GardenTrack
Join the beta

Can I plant this now? Check before you add it

Live · This works today.

While you are adding a plant, every crop in the list has a Look button beside it. It opens a short page for that crop whose first line answers one question — can I plant this here, this week — worked out from your own last frost date, not a national average. At the bottom is a button that takes you back to adding the plant with that crop already chosen, so looking never costs you your place.

The list opens on what you can plant

Before you type anything, the crop list is already sorted for today. What is plantable this week in your garden comes first, worked out from your own frost dates. Under a divider, everything else we hold.

The list and the crop page’s first line answer two different questions, on purpose. The list asks whether a crop will finish before your first frost — the same calculation as the “what can I plant now” button directly above it, so those two always match. The crop page’s first line asks whether the sowing window is open. Both are true and they are not the same question, so from midsummer the list can offer you a crop whose spring sowing window closed months ago and is still worth planting now.

As of 23 August 2026 the crop page carries both, so you no longer have to hold the difference in your head. Under the window verdict is a second line beginning “Sown today it would…”, and it runs the same finishing calculation the list and the button run — so the three of them cannot disagree with each other. It is worked out on your phone from your own frost dates, with no connection needed.

Nothing is hidden. All 152 crops are still there in one scroll. A browse list is how you find out the catalog is bigger than you thought, so filtering it would defeat the point.

Anything about to run out is at the top, soonest first — a row reading “last chance this year” leads, then “about 5 days left”, and so on. These are the ones you cannot plant again this year if you skip today.

Under those, the order is how much room a crop has left — the most days between planting it and your first frost, so the safest things to start come first. In August that means mizuna, arugula and radish rather than whatever begins with A, because by then almost nothing is still closing and the whole list is ordered that way.

We tried each of those on its own and neither works alone. Deadlines-only reads beautifully in April and does nothing from midsummer, when the list quietly goes back to alphabetical. Room-only fixes August and buries “last chance this year” sixty rows down in April, under things with no deadline at all. They answer different questions — how long you have to start, against how much room you have to finish — so each one orders the part of the list it is about.

Above the list sits What can I plant right now? — the fuller answer, sorted into plant these now, only just, and too late this year with how far each one misses by. The button and the list run the same calculation, so the number of crops one offers and the number the other highlights are always the same. They were not always: at one point the button said 34 and the list highlighted 11, because one asked whether a crop would finish before frost and the other only whether the sowing window was open. One question deserves one answer.

How much this changes depends on the day. A zone 6 garden sees a few dozen crops ready in late April and a handful in late October.

What the Look button is

While you are adding a plant, every crop in the list has a small Look button beside its name.

Tapping the name picks the crop and carries on, the way it always has. Tapping Look opens a short page about that crop first.

The first line is the whole point

It answers one question: can I plant this here, this week?

Not what the plant is. You can find that anywhere. The thing you cannot get anywhere else is whether it belongs in your garden right now — and that comes from the last frost date for your own spot.

Three kinds of answer:

  • Yes — this is a good week, and if the window is nearly shut it says how long you have
  • Not yet — with roughly when it opens
  • Too late this year — said plainly, because an annual is not coming back and pretending otherwise is not a plan

Then the few things that decide it

How much room it needs, what size pot, how deep the pot has to be, sun and water. That is all.

Depth is there because a pot can hold plenty of soil and still be too shallow — carrots need ten inches whatever the volume says.

And a way back in

At the bottom is Add this to my garden. It takes you back to where you were with the crop already chosen.

That button is the reason the Look button exists at all. Wandering around a catalog is only worth your time if it ends with something planted, so the page is built to hand you back rather than keep you.

Common questions

A notification called my plant “Orange · Cara Cara Navel”, with a dot in the middle.
**Fixed on 26 August 2026.** That dot is how the app separates the crop from the variety in a list, where it reads fine. ⚠ **In a sentence it does not** — and a phone shows it exactly as it is written, in the middle of a message about your garden. So anywhere the name goes into a sentence — a phone alert, or the assistant talking about your plants — **it now reads as a name.** Your Cara Cara Navel orange is called a Cara Cara Navel Orange. ⚠ **And it fixed something we had not been told about.** Most variety names already contain their crop: Red Russian Kale, Burgundy Amaranth, Blue Lake 274 Bush Bean. **We checked all 3,174 varieties we hold, and about nine in ten are like that** — so the old format was mostly producing things like “Kale · Red Russian Kale”, saying the crop twice. Now it just says Red Russian Kale. The crop name is still added when the variety genuinely does not carry it, which is where the reported one came from: **Cara Cara Navel** does not contain the word **orange**, so it gets it. Lists inside the app still show the dot for now. **It is doing a useful job there and nothing about it is confusing on a screen you are looking at** — the problem was only ever the sentence.
I searched for courgette and got nothing. Do you not have it?
**We do, and it now finds it.** Fixed 17 August 2026. Courgette, aubergine, capsicum, rocket, coriander and swede all searched for nothing at all, because the search only ever looked at one name per crop — the American one. Every one of those plants was in the catalog the whole time, with varieties. **If you know a crop by a name we still miss, tell us with the pencil button.** That list has an end to it and we would rather be told than guess. **Misspellings are still a miss.** Type *brocolli* and you get nothing — that is a separate fix and it is next.
It said it was too late to plant a crop I had already planted. What was that?
**Two things, both fixed 17 August 2026.** The page was answering *"is now a good time to put this in?"* — the right question if you are browsing, and the wrong one if you already have one growing. **It now leads with your own plant** and links straight to it, and the sowing window moves below as *thinking of sowing another?*, because a second row is a real thing to want. **And the sentence itself claimed more than we had checked.** It said *too late this year*, worked out only from the crop's SPRING sowing dates — so a late-summer sowing that would have been perfectly fine got called too late. It now says *the spring window closed around…*, which is the window we actually looked at.
Some of the text on this page was almost invisible on my phone. Is that fixed?
**Yes, as of 17 August 2026, and only if your phone is set to a light theme.** Eight things on a crop's page were being drawn in a pale sand color meant for the dark theme, on a pale cream background — the plant's Latin name, the line explaining that the frost date is an average, the link back out, and the four figures in the panel. **The one that mattered most was the honesty line**, because that is where we tell you the date is a typical year rather than your year, and it was the hardest of the lot to read. Nothing about the page changed except the colors, and the dark theme is exactly as it was.
What does the first line actually mean?
It is the answer to the only question worth asking at that moment — can this go in the ground now. Green means yes, this is a good week. If it is not yet, it tells you roughly when. If the window has closed for this year it says so plainly rather than pointing you at next spring as though that were a plan. All of it is worked out from the last frost date for your own garden, so two people reading the same page on the same day can honestly get different answers.
There is a second line starting "Sown today it would…". Is it disagreeing with the first one?
**No — it is answering a different question, and from 23 August 2026 both are on the page.** The first line is about the planting window: is this the time of year you put this crop in. The second is about the finish: **if you sowed it this afternoon, would it be ready before your first frost of the autumn?** One counts forward from spring, the other counts back from autumn, so they can both be true and say different things. Radish is the clearest case — its spring window really has closed by August, and a radish sown in August really does finish, because it is quick and you can sow it again later in the year. **The case this exists for is the opposite one.** A sweet potato can have an open planting window and still not have enough time left: it needs ninety days at the very least, and if your first frost is sixty days away it will not get there. So the second line will tell you that even when the first line has said yes. **And it does not always say "no".** Some crops are dug or cut rather than left to ripen — potatoes, carrots, chard — and for those the honest answer is that you get a small one rather than none, because what you eat keeps growing right up until the frost. It says which. **All of it is worked out on your phone**, from your own frost dates and the crop's own days to maturity. It needs no connection and it does not use any of your questions.
Why does it show so little about the plant?
Because you are in the middle of something. This page is for deciding whether a crop goes in your garden, not for reading about it — so it carries the handful of numbers that change whether you can do it today, and stops. If you want the full picture, the plant's page on our website has the sources, the varieties and the pests. Every row we put on this screen is a row between you and finishing the job you started.
Will I lose what I have already filled in?
No. Look only appears next to the crop list, which is the first thing you choose — so at the moment you can leave, there is nothing else filled in yet. And the button at the bottom of the crop page brings you back with the crop already picked, so you come back further along than you left.
What is the difference between this and the plant's own page in the app?
This one is for a crop you are thinking about. The other one is for a plant you already have — it holds that plant's history, what you have done to it, and how its season ended. Different questions, so different screens. You reach this one from the add-a-plant list; you reach the other by tapping a plant in your garden.
Why does the pot size sometimes have a note under it?
Because a number on its own can be misleading. Carrots are the clearest case: half a gallon is enough soil, but only if the pot is ten inches deep — a wide, shallow tray of the same volume grows forked stumps. Where a source tells us a condition like that, it sits with the number instead of being left out.
It says it has no planting window for my crop. Why?
Because nobody has published one we trust for that crop yet, and we would rather say so than print a plausible month. A made-up date is the kind of mistake you cannot catch until the season is over.

More on this

Shipped 2026-08-08. Last checked 2026-08-26. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us — support docs going stale is a bug.