Hot spell alerts

Common questions

The week only shows three and a bit days now. Where did the rest go?

Nowhere — slide it sideways. The week runs seven days and always has; you see about three and a half at a time and push the rest into view with your thumb.

⚠ The card at the right edge is cut off ON PURPOSE. That is how the strip says there is more — a row that ended neatly would look like the whole week.

It changed on 27 August 2026 and it was a fair complaint. Before that, three days were proper cards and the other four were thin columns with no card at all, so the week looked half-built — and the four thin ones were too small to read anything from.

Now every day is the same card, the day name reads as a heading, the picture is nearly twice the size, and the temperature is big enough to read at arm’s length. ⚠⚠ The trade is that seven of those do not fit across a phone, so the week scrolls instead of shrinking — which is the version that was too small to be useful.

The orange bar now runs across several days. Is that several warnings?

No — it is one warning, drawn the width it actually lasts. Since 27 August 2026.

Before this, a hot spell was marked on the day it started and nowhere else, so a four-day run of heat looked like a Thursday problem. The warning names the spell once, with the day it starts and how long it runs, so a four-day run reads as four days rather than as a Thursday problem.

⚠ The week row itself does not draw the spell. A band across it was designed, written up here, and never built; the row shows a weather icon, a temperature and a job count per day. Heat is said in words, above it.

⚠ The word HEAT and the number of plants are still said once, on the day it starts. That is deliberate. A four-day heatwave is one thing you plan around once — printing it four times would say you have four problems when you have one. So the color spans and the words do not.

The same is true if you are listening rather than looking. One day tells you how many plants are at risk and why; the others say only that they are still inside the spell. Hearing “four plants at risk” four times would be sixteen plants to somebody who cannot see it is one band.

Cold nights work differently, on purpose. A run of frosts is not one event — it is several nights you go out and cover something — so each night is still marked on its own rather than joined into a single stretch.

And from 2 September 2026 the band reaches every plant it counted. Each crop starts to suffer at its own temperature, so one hot run gives each plant its own stretch — and the card used to show the first plant's. It would say three plants and until Saturday while one of those three was still over its limit on the Tuesday. ⚠ Now the dates run to the last day any plant it counted is in trouble. The count and the dates describe the same plants.

The trade is that a plant whose stretch is shorter is inside the band for a day or two longer than it needs to be. That is the direction we would rather be wrong in — leaving shade on too long costs you nothing, and taking it off two days early can cost you the plant.

I tapped a day in the weather strip and it opened a picture of the sky. What is it showing me?

The sky it draws is the sky you are actually under — since 26 August 2026.

Tap any day and the screen fills with that day's weather: the sun sits where it really sits at that hour, climbing through the morning, high at midday, low again in the evening, and after dark it is a moon rather than a sun. The colors move with it. A rainy day is gray and low; a storm is dark and bruised; a clear night is deep navy with stars, and the half hour before sunrise and after sunset has a band of color of its own.

Under it are the things that matter to your garden — the temperature, large enough to read at arm's length, anything of yours that is at risk that day, the wind, what the National Weather Service wrote about the day, and the hour-by-hour if we have it.

⚠ We only show the parts of their write-up that say something the screen has not already given you. If it reads "High near 90" and there is already a large 90° above it, that sentence is dropped — and if the whole write-up turns out to be things you can already see, nothing is shown. Every word that IS shown is theirs, unedited. We drop whole sentences or none, never half of one: "High near 90" can go, "High near 90, with temperatures falling to around 87 in the afternoon" stays, because the second half is news.

And a line at the bottom to ask about that day. It already knows which day you are looking at, so you can just type.

The weather itself is drawn, not just colored. Clouds gather and darken from a clear day through to a storm, rain falls lightly or hard, snow drifts, and a thunderstorm gets its lightning. Fog is the one that is a wash rather than a drawing — fog is not a thing overhead, it is the air you are standing in.

The ground changes with YOUR season — from 5 September 2026 your own frost dates decide it, not the calendar. Under the sky there are hills that fade with distance, a treeline of firs with a few oaks among them, a near bank with a fence, and the earth running on under your jobs. The oaks leaf out around your last frost in a brighter new green that settles over the summer, turn color as your first frost nears, and stand bare after it — so a Utah garden in early September is still green, because it still is. There is an apple tree hidden in that treeline that buds, blossoms, fruits and goes bare through the year on the same dates. Snow and fog bring their own ground and cover it. If your garden is in the southern hemisphere, the seasons run the right way round for you.

The sun follows the real one. We know where your garden is, so a June day genuinely runs longer than a December one — at six in the evening in summer the sun is still well up, and in winter it went down an hour ago. And the moon is the moon that is actually up tonight, in its real shape, lit on the correct side as it waxes and wanes. If you have not told us where your garden is, the sun follows the clock instead — we would rather use the hour than guess at a place.

Nothing is downloaded for any of it. The whole sky is drawn on your phone, so it works standing in a bed with no signal — which is where you usually are when you want it.

I tapped the hot weather alert on my phone and it took me to a job about different plants.

Fixed on 26 August 2026, and it was our routing rather than either screen being wrong.

The alert said one thing — the plants that have a heat limit we hold, and the hottest day of the spell. The screen it landed on said another — the plants sharing a pot, and today’s temperature. ⚠ Both were correct on their own, and together they read as the app contradicting itself about the same afternoon.

The tap now opens the day the warning was actually about, with that day’s temperature and the plants at risk on it. A warning takes you to the warning; the jobs are still there when you want them.

⚠ One thing worth knowing if you tap an old alert. These go out the evening before the hot weather starts, so if you come back to one several days later the day it named has already gone by. The app will say so rather than opening a different day — showing you the wrong afternoon and letting you think it was the right one is the thing being fixed here, and we are not going to do it a second time in a smaller way.

Why did my plant in a pot get a different message?

Because you can pick a pot up, and that is the better answer. A plant in the ground gets told to shade it in the afternoon and water it deeply in the morning. A plant in a pot gets told to move it out of the afternoon sun, because that is a thing you can actually do in about ten seconds.

A pot also runs dry in a way open ground does not. A bed has deep ground under it holding water in reserve. A pot is about one bucket of soil, and the same hot afternoon empties one and not the other. So if you are checking anything twice on a hot day, check the pots.

If you have never told us where a plant is standing, it still gets the warning — it just does not get told to move, because most plants are in beds and telling you to carry a bed somewhere is not advice.

How far ahead will it tell me?

About three days, from 8 October 2026. Before that it was one day: tonight or tomorrow, nothing further out.

The things that help in heat take longer than an evening. Shade cloth has to be bought and put up, and a pot needs a shady spot cleared for it. So two or three days before a hot spell starts, you get one alert that names the day and how hot it gets. The evening before, you get a second one that says what to do in the morning.

That is all for that spell. Until 8 October 2026 the evening alert came back every evening the heat lasted. Now the next one waits until the heat breaks and a new spell is on the way.

Today works the same way. The warning under the temperature shows each morning from three days out and on the first hot day. Further out than three days it stays off, because a forecast a week away still moves.

I tapped a frost warning. Does that open the right night too?

Yes, since 26 August 2026 — and it did not before. The heat alert was fixed first and the frost one was left behind for a few hours, which was the wrong way round: ⚠ heat costs you a harvest, frost ends the plant.

Tapping a frost warning now opens the night it was about, with that night’s low and the plants at risk on it.

A night belongs to the evening it starts. So a warning sent on Tuesday evening about a cold Tuesday night opens Tuesday — the same day the weather strip files it under, not the morning you wake up to. That way the app and the alert always name the same night.

⚠ And if we cannot tell which night, which can happen when the forecast is short, the alert takes you to your jobs instead of guessing. Landing you on a real screen that is not the one you asked for is annoying; landing you on the wrong night and letting you believe it was the right one is the thing we are fixing.

Will I get a frost alert and a heat alert on the same evening?

No. You get one or the other, and frost wins.

There is a hard limit of one interrupting alert a day, and both of these are weather. On a September day forecast to freeze tonight and bake at the weekend, both are true and only the frost one is sent — because frost ends the plant and heat costs you a harvest. The heat one is still on your Today screen when you next open the app.

How does it decide a plant is at risk?

Two things have to be true at once.

The crop has to have a temperature on file. Not every plant does. For 37 of them a university extension service has printed the point at which that crop starts to suffer — beans at 90°F, tomatoes at 85°F — and we hold the source. For the rest we hold nothing, so we say nothing.

And it has to be a run, not a day. One hot afternoon is weather. Two or more in a row is a spell, and that is what actually does the damage. Minnesota's extension service puts a rough 50-hour window on it for tomatoes, which is two days and the night between them — that is where the two comes from, rather than a number that felt about right.

Why does it warn about warm nights?

Because for some crops the night is where the damage happens, and it is the half nobody expects. A tomato can take a hot afternoon; what it cannot take is a night that never cools down, because the plant uses the overnight drop to recover.

We hold a published night figure for nine crops — tomato, pepper, eggplant, and the vine crops: cucumber, melon, pumpkin, summer squash, winter squash and watermelon. For everything else we only check the days, which under-claims rather than guessing. A missing night figure does not mean the nights are fine, it means nobody has published one we can point at.

There is no planting date on this plant. Can a photo still help?

Yes, from 26 August 2026, if you have already confirmed what a photo said about it.

Most of what the app knows about a plant’s stage comes from its planting date and the crop’s calendar. A plant with no date has neither, so every stage stays theoretically possible and a heat warning could name a mechanism that does not apply — telling you the flowers will drop on something that is not flowering.

When you send a photo, the app reads a stage from it — seedling, growing, flowering, fruiting and so on — and shows you what it thinks. Once you have confirmed or corrected that reading, the heat warning uses it: a plant you have confirmed as growing will not be told its flowers are at risk.

Only readings you have confirmed count. A stage the app has proposed and you have not looked at yet is left out entirely — it would be a poor trade to silence a real warning on the strength of a guess nobody has checked.

And it only ever removes a claim, never adds one. A photo that looks like flowering does not switch a warning back on for a tree the calendar says is too young to bear. Trusting a picture over a planting date is a bigger decision than this, and we have not made it.

No photo means nothing changes. Not having sent one is not the same as having sent one that showed nothing.

I told you that spot is in shade. Does that change anything?

It does from 26 August 2026, and before that date it did not — which was fair to be annoyed about.

The app asks whether each spot gets full sun, part sun or shade. Until this date nothing in the weather warnings read the answer, so a bed you had marked as shade still got told “shade in the afternoon helps”. Useless advice, and worse than useless: it says we did not read what you told us.

Now, when every plant in a heat warning is in a spot you have marked as shade, the card drops that line and gives you the part that still applies — water in the morning, and keep an eye on them.

What it does not do is change whether you get warned. The forecast temperature is measured in the shade to begin with, so we have no honest way to say a sunny bed is a specific number of degrees hotter. Making one up would be worse than saying nothing. The warning arrives the same; only the advice changed.

And a spot you have never been asked about is not treated as shade. Not being asked is not an answer.

My young fruit tree got a heat warning with no explanation. Why?

Because we cannot tell whether it is fruiting yet, and from 26 August 2026 we stop pretending we can.

A fruit tree takes years to bear, and how many depends on the tree. Our figure for an orange is 2 to 4 years — that is an average across orange trees, not a fact about yours. Inside that window some are covered in blossom and some are still a stick with leaves.

Until this date the app treated the earliest possible year as the answer. A tree planted two seasons ago was assumed to be flowering, so a hot spell got the specific warning: the flowers drop and no fruit follows them. On a tree with no flowers that is simply wrong, and it was wrong in the most convincing way — a precise sentence, arriving on time, about a mechanism that was not happening.

Now, while a tree is inside its own bearing window, the card says the general thing instead: that the temperature is past what the crop takes comfortably. You still get the warning, on the same day, for the same tree. Once it is past that window — old enough that bearing is not in question — the specific wording comes back.

This does not affect anything grown from seed in a season. A tomato in flower still tells you the flowers will drop, because a tomato that is flowering is flowering, and you can see it.

The alert did not say what would happen to my plant. Why not?

Because on the lock screen we do not know enough to say it.

What heat does to a plant depends on what the plant is doing right now. A tomato in flower drops the flowers, and heat while it is setting fruit costs you that fruit. The app knows which stage yours is at — but the part of our system that sends the alert does not have that, so rather than guess a convincing-sounding reason, it tells you the true general thing and puts the specific one on the card behind the tap.

The card names the mechanism when we can actually say what it is — corrected 26 August 2026. For a lot of plants we cannot, and until this date it said so anyway: anything that was not clearly bolting or dropping flowers got “growth stalls while it lasts”. That was not something we knew about your plant. It was the sentence left over when nothing else matched, and it read as confidently as the two that were real.

Now those cards say the honest thing instead — that the temperature is past what the crop is recorded as taking comfortably — and the warning still comes. You lose a guess, not a warning.

What does the alert actually say?

The temperature is the headline — "100°F tomorrow", or "101°F, 4 days of it" if it is a long run — because the number is the thing that makes you act. The one that comes a few days early names the day instead: "99°F from Thursday, 4 days of it". Underneath, which plants and what to do about it. It never says our name or that it is a notification; your phone already prints both above the message.

It stayed quiet. Does that mean my plants are fine?

Not necessarily, and this is the honest limit of the feature. Silence can mean the forecast is mild. It can also mean that particular crop is one of the 109 we hold no published heat figure for.

We would rather say nothing than invent a temperature, but we are aware that reads the same from the outside. If you are growing something unusual in real heat, trust your own eyes over our silence — and Rafe will talk it through with you in Talk using whatever we do hold.

How does the week row mark a day I need to worry about?

By changing the day itself, not by adding a mark to it. A frost day shows the night's low with a snowflake instead of the day's high — the number you would act on.

⚠ There is no dot and no ring. An earlier version of this page described both, and a filled-versus-hollow shape for harvest risk against plant risk. They were designed and written up and never built, and this page said they were here for longer than it should have.

Heat gets no mark on the row at all. It is said in words, in the warning under the temperature.

Tap the warning and Today opens on that day: its weather, the warning with how many plants it reaches, and anything planned for it. The plants are named on the card on the day itself. Corrected 6 October 2026: this used to say the tap shows which plants and what the weather does to each, and for a day ahead it shows the count.

The hottest day of my week has no dot on it. Is that broken?

No — heat is never marked on the week row. It is said in words, in the warning under the temperature: each morning from three days out and on the spell's first day, then not again until the heat breaks. A heatwave is one thing you plan around, not four.

Frost is the exception. Every frosty night shows its low with a snowflake, because each one is a night you go out and cover things.

We measured this before building it: marking every day of every spell would have lit up most of July on an ordinary garden, and a mark that turns up every week is a mark people stop seeing.

Corrected 6 October 2026. This answer used to say the first day of a spell carries a mark. The row does not draw heat at all.

It told me to shade a plant that is actually in a pot. Why did it not say to move it?

Because we did not know it was in a pot — and from 27 August 2026 it says so instead of quietly giving you the weaker advice.

Moving a pot into the shade is better than shading it where it stands, so the app tells you to move anything it knows is portable. ⚠ If a plant has never been told how it is planted, it lands in the same bucket as something in the ground — the advice drops to "shade in the afternoon helps" and nothing explains why.

Now the card says what it does not know: "We have not been told how your apricot is planted, so we cannot say whether it can be moved. In a pot, or in the ground?" Answer it on the plant and the warning changes straight away.

And from 2 September 2026 you can answer it without leaving the card. A button under the warning opens the same question the app asks anywhere else — a seed tray, a pot, a raised bed, or straight in the ground — and the advice changes as soon as you pick one. Before this, the card asked the question and the only button on it said "Got it".

It offers four choices rather than the two the question names, and that is deliberate. "In a pot, or in the ground?" is the part that changes the advice, but a plant in a seed tray is in neither. Making you pick a wrong one just to clear the question would put something untrue on your plant, and that answer would then drive the watering advice for the rest of the season. We would rather ask the whole question than take a fast answer we cannot trust.

⚠ We deliberately do not guess from the bed. A bed can be marked as a container and still hold a plant in the ground — a front porch is a place, not a pot — and guessing would mean telling you to pick up a tree. The plant is the thing that knows, so the plant is what we ask.

Why does my fruit tree get less detail in a heat warning than my tomatoes?

Because we can tell how old a tomato is and we usually cannot tell how old a tree is — and from 27 August 2026 we stop pretending otherwise.

For something you sowed, the planting date is the plant's whole life, so we know what it is doing. ⚠ For a tree you bought, the planting date is the day it arrived — it may have been three years old already. We were reading a years-long clock off that date and concluding a young tree was in flower, then warning that heat would cost it fruit it was never going to set.

Now, when a plant lives for years and we have no way to tell whether it is old enough to bear, we do not claim anything about its flowers. You still get the heat warning and the two things that actually help — water in the morning, shade in the afternoon — just without a claim we cannot stand behind.

Nothing changed for annuals. Tomatoes, beans and squash are unaffected, because for those the sowing date really is the clock.

⚠ This gets better rather than staying quiet. As we source how many years each fruit tree takes to crop, the warning goes from silence to a real answer — including telling you when a tree IS old enough and the heat does matter.

My orange tree got no hot-spell warning in a September heatwave. Why not?

Because its limit is about blossoms, and in September it has none — from 5 September 2026.

The temperature we hold for oranges (90 °F, University of Arizona) is stated for bloom and fruit set: heat in the 90s then makes the tree drop flowers and young fruit. The same is true of the limits we hold for tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, beans, peanuts, tomatillos and quinoa — each source names flowers or fruit set. So the app now applies those limits only while the plant has flowers to lose, which it knows from the plant’s stages: for tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, beans and tomatillos that is from the first flower to the end of the season, because they keep flowering as they bear; for an orange it is bloom and fruit set, because it flowers once. Before the first flower there is no warning from that number, because the number never said anything about a plant with no flowers.

Two honest edges. A limit whose source names no stage still applies whenever the plant is alive — peas, for instance, where the same temperature is also stated for the whole plant. And when the app cannot work out a plant’s stage at all — nor can the lock-screen notification, which never knows it — the number is used as it always was, because a warning you did not need costs less than one you did.

Why is there no warning for high wind?

Because nobody has published the number, and we will not invent one.

Every mark on your week strip means a plant you own is at risk, and we only make that claim where a university extension service has published a temperature for that crop — the same evidence bar as the frost and heat figures. There is no wind speed on record anywhere in our plant data, for any of the 152 crops. A wind alert would therefore be our own guess wearing the same badge as a sourced fact, and a guess should not raise an alarm.

The wind is still shown. Tap any day and you get the speed, the direction, and the Weather Service's own paragraph for that day — all three of which were already arriving in the forecast we fetch and were being discarded until 25 August 2026. That is weather reported as weather, which is a different thing from a judgment about your plants.

Ultraviolet is genuinely missing, not withheld: the forecast we use carries no UV index at all, so there is nothing for us to show yet.

How do I turn alerts off?

Profile → Alerts → Turn alerts off on this phone. It is the same switch as frost — there is no separate one for heat, and turning it off turns off both. It unsubscribes the device you are holding, so a tablet keeps its own setting and you turn that off there.

More on this

• The plant it already knew everything about — the build story: how we decided, and what went wrong on the way.
• Frost alerts
• Where your plants are
• Your daily list
• What shipped and when