Two questions, and the app stops guessing

Common questions

Can I make the app dark?

Yes — Profile, under "Light or dark". It is remembered on that device only, so your phone and your laptop can look different, and it does not follow your phone's own night setting: if you chose light, it stays light at dusk. **Dark now means dark all the way through.** Until 14 August the page went near-black and the cards on top of it stayed cream, which is legible but is still a bright screen when you are standing in a garden after sunset. The cards go dark with it now. **Two screens stay light on purpose** — the setup walkthrough and the one-job-at-a-time screen you work from. Those are built to be read at arm's length in daylight, and they keep the pale background because that is what makes them readable outdoors.

What is the picture on the first screen?

An illustration, and deliberately not your neighborhood — we have not asked where you garden yet. It is a view over a whole neighborhood with two pins in it: a garden down among the houses and a spot on the higher ground behind, each with a different last-frost date. **That difference is the whole point of the screen.** A date worked out for your region is an average of a lot of different ground, and a few miles — or a few hundred feet of height — can be weeks apart. **The two dates on the pins are examples.** Yours are worked out the moment you give the app a location, for a square about 800 feet across around your own garden, and the next screen shows them next to the same figure north, south, east and west of you. Until 23 August this screen showed a grid of a thousand small squares making the same point; it was replaced because it argued the opposite to most people who saw it — a big gray area with a speck in it.

Why does it want my address before it wants anything else?

**Because almost every date in the app is worked out from your frost dates**, and until it knows where you are it cannot work them out for you — it falls back to a typical zone 6b, which is a regional average wearing the costume of a real answer. It tells you when it is doing that. What it does with an address is find the frost record for **a square about 800 feet across around your garden**, from 26 years of daily records. That is deliberately much smaller than a ZIP: a ZIP center can sit four miles from your garden, eight in the country, and in hilly ground four miles is weeks of difference. **We keep the coordinates and the dates, not the address.**

I skipped it. Can I get it back?

**Yes, any time.** Profile has a card called **Walk me through setup again** with a link that runs the same five screens, whatever state your garden is in — skipped, half-done, or years old with two hundred plants in it. **It deletes nothing.** It updates your frost dates if you give it a location, adds a plant if you name one, and leaves everything else exactly where it was; if you want to actually clear your garden, that is the Start over section at the bottom of the same page and it says so much more loudly. When you finish, it puts you back on Profile where you started rather than dropping you on the home screen.

Will I get the setup again if I start my garden over?

**Yes, and that is deliberate.** Restarting your garden from Profile with **Clear everything** puts you back where a brand-new gardener starts — no plants, no frost dates — so the walkthrough runs again from the first screen. **Keep my location** does not, and should not: it leaves your frost dates in place, so setup has nothing left to ask and stays out of your way. That is the same distinction the restart screen itself draws. Skipping the walkthrough once does not block it from running after a future restart either — **a skip in March is not a decision about a garden you start over in July.**

Can I skip the setup?

Yes, all of it. There is an X in the top-left of every screen and it will not come back on its own — the only thing that brings it back is deliberately restarting your garden. **Nothing is lost by skipping** — you can pin your garden later from Profile, and add plants whenever you like. The only thing you give up is accuracy: skip the first screen and every date in the app stays a regional guess until you set it. **The app keeps saying so rather than quietly pretending otherwise** — Today carries a line offering to pin your garden and saying every date is a guess until you do, and it stays there until you have.

Why does it show me other places near me?

**Because that is the whole point of working your dates out for your own spot rather than your region.** The second screen shows your last frost in the middle and the same figure five miles north, south, east and west of you, with the difference in days. In hilly ground those numbers are startling — on one Utah address, five miles west is 11 days earlier and five miles east is 34 days later, a month and a half of spread inside a ten-mile box. **A ZIP code would have handed all of those gardeners the same date.** If your ground is genuinely even, it says that instead and does not invent a difference: everything within five miles gives the same week, which is worth knowing too.

What is a growing day, and where did my number come from?

It is the stretch between your last spring frost and your first autumn one — the part of the year you can grow tender things outdoors without covering them. The second screen shows yours as a single number because that is the fact people actually want, and the two dates underneath it because that is the fact people need. Both move if you change the gamble setting on that same screen.

How much do you want to gamble — what does that change?

**Every date in the app, and it is the honest way to hold a number that is really a range.** Your last frost is an average, and one spot can vary by more than a month between an early year and a late one — on the Utah address above, the same square runs from early April to early May depending on the year. Printing the midpoint and saying nothing hides that. So the second screen offers three: **Play it safe** uses the date the frost is finished by nine years out of ten, which costs you a couple of weeks of season. **Middle of the road** is the date most seed packets mean, an even chance either way, and it is what you get if you never touch it. **Push my luck** uses the early end — plant then and most years you will be covering things at least once, which is worth it if you own the covers. Pick one and the growing-day count and both dates move while you watch. Nothing is hidden behind it: the app just counts against the dates you chose.

Why do I only get two choices instead of three?

**Because where you garden, some years have no spring frost at all.** Across the Gulf Coast, coastal California and the southern tier there are winters that simply never freeze, so there is no meaningful early date to offer — the records cannot produce one. Rather than show a third button that quietly gives you the same date as the middle one, the app shows two and says why. Houston is the clean example: it has a cautious date and a middle date and no early gamble to take.

I chose "Nothing yet — I am planning". Where did the last two screens go?

**They stop after three, and until 23 August the app did not admit it.** Choosing *Nothing yet* on the third screen means there is nothing to name a spot for, so the fourth screen has nothing to ask — but the counter had been saying 1/5, 2/5, 3/5, and you were then dropped straight onto Today with two screens still promised. It now finishes properly: you land on the last screen, which tells you your dates are set and what Today will do with them, and the progress bar shows the one screen you skipped as an empty step rather than pretending it never existed.

It only let me add one plant. Where is the rest of my garden?

Setup asks for one on purpose. The point of the first run is to get the app **right about your dates** and show you one plant working, not to make you type in a whole garden before you have seen anything happen. Everything else goes in from the Garden tab whenever suits — and Today will keep a standing line reminding you, because Today is only as useful as the garden it knows about.

It did not ask whether I sowed it or bought it. Does that matter?

It does, and it is asked later rather than never. Setup asks only what is growing and where it lives, because those two are cheap to answer and enough to start. **How it started, which variety, and how many all change what the app tells you** — a variety can move a harvest date by weeks — so the plant's own page asks for them once the plant exists and has a name. Questions about a thing that is already there read as interest; the same questions before it exists read as a form.

Do I need an account to do any of this?

No. **The whole app works on your device without one**, setup included, and your garden is saved locally as you go. An account does two things: it means your garden survives a lost phone and shows up on your other devices, and it is what lets you ask questions on the Ask screen. You are offered it after setup rather than before, because being asked to sign up before you have seen anything is a poor trade.

I got the wrong spot. Can I change it?

Yes — on the dates screen there is a **Somewhere else** button that takes you back to the question, and after setup the same thing lives in Profile under *Where you garden*. Changing it re-does the frost dates and every date that hangs off them. If you typed a ZIP rather than a street, the app marks the result as approximate and says why, rather than presenting it with the same confidence as a rooftop.

Why did it not ask my hardiness zone?

**Because we cannot work it out from your coordinates and we would rather not ask you for something we cannot check.** Zone answers one question — whether a perennial like a rosemary, a fig or an apple tree lives through your winter — and frost dates answer nearly everything else. So setup asks for the one that does the heavy lifting, and the zone sits in Profile for when you want it. Setting it is one tap and there is an *I do not know mine* if you do not.

More on this

• Your garden dates
• Where your plants are
• Backing up your garden