Start again from an empty garden, on purpose

What it is for

Sometimes you have been trying the app out rather than recording a real garden — adding a few test plants to see how it works, naming a bed something silly, taking a photo of the first thing to hand. At some point you want to stop testing and start for real.

Restarting empties the garden completely so you can go through setup again from the beginning, as though you had just installed the app.

Where it is

Profile → Start over → Restart my garden.

It is at the bottom, on its own, in red. That is deliberate — it is the only button in the app that destroys things you cannot get back, and it should not be somewhere your thumb finds it by accident.

What it deletes

Everything that describes your garden:

• Every plant, in every bed and every tray
• Every growing space — beds, rows, pots, trays
• Every journal entry — waterings, harvests, notes, anything you have ever logged
• Every photo you have taken in the app
• Every reminder, done or waiting
• Every conversation you have had with the app about a plant

Before it runs, it counts them and shows you the real numbers — “this deletes 3 plants, 1 space and 14 journal entries” — rather than warning you vaguely. If the numbers look wrong, that is your sign to stop.

What it keeps

• Your account. You stay signed in. Nothing about your login changes.
• Your garden itself, as an empty garden ready to fill.
• Anything you have sent us as feedback. That is a message to us, not a record of your garden.

Your location and frost dates: your choice

You are offered two buttons, and the difference matters:

• Keep my location — your zip code and your frost dates stay. You land straight on an empty garden and can start adding plants immediately.
• Clear everything — the location and frost dates go too, so the app asks for them again next time you open it.

Pick “clear everything” if what you want is to see the whole first-run experience, prompts and all. Pick “keep my location” if you just want an empty garden.

Why you have to type the word

The button asks you to type restart before it will do anything.

A confirmation you can dismiss by tapping in the wrong place is not a confirmation. Typing a word takes a couple of seconds and it means the deletion is always something you decided to do, never something that happened while you were putting your phone in your pocket.

There is no undo

This one is worth reading twice. There is no undo, no trash, and no “restore my garden” — not on your phone and not on our side. When it finishes, the garden is gone.

If there is any chance you want the record later, do not restart. You can delete a single plant or a single space instead, which leaves everything else alone.

What happens to your other devices

The deletion syncs. If you use GardenTrack on a phone and a tablet, the second one empties too the next time it connects.

That is the intended behavior — a restart that left an old copy on another device would put the whole garden back the next time that device synced.

Deleting one thing instead

If you only want to remove a test plant or a bed you named wrong, you do not need this button. Deleting a single plant or space is a separate action, and it is different from recording that a plant died.

Delete means this never happened. Died means it happened and is over. Use died for a real plant that really died — that is a fact about your garden and it belongs in the record. Use delete for something that was never really there.