all of that on the card and lets you decide.** Bringing it in that night is a fair reading of the same advice. **What we do check, every time:** tonight's forecast low against that plant's own limit. Below it, the app does not offer the night out at all — it tells you to leave them in, and says why.

The app says my plants are hardened off, but I cannot plant this weekend. Am I too late?

**No, and the app should never have made that feel like a deadline — fixed 19 August 2026.** Hardening off is the thing that makes a plant able to live outside. So the moment it finishes, waiting costs you nothing: **the plant simply stays outside until you have an afternoon for it.** It is not sitting indoors losing what it gained, and it is not on a clock. The finished card used to say *"it can go in the ground"*, which reads like a job that is now due. It now says it can go in whenever suits you, and that it is fine outside until then — and the **Not yet** button says where the waiting happens. **One thing that is still worth doing when you get to it:** tell the app the day it actually went in. Every date it gives you for that plant afterwards is counted from that day, so a guess there is a guess in everything downstream.

Should I move seedlings into bigger pots before hardening them off?

**If they have outgrown their cells, yes — and that is a separate job from hardening off.** Minnesota Extension puts it plainly: *"Transplant seedlings that outgrow cell packs into containers that are 1 to 2 inches wider in diameter than the cell packs."* That happens indoors, under your lights, before the plant starts going outside. **The app treats those as two different things**, because they are: potting up is a move, and it asks where the plant went afterwards. Hardening off is a ramp of days outside. A plant can be hardened off in a cell tray or in a pot — but if it is in a tray on the night it is meant to stay out, the app says so, because that is the case the published guidance does not cover.

How do I find the hardening off page, or change my reminder times?

**Profile → Your garden → Hardening off.** One card, and it holds both halves: a button reading *See what is hardening off*, which is the page that tracks your runs, and — since 23 August 2026 — the times themselves, so changing when you are reminded to put trays out and bring them in no longer means opening a second screen. **Since 25 August 2026 those times are a row per day** — Monday through Sunday, with as many stretches as you like on each one and a **+** to add another. Set one day and **Apply to every day** copies it across. Before that it was a single pair of times applied to the whole week, which could not say the ordinary thing: home all day Saturday, evenings midweek. A day you leave blank reads as *not around*, and the app will not schedule a carry into it. Until 13 August 2026 **neither of those existed** — the only way into the hardening page was a card on Today that appears while a run is under way, so between runs the page and the times you had set were unreachable by any route. That was reported and it was a fair complaint. The same links now sit on the hardening page itself, so wherever you come at it from there is a way to the settings.

I told the chat I took my plants out yesterday and today and brought them in yesterday, and it argued with me.

**That was the app being slow, not you being unclear, and it is fixed as of 13 August 2026.** What you described is two perfectly ordinary days: out yesterday morning, back in yesterday evening, out again today. About one time in three the chat read it as impossible — *"that would be before you took them out, can you walk me through the order?"* — and asked you to explain a sentence that made complete sense. **The reason is oddly specific.** The chat is handed your hardening schedule, so it already knows which day you are on and how long today's step is. What nobody had ever told it is what a hardening DAY is: the tray goes out in the morning and comes back in the same evening. Without that, "out yesterday and today, in yesterday" looks like a contradiction rather than a routine. **It has that sentence now**, so describing two days in one breath works. **It was caught by our own testing rather than by you having to report it twice.** We keep a set of real questions — including that exact sentence, which came from a real report — and run them against the live chat over and over, because it does not answer identically every time. Something that only goes wrong on one try in three is invisible if you ask once.

Where does "transplant on Wednesday" come from?

Your forecast and the crop's own cold floor. **Tomatoes should not sit out below 50°F**, and that number is sourced per crop — so if tonight is 38 and Wednesday is the first night above 50, Wednesday is what it says. If the whole week stays under the floor it tells you that instead of naming a day it cannot see. **And if we have no forecast, or the one we have is more than twelve hours old, it will not clear you to plant at all** — it says the plant is ready and hands the cold question back to you. *Transplant now* with a frost coming is the worst sentence this card could produce, so the weather is allowed to stop it and never to assume for it. Before the run finishes the line is about the run instead — *3 more days of hardening off* — and if the ten days ran but you only managed a few, it says what we would add first.

What are the ten little squares?

One per day of the ten-day week, so you can see what actually happened without reading anything. **Filled** means the plant went out and came back. **Hollow with a dashed edge** means that day went by and nothing was logged. **Half-filled** is right now — it is outside as you look at it. **Faint and dotted** are the days that have not arrived yet, and there is a line between those and the rest. **That line is the important part.** A day you missed and a day that has not happened are both "nothing recorded", and drawn the same way they say the same thing — on day one a row of ten would read as nine failures, which is the opposite of the truth. Beside the squares: how many days you have managed **out of the days so far**, not out of ten, for the same reason. Once the week is over those are the same number and it says *6 of 10 days* on its own.

Why did the explanations disappear from the card?

They did not — they moved one tap away, on 13 August 2026. The reasoning behind each step is still there under **Why this step**, and the day-by-day record is still there under **Day by day, and fix one**. **What changed is what the card leads with.** It used to open with a paragraph explaining the day and a sentence summarizing your week, and the thing you came to find out — did I do this, how much is left — was somewhere inside them. The squares answer that before you read a word. The words are better as the second thing than the first.

It told me the plant was ready for the ground AND that it needed eight more days. Which is it?

Both were true and the page should never have made you work that out. Fixed 13 August 2026. **Two different things were being measured and each half of the page only knew about one.** *Hardened off, ready for the ground* came from the CALENDAR — ten days have passed since you started, and the last night is behind you. *We would add eight more days* came from the LOG — how many of those ten days the tray actually spent outside. **A run really can be both finished and thin:** the ten days ran whether or not you were home for them. So the page now says that in one breath — *the 10 days are up, but it was outside on 3 of them* — and the recommendation underneath agrees with it instead of arguing. **And a separate fault underneath it, which we found while fixing this one: a perfect week was being told to add a day.** The last step is the overnight, so there is no bring-in to record, so that day had no hours on it and got counted as one we could not read. **Every gardener who did the whole ten days correctly was being advised to do an eleventh.**

What does "we could not read" mean about one of my days?

It meant nothing useful, which is why it is gone. It was our word for a day with no hours on it — you logged the tray going out and nothing came back, so there is no length to count. It now says that: **has no time coming back in.** You can fill it in from the day list, and it will count once you do.

The row says the day is done and there is no button. Is something missing?

No — that is the app getting out of your way. **From 13 August 2026, once the tray is back in, the row becomes a plain sentence with a tick: *Day 3 of 10 done. Nothing more today.*** There is nothing to press because there is nothing left to do today, and a button beside a finished job makes it read like an unfinished one. **The row does not vanish either**, and that is deliberate: the week is still running, and something disappearing the moment you complete it is how you lose track of where you are. It comes back as a job tomorrow. Half a day counts as open, so you only see this once the tray is actually indoors — a tray still outside keeps its countdown and its *Brought them in* button.

Why is hardening off in its own box instead of in my list of jobs?

Because it is the one job where being late by an evening can cost you the plant, and because a hardening week does not fit in a list sorted by urgency. **One week is four different levels of urgent at the same time**: the tray sitting outside past its time is drop-everything, today's put-out is a today job, the same put-out after dark is a tomorrow job, and *the Sungold is hardened off* is not a job at all. Sorted by urgency they scattered across the screen, and the end of a good week ended up filed under **No rush**. Now they are one box, above your garden tasks, with a purple edge so you can find it without reading. Same grouping on the week screen.

The button used to send me to another screen. Does it now do the thing?

It does, since 13 August 2026. **Tap *Out they go* on the home screen and the tray is recorded as out, right there** — no second screen, no extra tap, and an *Undo* underneath in case you meant a different row. It was a link before for a real reason and we fixed the reason rather than dropping it: putting a tray out is also the moment we offer the bring-in alert, and that offer needs somewhere to appear. So it appears on the home screen too, **after** the tray is already written down. Dismiss it and nothing is lost. The one thing still on its own screen is *Transplanted it* at the end of the week, because that one has to ask where the plant went, and a one-tap version would record half an answer.

Can I just tell the chat I put the trays out, instead of tapping the button?

**Yes, as of 12 August.** Say *"I took the trays out this morning and brought them back in at four"* and it counts as that day of the run — the same as tapping. The row on the card says **Hardening off** rather than the older **Written down**, so you can see it is going to count for something before you tap it. **What changed underneath is smaller than it sounds and it is worth knowing about**, because it explains a gap you may have seen: sentences like that were already being understood correctly and filed with the right date. They were landing on no plant. *"All my plants"* and *"the trays"* do not name a crop, so nothing was attached, and a day you really did showed up as missed. **Now, when what you described is putting them out or bringing them in, and you did not name a particular plant, it means the trays that are actually on a run.** Only then — say *"watered all my plants"* with four trays hardening off and it still means all of your plants, because watering is not part of the run. And if you do name a plant, the plant wins.

I answered the when-are-you-around questions wrong. Can I change them?

Yes — Profile, under **Hardening off**. Same two rows of taps as the setup, and a change takes effect on the next day of the plan. **They had a section of their own until 23 August 2026**, three cards away from the only feature that reads them; they are inside the hardening off card now. The setup itself only ever appears once, on purpose: an app that keeps asking is one you stop reading. **But a routine changes** — a new job, a school term, the clocks going back — so the answer lives where a setting lives rather than being locked in by whichever week you happened to be having. If you skipped the questions entirely, this is also where you can answer them later; the ten days run either way, you just do the timing yourself until you do.

The plan says my day 5 will be outside longer than it asks for. Is that a problem?

It is a trade, and the app tells you rather than hiding it. If day 5 wants five or six hours and you are out of the house for ten, the tray goes out before you leave and comes in when you are back — which is longer than the step asks. **On the early days, when the step is full shade anyway, we suggest a spot that stays shaded all day.** On the later days the step wants sun, so there is no shade advice to give and we do not invent one: you get the trade stated plainly and nothing else. **We went looking for published guidance on whether extra hours in shade make up for fewer in sun, and there is none** — the extension ramps we follow increase the hours and the sunlight together and never swap one for the other. If a day genuinely does not suit your week, the honest answer is usually to do that step on a day you are around.

Where does the setup appear, and when?

On your home screen, the first time something you raised indoors is ready to go out — the line at the foot of the **Hardening off** block reading **fit the ten days round your week**. Tap it and you are in the three screens. From 13 August 2026 that is the only link there, and it takes the slot back over once your times are set, becoming the way in to repeat a step or fix a time. Before that both were printed, one under the other, going to the same screen — with the offer to repair a past day sitting on top of the offer to set up the week you had not started. **It appears before the first step, not after it**, which sounds obvious and was not: the first version only knew about plants that had already been put outside once, so the walkthrough explaining the ten days would have turned up on day two, after you had done day one on your own. It shows once. Anything else that gets ready later joins the answers you already gave, silently.

Why does the line not say which plant it is about?

Because it is not about one plant. **The two questions it asks — when you leave and when you get home — are answered once and used for everything you ever harden off**, so naming a plant would suggest a setting that does not exist. It also said the wrong thing: for a few days it read *ready to start hardening off, basil* directly under a card saying *hardening off · day 1 of 10 — put the basil out*. **Both were true and together they read as though the app had lost track of your week.** The card names the plant and the step; the line offers the one thing the card cannot.

I told it when I get home. Does it actually use that?

It does now. **Until 11 August 2026 it did not, and that was a real failure on our side.** The setup asks when you leave the house and when you are back, lays the ten days out around those two times, and shows you the plan — and then, the moment you tapped Start, the app went back to its own arithmetic and asked you to bring the tray in two hours from whenever you happened to open it. **Say you are home at six, open the app at eleven in the morning, and it wanted the tray indoors at one o’clock, while you were at work.** Your return time is now the time on the card, because you cannot carry a tray in before you are home. If you open the app in the evening, past the time you gave us, it falls back to the step’s own window — a few hours from now — which is what it always did.

What is the setup thing that appeared the first time I had something to harden off?

Three screens, and you can skip every one of them. **The first shows you the whole ten days** — what happens on each one, in your own plants' names — because a plan you have seen is a plan you can decide about. **The second asks two questions: when you leave the house, and when you are home.** Not what time you want reminders. That matters more than it sounds: the app already knows the ramp, your frost dates and how cold each crop can take, so the only thing missing is your week. With those two answers it puts the tray out and brings it in at times you are actually there — and when a day needs more hours than you are home for, it says so out loud instead of buzzing you at work. **The third asks whether to send alerts**, and it is asked last on purpose, once you have seen what they are for. Skip any of it and the ten days run exactly as they do now; you just do the timing yourself. It only ever appears once, and anything else that becomes ready later joins the answers you already gave.

I turned alerts on and nothing arrives on my iPhone. What is wrong?

Almost certainly nothing is wrong with your phone. **On iPhone and iPad, alerts only work once the app is on your Home Screen** — that is Apple's rule, not ours, and there is no way around it. Open the app in Safari, tap the Share button, choose Add to Home Screen, and open it from there. Then turn alerts on again and send yourself a test. The app used to report this as the phone not being supported, which was misleading in the worst direction: it reads like a dead end when it is one tap from working. **Alerts are now a switch, and when it cannot move it stays visible and grayed with the reason underneath** — so it tells you what to tap, and if a test does not arrive it names the reason — not on the Home Screen, blocked in your settings, this phone never registered, or our own end missing a key — rather than leaving you guessing which.

What does hardening off actually mean?

Getting a plant that was raised indoors used to being outside, gradually. A seedling grown under a light has thin leaves and soft stems because nothing ever asked it to be tougher. Put it straight into full sun and it scorches; into wind and it snaps. Skipping this step is how a healthy tray of seedlings dies in a weekend.

How long does it take?

Ten days. GardenTrack ramps you from one to two hours in full shade on day one, up to a full day outside, and then one final night left out. Each day it tells you the hours and where to stand the plant.

Is the schedule the same for every plant?

The ramp is, and that surprised us. We went looking for a different-length week per crop family and three extension services — Michigan State, Minnesota and Utah State — all describe the same shape for everything: about an hour in the shade out of the wind, one to two hours more each day, build to full sun, then a night or two outside. None of them varies it by plant. What genuinely differs is how cold the plant may get while it is out there, and that is the part we now hold per crop.

What temperature is too cold to put mine out?

Two numbers cover 35 of the 38. Anything tender and warm-season — tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, basil, and the tender flowers like zinnia, cosmos and marigold — should not sit out below 50°F and would rather have nights of 60°F. Everything hardy — brassicas, the cool-season flowers, the perennial herbs — takes 40°F. The other three are the exceptions: celery and celeriac should not be chilled at all, and artichoke actively wants the cold. When tonight's forecast breaks a plant's floor, the app tells you to keep them in rather than offering to put them out.

It said to keep them in, then explained why they should stay out. Which is it?

Keep them in — the second half was ours to fix, and it is fixed as of 20 August 2026. When tonight's low broke the plant's floor the card led correctly: **Too cold today**, *Keep the tray in today*, *38°F tonight is too cold for this one*, and no button offering to put them out. **Underneath that, Why this went on giving the day's instructions anyway** — where to stand the tray, what time to bring it back in, and on the final night the worst one of the set: *38°F forecast tonight, which is above the line for these*. **That is the same number the card is refusing on, called safe.** It happened because the sentence was written for the night that passes and shown on any night we had a forecast at all — which includes every night cold enough to kill the tray. A refused day now carries the refusal, the plant's own floor and the reason behind it, and nothing that tells you to do the thing we just said not to. The last night still tells you which step you are on, because that is worth knowing either way.

Celery is telling me not to put it outside at all. Is that a bug?

No, and it is the one place our old generic advice was actively harmful. Celery and celeriac vernalize from cold exposure itself — celery runs to seed after one to nine weeks between 35 and 48°F, celeriac after two to five weeks between 41 and 46°F. Hardening either of them off by chilling is how you get a plant that bolts and is worthless. They are conditioned by easing back on water instead, kept clear of that band — above 48°F, and the app uses 50°F to leave a margin. Standing your celery outside for a cool week is not a rough approximation of the right advice; it is the instruction that ruins the crop.

Is it seven days or two weeks?

Ours is ten days, and it used to be seven. Michigan State says begin seven to 10 days before your frost-free date; Minnesota and Utah State both say about two weeks. Seven was the floor of a range being quoted as the whole of it, so we lengthened it — ten is the top of the one source that gives an explicit upper bound and sits inside what the other two describe. It errs long, which is the safe direction: a day too many costs nothing and a day too few costs the tray. The extra days go at the shade end, where nothing is being risked yet.

How does the week actually end?

The morning after the last night out, the plant graduates: "The Sungold is hardened off. It can go in the ground." One tap records the day you plant it, and that date is worth giving — every figure this app quotes for that plant afterwards is counted from it. Until 31 July 2026 there was no ending at all: the last step is a night outdoors, so there was no bring-in to log, and the app would eventually ask "did it come back in?" about a night it had itself instructed. A week of doing everything right finished on a confused question.

Why am I being asked to harden off a plant that is already in the ground?

You should not be, and from 10 August 2026 you are not. The app knew a plant had been started indoors, which is true forever and is what put it on the hardening list. It never checked where the plant is sitting now. Tell it a plant is in a raised bed or straight in the ground and hardening off stops immediately — you cannot carry in something that is rooted in a bed. If you still see one, it means we have never been told where that plant is. The hardening card now has a button that says it is already in the ground; one tap answers the question and the job goes away for good. Trays and pots keep theirs, because those are the ones you actually carry outside — including under glass. **A greenhouse used to be an answer in its own right and stopped being one on 23 August 2026**, and this is one place you may notice: a tomato planted into a greenhouse border no longer gets a hardening run, which is right, because you cannot carry a bed outside. A seedling in a pot or a tray in that same greenhouse keeps its run exactly as before.

I have six seedlings on one tray. Does the app know that?

If you have named the tray, yes — and the card says the tray rather than counting plants: **Put the windowsill tray out**, not **Put 6 plants out**. Everything on one tray also comes in together whatever the individual clocks say, because it physically does. One tray, one pair of hands, one trip. Two different trays are never called one tray, even when they are on the same day of the plan: sending you out for one and leaving the other on the sill overnight is the exact thing hardening off exists to prevent. Worth saying what we did NOT do: the ten-day plan itself is still tracked per plant. We went looking for tray-level guidance across 34 extension and seed sources and it is not there — the horticulture is written about the plant. What is genuinely per-tray is the carrying.

It says the plant is hardened off. Is it definitely ready?

It has done the week, which is the plan, not a certificate. Look at it before it goes in: a plant that still looks soft or pale wants another day, and if there were nights out ahead of schedule during the run the card says so and tells you to check the leaves. The app is tracking what happened, not grading the plant.

I missed a big chunk of the week. Where does it pick up?

**It does not back up, and it does not wait for you.** The ten days run on the calendar — day six is day six because six days have passed, not because you logged five. A day you miss is recorded as missed and the plan keeps moving. **This changed on 11 August 2026 and the old behavior was worse than it sounds:** the app used to step backwards after a gap — three to seven days off repeated one step, one to three weeks repeated two, over three weeks started again — which meant a skipped day could leave the screen sitting on "day 2 of 10" indefinitely. **We went looking for the research behind those numbers and there is none.** We read the hardening-off guidance from Illinois, Utah State and Minnesota; all three tell you the ramp is about two weeks and **not one of them says what to do if you miss days.** So we stopped pretending we knew. What the app does instead is count: how many days it was out, how many were shorter than the step asked, how many had nothing logged. At the end, if fewer days went well than the plan asked for, **we suggest adding that many back** — and we say it as our suggestion, with the numbers next to it, because it is our reading rather than a rule anybody published.

It asked where I actually put the tray. Am I being marked down for the wrong answer?

No, and here is the mechanism rather than just the reassurance: **nothing reads that answer.** The score at the end of the week counts hours — days out, days shorter than the step asked, days with nothing logged — and where the tray sat is not part of it and cannot move it. **The reason is that nobody has published the trade.** We read the hardening guidance across twelve extension sites looking for whether extra shade buys you a shorter day, or more sun makes up for a missed one, in either direction. **Not one source makes that comparison.** Every published ramp increases the hours and the sun together. So a score combining them would be us inventing an exchange rate, and we would rather record what happened and leave it at that. What the answer IS for: if the leaves scorch on day six, your journal can tell you the tray sat in full sun on days three, four and five. That is a fact worth having later, and it needs no rule at all. You only get asked when you tap **Put it somewhere else?** — the ordinary button assumes you did what the step said, because you usually did.

It asked what time I brought the tray in yesterday. Why does that matter so much?

Because until 12 August 2026 we guessed, and we guessed badly. When a tray went out and nothing was logged after, the card asked whether it came back in — and if you said yes, we recorded the bring-in at **the moment you tapped**, not when it actually happened. Answer that at eleven the next morning about a tray you put out at nine the day before and the app wrote down **twenty-six hours outside**. Then it did two things with that number, both wrong: it counted the day as a full one in your week, and it warned you that the plant had been out overnight ahead of schedule and told you to check the leaves for damage. **Answering honestly produced a warning about a night that never happened.** Now it asks. The box starts on the time the step itself suggested — for a two-to-three-hour day that went out at nine, midday — so if that is about right you tap once and you are done. Change it if it is not. And whatever you put in lands on the day the tray actually went out, not today, which is the part that was broken underneath.

I did a day and forgot to tap it. Can I still put it in?

Yes, since 12 August 2026 — and before that you could not, which was the real problem. The line that counts your week is now a button: tap **You had it out on 2 of the last 5 days** and you get every day of the run as a row, with the date it was. A day nothing was logged on shows the date in orange and offers **I did this day**. Put in roughly when it went out and came in, and it is recorded on that day, not today. The times start on the step’s own window — so a day that wanted eight hours suggests nine in the morning to six — because a fixed guess would quietly log a short day and then count it as one. **What it will not do is move the plan.** The little arrows beside the day number change which step you are on, not what is written down, and they are not the way to fix a missed day — that caught us out too. And when filling a day changes our suggestion, it says so plainly: what it read before, what it reads now, and that the reason is the day you just added. If the suggestion does not change, it says that instead. **And a day you already logged can be corrected too** — tap its times and you can change the hours *and the date*, because logging a day late is at least as common as logging it short. Move it to a day that already has an entry and it refuses and tells you which one is in the way, rather than quietly merging the two into a day that never happened.

Why did it ask me twice for plants I carried out together?

It should not, and until 31 July 2026 it could. Plants on different days of their own schedule have different bring-in times, and the app treated each as its own alarm — so two trays carried out in one armful produced two interruptions. Now anything due within two hours of something already late comes in on the same card. Bringing seedlings in is a walk to the step, not five walks.

Why is it telling me to bring in a plant that is not due for another hour?

Because you are about to be outside anyway, and one of its neighbors is already late. The card says so plainly — it names the plant and how long until it was due — so you can leave it if you would rather. An hour of extra shade on day four costs nothing; a second trip to the step costs you.

Where is the line? When does it NOT group them?

Two hours. If a plant is due more than two hours after the one that is already late, it gets its own reminder later, because at that point the extra time outside is real and the plants genuinely want different treatment. Under two hours, one card.

The overdue screen is blocking me and I am not home. How do I get past it?

Tap "Not now — remind me later" and pick 5, 10 or 30 minutes, an hour, or type your own number, up to six hours. The app goes back to normal and the screen returns when that time is up. There is no permanent dismiss on this one, deliberately: if the tray is still outside, the app has to keep saying so. With alerts turned on you also get a notification when the snooze runs out, and that one comes from our server rather than your phone — so it arrives whether or not the app is open.

I snoozed for five minutes and nothing arrived until I opened the app again.

That was a real bug, fixed on 31 July 2026. The snooze was a timer running inside the app, so closing the app killed it — the reminder you eventually saw was the missed alarm firing on your way back in, which is not a reminder at all. Snoozes are now held on our server, which is awake when your phone is not. The check that sends them also went from hourly to every five minutes, because an alert that can turn up fifty-five minutes late is not an alert.

What does the notification say?

It names the plant and the action — "Bring the Sungold in", or "Bring 4 plants in" — because that has to work on a locked screen where the rest may be cut off. Underneath: how far past the step it is, when it went out in your own local time, and, only once it has run more than four hours over, that the leaves are worth a look. If a sentence would still be true with the numbers taken out, we do not send it.

Will it keep pinging me while a tray is out?

At most once every half hour. The check runs every five minutes so the first one is timely, but repeating at that rate would be harassment and the channel only works while you leave it switched on. If you want it quiet for a while, snooze — that beats the repeat outright.

I snoozed one plant and the screen came back. Why?

Because a different plant went past its time while you were snoozed. A snooze covers the trays that were showing when you set it — anything that goes overdue afterwards is a new problem you have not seen yet, and silencing it would be the app hiding something from you.

I never got a notification and my tray sat outside. What happened?

Almost certainly that alerts were never switched on for your phone — and until 31 July 2026 the app only ever offered to turn them on from the hardening page, which most people never open. Putting a tray out from the daily flow asked for nothing. Both are fixed: the app asks the moment a tray goes outside, and Profile now shows whether this phone is actually registered plus a button to send yourself a test. Separately, opening the app with a tray overdue now takes over the screen rather than waiting in a list.

How do I check alerts are really working?

Profile, under Alerts. It states whether this phone is registered — which needs three things, not one: permission granted in the browser, an account, and the endpoint having reached our server. Then send a test. Close the app and it should arrive within a few seconds. If it does not, the line above the button says which of the three is missing.

Why does it keep telling me to bring them in?

Because that is the step people forget, and forgetting it is what kills the tray. You put them out at nine in the morning, get on with your day, and remember at eleven at night. Every day of the run except the last one ends with bringing the plant back inside.

I tapped it twice by accident. Did I skip a day?

No. Progress counts distinct days, not taps. Two taps in one afternoon is still day one. Bringing a tray in at lunch and putting it back out is also still one day, and the hours add up rather than resetting.

I missed a few days. Do I carry on where I left off?

No, and GardenTrack will not let you. After a three-day gap it repeats the last step instead of advancing, because a few days back indoors undoes most of what the previous days built. Resuming at day five with an unconditioned plant is the scorch this whole process exists to prevent.

I forgot and left them out overnight. What now?

The app will ask you the next morning whether they came in, because it genuinely does not know. Answer honestly. If they stayed out, check the leaves for pale or papery patches before carrying on — and consider repeating a day rather than pushing ahead.

I put them out at eight but only tapped the button at nine. Can I fix the time?

Yes. Tap the recorded time on the card and change it. The bring-in time recalculates from the corrected time.

Is this schedule specific to my crop?

No, and we say so on the card. It is standard extension-service practice — about a week, starting with an hour or two in shade and building up. Our plant records list hardening off for 38 crops without any duration attached, so there is nothing crop-specific to read yet. A brassica and a pepper do not really want the same week, and sourcing that properly is on our list.

More on this

• Hardening off is a week, not a button — the build story: how we decided, and what went wrong on the way.
• Frost alerts
• Asking your garden a question
• How long hardening off takes
• What shipped and when