The job, with the number in it

Common questions

My potted tree just says water, check for pests. How much water?

In a pot there is no useful number, so the app asks a question instead of printing one. "An inch a week" is a depth of rain over a bed and means nothing over a container. What you get is: push a finger in to the second knuckle, or lift the pot — a dry one is noticeably light — and if it is dry, water until it runs out of the drainage holes and then stop. The drainage hole is the measurement, which is why you never have to know how many gallons your pot holds. It also tells you how often to look: daily in summer, twice in a heatwave, because a pot holds a fraction of what a bed does and dries from every side.

Why did my plant's own page say less than the daily list did?

It did, and it should not have. Everything above shipped on the run-through-the-day screen first, and the plant's own page kept showing the bare verb — the same plant described two different ways depending on which screen you opened. Fixed in August 2026: the plant page now carries the instruction, the rhythm, and the explanation behind a tap. It also reads where the plant is sitting, whether it is mulched, and what you have already logged, none of which it was looking at before.

My mulched bed started asking me to check the soil more often. Why?

Because mulch does not last forever, and until August 2026 the app behaved as though it did. Log that you mulched a bed and you got mulched-bed advice from then on, for good: check every few days, pull the mulch aside, feel underneath. Straw and clippings break down over a season, so a bed mulched in April was still getting that advice the following summer — over bare soil, telling you to pull aside mulch that was no longer there. The bigger problem was the rhythm: mulched-bed advice says a bed can go two or three times longer between waterings, so the app was confidently telling people to water less often than their garden needed. After about four months it now goes back to plain open-ground advice — feel two inches down, check every two or three days. Mulch it again and log it, and the mulched-bed advice comes straight back.

Why does thinning say two numbers on my arugula but one on my carrots?

Because on arugula the two ends of the range are two different ways to grow it, and on carrots they are not. Carrots thin to 2–3 inches — that is one answer with a little slack in it. Arugula is listed at 3–12 inches, and that is not slack: 3 inches is for leaves you cut small and often, 12 inches is for full-size plants. A four-fold range is not advice, so where a crop is one you pick over and over we say what the choice is instead of handing you a span. Nine crops read this way — cilantro, mustard, mizuna, arugula, leaf lettuce, mâche, amaranth, scallions and dill.

It says water an inch a week. An inch of what?

An inch of water standing over the soil, rain included — the way extension services state it. The practical version is that an inch over a square foot is a little over half a gallon, so a 4x8 bed wants roughly twenty gallons a week if no rain falls. It is a total, not an extra: a week with an inch of rain in it needs nothing from you. We give the figure for 148 crops; beets, dill and peas have no number because no source we hold states one for them, and on those the job just says Water.

Why does the pest check list pests I have never seen?

Because it is a list of what has been recorded on that crop, not a guess at what is in your garden. It exists to tell you where to look and what shape of damage counts — knowing that flea beetles leave shot-holes and cutworms fell a seedling at the base is most of the job. Where a crop has a long list we name the three most likely and stop. It used to end “and 6 more”, which is a number you cannot do anything with; the full list is behind the “why this?” tap instead. It is not a diagnosis, and if you find something the check offers to take a photo there and then.

Why do some plants say how deep to sow and most do not?

Because most plants in the app were not sown by you — a tomato you bought as a start has no sowing depth to give. The depth shows on the jobs where it is the thing you need: sowing seed, and setting out garlic, onion sets, shallots, horseradish crowns or asparagus. Nineteen crops carry a sowing depth and five carry a planting depth for sets. Depths are written the way a seed packet writes them — 1/4 inch, not 0.25 — and where the depth is too small to aim at, the job says the action instead of a number: “just under the surface, a dusting of soil over them”, or for the few that are not covered at all, “right on top and pressed down so each seed sits firmly against the soil”. “Sow seeds 0.0625 in deep” is not something anybody can do.

Where does a card show more than one number?

One card can cover several plants — that is deliberate, because you water a bed rather than a row of database rows. When every plant on the card wants the same thing, the number sits under the headline. When they disagree, say a bed of carrots and beets that thin to different distances, the headline stays clean and the per-crop numbers move behind the "why" tap. We would rather make you tap once than print a number that is wrong for half the card.

Some jobs are a paragraph and some are five words. Why?

Because some of them need to be. "Thin seedlings to 2 inches apart" is the whole job. "Pick your asparagus" is not — you need to know a spear is ready at about the length of your hand and at least as thick as a pencil, with the tip still closed, and that you cut it at ground level. The card shows the first sentence and keeps the rest behind the "why this?" tap, so a long answer never turns the card into a wall of text. That tap is also where the job explains itself, and every one of the thirty jobs the app can give you has an explanation now: what thinning actually is and why it feels wasteful, what curing is and how you know it is finished, why mulch has to be kept back off the stem, what a sucker looks like and where to find it, which way up a garlic clove goes.

It said my squash will not fit between my rows, but the plot is half empty.

Both things are true, and they are different questions. Your plot has room — it just is not the right shape for that crop. Squash wants about six feet between rows and yours are a foot apart, so one plant will grow across six of them. The app tells you how many rows it will cover, because that is the bit you can act on: plant it along an edge, or leave the neighbors empty. It never stops you — a gardener who means to do it knows something we do not.

My apple says it needs anywhere from 6 to 25 feet. Which is it?

Whichever tree you bought. A fruit tree is grafted, and the rootstock — not the variety — sets how big it gets: a dwarf apple finishes at six to eight feet across, a standard at twenty to twenty-five. That is the same tree in the catalog with one spacing line, so the range is not slack, it is two different trees. Tell the app which size yours is on and it gives you the one number. The size class is on the nursery label, and it is per tree rather than per crop, because two apples in one garden are routinely different. Leave it unanswered and you keep the wide range, which is us admitting we do not know rather than guessing a middle.

It told me to leave the stake in my apple tree forever. Is that right?

For a dwarf apple, quite possibly, and the usual advice is what makes it dangerous. Everyone is told to stake a young tree for a few years and then take the stake out — true for most trees, and wrong for this one. A dwarf apple sits on roots that stay small and brittle, and it starts carrying fruit while it is still young, so it leans and then goes over under a crop years after you stopped watching for it. How permanent depends on the exact rootstock: Minnesota Extension says M.9 "requires staking for the life of the tree", while M.26 "generally require staking for the first few years of growth or, on windy sites, for the life of the tree". Iowa State puts it more broadly — some dwarf and semi-dwarf fruit trees have poor root anchorage and may need a stake or trellis. If your label does not say which rootstock you have, leaving the stake in costs you nothing and taking it out can cost the tree. We say this only for apple, because every source we found on it is about apple.

It keeps telling me to sow more lettuce. When does that stop?

When another sowing can no longer finish before your first frost — worked out from that crop's days to maturity against your own frost date, with the fall slowdown counted in. Before then you get a nudge every couple of weeks, which is the interval the sources give for that crop and the whole point of succession sowing: a short row every two weeks instead of one big row that all comes at once. The last one that will make it says so plainly — "Last sowing of the year" — because that is the one worth acting on today. After that the app goes quiet on it until next season rather than nagging you into wasting seed and a bed that a winter crop wants.

My tomatoes are dropping all their flowers. What is wrong with them?

Probably nothing you did. In hot weather the pollen inside the flower goes sticky and stops working, so the flower falls off instead of turning into a tomato — Clemson: "the pollen becomes tacky and nonviable, preventing proper pollination." The plant looks perfectly healthy the whole time, which is why people go looking for a disease. It starts setting fruit again on its own once the weather breaks. The app warns you before the hot spell instead of leaving you to work it out afterwards. The whole story — the temperatures for peppers, beans, squash and greens as well as tomatoes, and what actually helps — is in our guide on [why tomato flowers fall off](/guides/summer-heat/tomato-flowers-falling-off/).

Is it the hot days or the warm nights that do the damage?

Both, and the nights catch people out. Clemson: "Several days of nighttime temperatures above 70 F and or daytime temperatures above 85 F will cause the plants to abort flowers" — note the "and or", either one can do it. Alabama Extension goes further: for some varieties "night temperatures alone (above 72 degrees F) can be detrimental to flowering, even if day temperatures remain below 85." So a run of muggy nights costs you fruit even when the afternoons feel fine, and the app says which of the two is the problem rather than just saying it is hot.

How long does it have to be hot before it matters?

About two days and the night between them. A tomato flower has a roughly 50-hour window in which it can be pollinated, and Minnesota Extension puts it directly: "during 50-hour periods with hot days and especially hot nights, a round of tomato flowers is likely to drop off without pollination." So one hot afternoon is nothing — we do not warn you about it — but two hot days running is a lost round of flowers. It has to be consecutive: hot Monday, mild Tuesday and Wednesday, hot Thursday is not a heatwave and we do not treat it as one.

I sowed lettuce and nothing came up. What happened?

Check how deep you put it. Some seed needs daylight reaching it before it will sprout, and lettuce is one — Iowa State groups it under "Require Light for Germination" and says to press the seed in and not cover it. Bury it and it just sits there: no seedling, no rotten seed, nothing on the surface to tell you why. The app now says so on the crops it applies to. Twenty of our hundred and fifty-one carry a sourced answer and say it; the rest either do not care, or the answer we hold is not solid enough to say out loud. Four go the other way and must be covered properly — a nasturtium or a zinnia left showing on top will not come up either. Three crops say nothing on purpose: basil, cosmos and celery. Utah State names basil among the seeds that need light and Iowa State files it under the ones that need darkness, both in as many words, and when two extension services flatly disagree we would rather leave you with the sowing depth — which they all agree on — than pick a side and sound certain.

It says wait until the soil is 60°F. How am I supposed to know?

Push a thermometer 2 inches down into the bed — that is the depth seed sits at — at the same time on three mornings in a row, and use the average of the three. Wisconsin Extension gives both the depth and the three-morning rule. One reading on a warm afternoon is not it: soil holds yesterday's cold, which is exactly why a date on the calendar cannot answer this. It used to print the temperature and stop there, which left you a number and no way to check it.

Why does it ask how far apart my rows are?

Because nothing else can work it out. We know how many rows you have and how long they are, but not the gap between them, and we cannot infer it from the crop — the crop is the thing we are checking it against. It is asked once, in inches, because every crop's between-row figure is stated in inches and converting at the boundary is where wrong numbers creep in. Leave it blank and the app simply does not comment.

I grow in rows in the ground, not in a bed. Does it work for that?

Yes, and it counts a different thing. A raised bed is an area — four feet by eight is thirty-two square feet, and a plant takes a square of its own spacing. A row plot is a length: three rows twenty feet long is sixty feet of row, and a plant takes a slice of one row equal to its in-row spacing. The gap between your rows was decided the day you laid them out and is not space you can spend again. The difference is not small — sixty feet of row holds about 360 carrots, and the same plot measured as sixty square feet would have claimed 2,160. Tell the app how many rows you have and how long they are and it answers in feet of row.

The app said my bed had room for one more tomato. That cannot be right.

It was not, and it is fixed. Extension services state spacing for rows in open ground, where a tomato is given three feet and takes up nine square feet on its own. Applied to a 4x8 raised bed that comes out at about one plant, which is obviously wrong to anyone standing in front of the bed. A raised bed, a pot or a greenhouse is the close-planting case — that is most of the reason people build them — so those use the tight end of the range and a 4x8 bed reads as room for about fourteen tomatoes. Open ground still uses the wide figure, because open ground is what the wide figure was measured in.

I have plants from before the app asked how many. Do I have to go through them all?

Only the ones in a bed you have measured, and it is one tap each. The bed asks you itself: it names a plant, gives you a row of numbers, and moves to the next as soon as you tap one. It tells you how many are left to go, and once the last one is answered the bed stops asking and starts telling you whether there is room. You can also set a count on any plant's own screen if you would rather.

Why does it ask how many I am planting?

Because nothing else can tell it. It is the one number only you know, and it is asked while you are holding the plants rather than months later. It is also what makes the rest work: without a count the app cannot say whether a bed is filling up, so it has to ask you instead of answering. Six is six seedlings going in, not six cell packs.

Do these numbers change for my variety?

Not yet. Spacing, depth and watering are held per crop, which is how the extension sources state them, so a Sungold and a beefsteak read the same. Days to maturity is the one figure we do hold per variety, and the season chart already uses it. Where a crop's range is genuinely about which type you have — a bramble at 24–96 inches is an upright versus a trailing one — the range is shown as it stands rather than resolved to a number we cannot justify.

More on this

• The season chart
• Tree and bush care
• Plant spacing calculator
• What shipped and when