Your season, the ribbon you plan on
Partly live · A plant still needs a sowing or transplant offset on file to be placed on the ribbon at all — a handful of crops, mostly ones you start from a bulb, a crown, a runner or a cutting rather than a seed, don't have one yet, and the ribbon counts them and says why underneath rather than dropping them silently. Add succession starts on the crop's own sowing interval; there's no way yet to set your own. Trees, bushes and canes still keep their yearly jobs on the Year Wheel below rather than the ribbon — see tree and bush care for what that page does and does not cover.
The Calendar shows your season — every plant you're growing this year, drawn as a bar across your own last and first frost, grouped by zone then bed and collapsible. A row leads with your own photo of that plant when the journal has one. Two zooms: Season shows the whole year at once; Weeks scrolls at week scale with today in view. A planned planting, one whose day hasn't come yet, draws outlined and says so. Grab a planned bar's handle and slide it along the grid: the crop's planting window lights up underneath and a line updates, like 'Oct 6 — in the window. Picks from about Nov 20.' Let go and the day is saved. A bed with room says so on its row and opens What still fits. Add succession, in the … menu on a row whose crop has a sowing interval, plans a run of the same crop every so many weeks, with one undo. Tap a bar and a sheet opens: the plant, its stage now and next, its next job, and buttons to open the plant or use Talk. Tap the corner of the grid to shrink the names to their pictures, and the ⤢ button at the head to give the Calendar the whole screen. Trees, bushes and canes live on the Year chip's wheel, because a tree's year comes back round and a bar can't say that December touches January.
What it is
One ribbon, your whole season, left edge to right edge: last frost to first frost, both of them your own dates. Every annual plant you're growing gets a row, grouped first by zone and then by growing space — tap a group's name to collapse it. Each row leads with a small round photo — your own latest journal photo of that plant, or the small crop drawing until you've taken one. Today is the lit vertical line running down every row.
Each bar is that plant's whole life, not just its harvest — getting going, filling out, cropping, resting, colored to match. Two diamonds mark your frost dates with the date beside each. Hold the mouse pointer over one and it reads last frost, about Apr 12 — always about, because a frost date is an average, never a promise.
A planted bar is filled in. A planned one — a day you or Rafe set ahead of today — draws outlined instead, with a dashed edge, and it costs you no jobs until the day comes.
Tap any bar, planned or not, and a sheet opens from the bottom: the plant, its bed and its own date, Stage now, Next stage and Next job, then buttons to open the plant or ask about it in Talk.
Two ways to look at it
A Weeks | Season toggle sits at the head of the grid, on the first of the Calendar's four small pictures under the title. Weeks is what it opens on — the same bars at week scale, in a side-to-side scroll with a line every seven days and month names along the top, today already a third of the way into view. Season lays the whole season across the screen at once, from about four weeks before your last frost to four weeks after your first, with nothing to scroll.
Weeks is the everyday read. Season is for stepping back, when a crowded stretch of the year has packed too much into too little space to read comfortably.
The whole screen for the Calendar
From 17 September 2026 the grid can take the whole screen. The ⤢ button at the right of the grid's head puts the title, the four chips and everything else above the grid away, and the bars run from under the app's own top bar down to the bottom of the phone. The week dates stay pinned at the top while you scroll down through the beds, and the Weeks | Season toggle, Still fits and the funnel stay in reach on one line. Tap the button again and the page comes back. It remembers which you chose, so a phone that likes the grid full stays full.
The names can shrink to their pictures. Tap the empty corner where the names meet the dates and the name column folds to a strip just wide enough for each plant's own photo — or its crop drawing when the journal has none — and its … menu. Twice the Calendar on a phone, and you still see who's who. Tap the corner again for the names. That choice is remembered too.
Two things went with it. The dates and the names now sit on a solid ground, so a bar scrolling underneath them disappears instead of showing through the words. And a garden with no zones no longer opens on a No zone heading over everything — the beds start at the top, and the heading appears only once there is a second zone for it to stand beside.
Planning where nothing has gone in yet
A bed with room to spare says so on its own row — room for about 32 sq ft — see what fits › — and that opens What still fits for the whole garden, where Plan it puts the best crop in as a plan.
To put something in for a day still to come, tell Rafe in your own words — “put lettuce in the porch pot on October 6” — or add the plant normally and set its date ahead on the plant's own page. Either way marks it planned rather than in the ground, and it appears on the grid outlined.
Two doors start that sentence for you: a round + at the end of Calendar's four chips opens the chat with “Plan ” already typed, and on the Calendar chip's month an empty day still to come says “Nothing yet — tell Rafe what to put in ›” and opens the same chat with that date filled in. Once Rafe plans it, the reply carries See it on the Calendar › — the bar's already on the grid when you tap through.
Once something is planned, you can move it: grab the handle at the end of its bar and slide it along the grid. While you're dragging, the crop's own planting window lights up underneath the row, and a line under the grid tells you what the day under your thumb means — “Oct 6 — in the window. Picks from about Nov 20”, or “Dec 1 — too late this year.” Let go and the day is saved — unless the line says too late this year, in which case the bar snaps back and the line says which day it kept.
Only a planned bar drags. A plant already in the ground has a date that happened, and that's edited on its own page — not by a slip of a thumb on the grid.
Add succession
Crops you'd normally sow more than once — lettuce, radishes, bush beans — carry Add succession in the … menu on their row. A crop we hold no sowing interval for, a planting with no day of its own yet, or one where every day left is already too late says so right in the menu instead of opening a sheet — the real last chance, not a button that quietly stops working.
It plans a run of them at once. The sheet asks: every so many weeks (it starts on the crop’s own interval), how many more, and the dates they would go in — the last one marked when it is the last sowing of the year, and fewer offered than you asked when the rest would not finish before your frost. Plan these puts them all on the calendar as planned, with one undo.
The month
The Calendar chip — the second picture, a page of a wall calendar — is a month at a time: the days of the month in seven columns, today ringed, your frost days marked, and on each day small marks for what happens then — a plant going in (outlined when it is only planned), a first picking opening, a job due — with a count when there are more than three. Tap a day and its list opens underneath: what goes in, what starts to pick, and every job due that day — from 17 September 2026 the very rows the Tasks chip lists, so a day with five waterings lists all five — each opening the plant or the job. ‹ and › move a month at a time; Today brings you back.
Your tasks
The Tasks chip — the ticked list — is the list. A search box at the top, then Overdue, Today, This week, Any day and Later, each with its count — Any day, since 17 September 2026, holding the jobs whose window is open rather than due, so Today is only what today asks for. A row is two lines on a phone: the job and its when, then its crop and bed as tags, never the bed twice. Every job is one line: a tick where it can be done in a tap — the same tap Today uses, so a watering ticked here is the same watering — the job, the crop and the bed as tags, and when it is due at the right. Tick one and it is struck through with an Undo for a few seconds, then it leaves. Done with all of these on the overdue pile ticks them in one go, with one undo. A job that is not due yet, or that needs more than a tap, keeps its line and its when-word and no tick.
What still fits this year
Open it from the Still fits › button at the head of the Calendar's grid, from see what fits on a bed that has room to spare, or from the link under a task list with nothing on it.
From 8 October 2026 it opens on how much season is left, then every crop that can still finish before your frost, grouped by the last day to plant it. The top line counts down to your first frost, like 11 weeks until your first frost, about Oct 13, over a bar that runs from your last spring frost to your first fall one, with today marked.
Under it, the crops come in groups: Last chance this week, then By early August, By mid-August and so on. Each crop says its last day and how long until you pick it, like Plant by Jul 29 · 11 weeks to pick, or Last day tomorrow when it's that close. That last day comes from walking the calendar day by day until the crop can no longer finish, so it's the real cutoff, not a rough guess. Hardy crops like carrots can run up to your hard freeze (28 °F), so their last day can fall later than you'd expect.
The crops you said you eat come first, then the ones you've grown, then the ones most gardens grow. Flowers and cover crops come last. You see ten at first, and … more still finish › shows the rest. If you haven't told us what you eat, a line says so, and the list starts with what you've grown, or with the crops most gardens grow if you haven't grown anything here yet. If none of your crops can still make it, it says that too, then shows what can.
Tap a crop and a sheet asks where. Each of your places is listed, with the ones that have room first. A bed offers one row across its short side, like 1 row across Bed 2 · 24 plants, and − and + step it by whole rows, up to what the open space holds. A pot is counted by how many gallons it holds. A bed or pot with no size on file asks how big is it? with a few common sizes to tap, and the size you pick is saved to it. A bed that's already full says Full.
Tap Plan it and that many go in as a plan dated today, the same as adding them by hand. They show outlined on your Calendar until you confirm they're in the ground. Undo takes back the whole batch for a few seconds, and the crop's row reads Planned ✓.
In fall, once nothing more can finish before your frost, it says so: Nothing more finishes before your frost. Crops that go in now for next year, like garlic, are still listed with their last day.
It works from your own frost dates when it has them, and says which underneath. For now it only plans for today. You can't pick a future day on this screen yet, and Rafe can't yet tell you what fits in one bed on its own. To plan every place at once, priced in jobs and hours before you commit, Plan the whole rest of the year › at the foot opens the Garden Planner.
Why your trees are not on it
This came from a gardener with a potted orange tree, who pointed out that ten fruit trees would sit on the ribbon permanently and crowd everything else off it.
He was right, and the reason turned out to be in the data rather than the layout. Every annual crop we hold records its growth stages counted from the day it was sown — one life, from a seed, with a deadline at the end. Most perennials record theirs counted from the frost dates instead, because their stages describe the recurring year of a plant that's already established. Those are two different kinds of calendar, and putting them on one axis meant the app kept telling fruit trees they were late for a race they weren't in.
The Year chip on a garden with nothing that comes back says so in one line and offers to add a plant, rather than four chips over an empty page.
So the ribbon draws this year's crops only — the ones racing your frost. For a while there was a second band underneath for established plants, and it was cut on 13 August 2026: a picture of a normal year is a picture of nothing happening, and the jobs those plants actually need are listed with real dates on the Year Wheel, which has the fourth chip to itself since 17 September 2026.
Nothing is hidden
The ribbon draws every annual plant you're growing this year — there's no cap and no “+ N more” button to work through. A big garden runs long rather than getting crowded: group it by zone and bed, and collapse the ones you're not looking at right now.
Plants we can't draw at all get counted and explained underneath, by reason, rather than dropped without a word. It used to give the same explanation for every case — “no growth stages recorded” — which was false almost every time it appeared. It now says whether the crop is missing from our catalog, whether we hold its stages but can't pin them to dates, or whether it genuinely has no stages recorded.
Young fruit trees, and what the ribbon will not claim
A fruit tree's seasons repeat every year — that's what makes the ring work for something that lives a decade. But a tree planted this spring isn't going to fruit this year, and for a while the app said otherwise: every apple showed as ripening in August, whatever its age, and the job list said to pick it.
It now checks how old the tree is against how long that crop takes to bear, and holds back the stages about fruit you can actually pick until it's old enough — saying so, rather than leaving a gap. Flowering stays in. A young tree does blossom before it can carry a crop, and taking that fruit off so the tree puts its energy into structure is real advice, not a mistake.
Garlic, and the other two you plant in autumn
Ask what can I plant now? in September and garlic now answers yes — along with cereal rye and hairy vetch, the two cover crops sown at the same end of the year.
It used to say the payoff was next year. Garlic really is a perennial, and the app was treating every perennial the same way: an asparagus crown planted this spring won't feed you this summer, so there's no point answering a frost question about it. That's true of asparagus and wrong about garlic, which goes in around the first frost and is lifted the following July — one crop, then you plant again.
The date was already in our records. Garlic's first growth stage runs from six weeks before your first frost to two weeks after it. Nothing was missing; the planting question simply never looked there, because every other crop is measured from the LAST frost of spring and garlic is measured from the first one of autumn.
Asparagus and rhubarb still answer the way they did. They're perennials that genuinely make you wait.
Common questions
- What happens when I tap a bar?
A sheet opens from the bottom of the screen, with everything about that planting in one place. At the top: the plant, its bed, and its own date — "Planted out Aug 4," "Sown Apr 12," or for a planned one, "Planned for Oct 3 — not in the ground yet." Then Stage now, in the app's own words — "Setting fruit," say, "Not in the ground yet" for a planned one, or "Done for the season" once every stage is past. Next stage says when, with the word about because stage dates are the crop's typical schedule, not yours — "Ripening starts about Sep 28," or "This is its last stage." Next job is the soonest job on your list that names this plant, one line with when it's due and a tick — the same tick Today and Tasks use: tap it and it reads Done with an Undo for a few seconds, or Open when it needs more than a tap. Otherwise it says "Nothing due for it right now." Two buttons underneath: Open the plant goes to its own page — what a tap did before — and Ask Rafe about this plant opens the chat with that plant already named. Escape, the ×, or a tap outside closes the sheet; on a keyboard, Enter on a bar opens it the same way.
- Why does a row show a photo of my plant?
Because it's your plant, not a stock drawing of the crop — from 16 September 2026. Each row on the Week grid, and each plant in the Month view's day list, leads with your latest journal photo of it, the same picture its own page and the garden pages already use. A plant with no photo yet keeps the small crop mark it always had.
Nothing is uploaded anywhere new, and nothing about taking a photo changes. The picture comes from your journal — a photo you took through the app and filed to that plant.
- How do I put something in for a day that hasn’t come yet?
The easiest way is to tell Rafe. Say something like "put lettuce in the porch pot on October 6" and he plans that instead of adding it as already in — the reply says plan lettuce for Oct 6, and it shows up on the ribbon outlined. Two shortcuts start that sentence for you: a round + at the end of Calendar's view chips opens the chat with "Plan " already typed, cursor waiting; and on the Month view, an empty day still to come says "Nothing yet — tell Rafe what to put in ›" and opens the same chat with the date already filled in. You can also do it by hand: add the plant normally, then open its own page and set its planted date ahead of today. Either way marks it planned and puts it on the ribbon, where you can grab its handle and slide it to a different day.
- What does "planned" next to a bar mean?
Nobody has confirmed that plant is in the ground yet. Give it a day later than today — through Talk or on the plant's own page — and it goes in as a plan: the bar draws outlined instead of filled, with the word planned beside it, and it gets no jobs on your list until the day comes and you confirm it.
- How do I move a planned planting to a different day?
Grab the handle at the end of its bar and slide it along the grid. While you're dragging, the crop's planting window lights up underneath the row and a line under the grid tells you what that day means — "Oct 6 — in the window. Picks from about Nov 20," or "Dec 1 — too late this year." Let go and the new day is saved — unless the line says too late this year, in which case the bar snaps back and the line says which day it kept. Only a planned bar moves this way. A plant already in the ground has a date that happened, and you change that on the plant's own page rather than by a slip of a thumb.
- What does Add succession do?
It sits in the … menu on any row whose crop has a known sowing interval, and plans a run of the same crop in the same bed: every so many weeks (it starts on the crop's own interval), how many more, and the dates they would go in, previewed — one tap plans them all, with one undo. It offers fewer than you asked when the rest would land too late in your season to finish, and marks the last one as the last sowing of the year, so you always see the real last chance. A crop we hold no interval for says so in the menu instead of opening the sheet.
- What are the two zoom buttons, Season and Weeks?
Season draws your whole season across the screen at once, from about four weeks before your last frost to four weeks after your first. Weeks draws the same bars at week scale, in a side-to-side scroll with gridlines every seven days and today already a third of the way into view. Season is the whole-garden picture; Weeks is for when the season view has packed too much into too little space to read.
- Can I collapse a zone or a bed on the ribbon?
Yes — tap its name. The ribbon remembers which ones you've collapsed on this device, so a big garden doesn't mean scrolling past everything every time you open it.
- Why do my fruit trees get a circle and my tomatoes get a bar?
Because a tree's year comes back round and a tomato's does not, and from 23 August 2026 the app stops drawing them the same way.
A bar runs from your last frost to your first one. That's the right shape for an annual: it's a single life, from a seed, that either finishes before the cold or does not. It's the wrong shape for an apple. On that line December and January sit at opposite ends of the screen — and they're the same winter. A prune in the last week of December fell off one edge and reappeared at the other, which isn't a small inaccuracy: it's the chart asserting something false about time.
So the ring. Twelve months round the outside, today as a hand, and the colors are what most of your perennials are doing at that point in the year — resting, getting going, cropping. One ring for the whole garden, not one per tree. Ten trees would be ten dials, which is a dashboard rather than an answer.
It's not a score. There's nothing to fill in, no percentage and no streak. A wheel has no finish line, which is exactly why we chose one.
- There is a dot on the ring with a number in it. What is that?
A month, and how many yearly jobs fall in it. Tap it and they're listed underneath — what the job is, which plant, and the date — and each row opens that plant.
A month rather than a day, on purpose. Pruning lands on almost every woody plant we carry and it clusters in the dead of winter, so ten fruit trees would put ten marks inside a few degrees of the ring and leave the rest of it empty. One mark per month keeps that readable: a January with six prunes in it shows as one bigger dot saying six.
The exact dates live in the list, which is where a date belongs. Nobody prunes on the 14th because a dial said so.
- Which plants go on the ribbon, and which stay on the ring?
Anything you start fresh each year — sown or planted this season — goes on the ribbon. Anything that comes back on its own stays on the ring. We take that from the crop's own record, not a guess. Peppers are a deliberate exception: a pepper is a perennial where it comes from and an annual in an American garden, so it sits on the ribbon, because it genuinely is racing your frost.
- Why does a bar run off the right-hand edge?
Because that plant's life runs past the first frost. On this year's crops that's worth knowing, and the ribbon marks it with an arrow. On the plants that come back every year there's no arrow, because of course they run past the frost — that's what a perennial is.
- My plant is not on the ribbon at all. Why?
One of three reasons, and the ribbon now tells you which, in a line underneath. Either the crop isn't in our catalog at all; or we hold its growth stages but can't pin them to dates, which happens for a small number of crops — mostly fruit trees and berries — that have no sowing or transplant offset; or it has no growth stages recorded, which is rare in our catalog. For a long time the chart said this last one about almost every missing plant, which was wrong nearly every time — most of what's missing is one of the first two reasons, not this one.
- Does it use the variety I planted, or just the crop?
The variety, wherever we have a sourced figure for it and it lines up with the crop's calendar — which is why not every variety gets used: 2,222 of our 3,174 carry a sourced maturity figure, and the ribbon takes one only where it also fits the crop's own calendar. It matters more than it sounds: our tomato record spans 52 to 90 days, Sungold is 57 of them and Ace 55 is 85. Where a variety has no figure of its own, or records its days in a way we can't honestly line up, you get the crop's range and we leave it at that rather than converting a guess.
- What do the colors mean?
Getting going, filling out, cropping, resting. The key under each row only lists the colors actually drawn on it. An earlier version lit up only for a harvest window, which meant a garden with nothing ripening before frost showed a row of gray bars and looked broken.
- The frost note says "6 plants" instead of listing them. Why?
Because all six had the same thing to say. The note names the plant and the number of days, so six bush beans sown together produce six identical sentences — and until 25 August 2026 it printed all six, one under the other, which made one fact look like six problems. Word-for-word identical warnings now share a line and carry the count, the same way your daily jobs already say "10 plants." Nothing is hidden behind that number: only sentences that match exactly are merged, so two plants whose timing genuinely differs still get a line each.
- The bar for my beans just stops. Is something missing?
No — that's the year ending, and it's deliberate.
The four colors describe what a plant is doing: getting going, filling out, cropping, resting. A bean finishes. It doesn't rest and come back next spring the way a rhubarb crown does, so after cropping there's nothing left to draw.
We chose not to invent a fifth color for it. A word for the end of a plant's life on a chart of a growing year would be a strange thing to look at every time you opened the page, and the app already records that a plant is finished on the plant itself.
⚠ One honest limit: a blank tail looks the same as us not knowing. If that ever reads as "no data" to you, tell us — the fix is a small mark showing where the year ends, not a new color, and we'd rather hear it than guess.
- One of my plants says "nothing scheduled" and the identical one beside it says when it will sprout.
Ours, fixed 17 August 2026. Both had a sprouting date the whole time. Earlier the same day we stopped the app claiming a just-sown seed was ready to pick, and for a few crops that left the Garden screen with nothing to put in its place — so it fell back to nothing scheduled, which is our word for the state of our list rather than anything about your plant.
If a screen ever tells you there's nothing to say about a plant you can watch growing, that's us being wrong. Tell us with the pencil button.
- My plant says "Probably a seedling — nobody has said it came up yet". Why probably?
Because nothing has told us it came up, and until 23 August 2026 the app said it anyway. A kale sown 30 days ago read "so it is worth a look" near the top of its page and "seedling · vegetative" eleven lines down, while the Garden list flatly said Seedling. Three claims about one plant that couldn't all be true.
The stage comes from a calendar, not from anyone looking. We work out where a plant should be from the day you sowed it and your own frost dates, which is a good guess and is not a sighting — so while we're still asking whether it came up, the word carries a probably and says why. The moment you tell us it's up, the hedge goes and the plant page and the Garden list both say the stage plainly.
A plant you bought and set out is never hedged. There's nothing waiting to sprout on a tree that arrived alive.
And you now get one stage rather than two. Growth stages overlap on purpose — a plant really can be finishing one and starting the next — but "seedling · vegetative" reads as a mistake rather than as a fact. We name the later one.
- I sowed basil yesterday and it said Ready to pick. What happened?
Ours, and fixed on 17 August 2026. Our records measure some crops from the day you sow, and others from the day a seedling gets planted out. Basil is the second kind — so if you sow it straight into the ground, the day it would have been planted out never happens, and those later stages had nothing of yours to count from. They fell back to the typical calendar for basil, and in late summer the typical basil is ready to pick.
The app now refuses to claim a stage the plant cannot possibly have reached. A seed that hasn't been in the ground long enough to come up cannot be ready for anything.
One thing it still can't do, and we'd rather say so: for those crops it doesn't yet know when your basil will be ready. It's stopped guessing wrongly, which isn't the same as knowing.
Widened on 15 September 2026. The August fix covered only the picking stages, so a broccoli sown on 23 May could still read Forming heads in 3 days the day it went in, and a cabbage Growing leaves before its seed was up. Now, until a seed has had long enough to come up, the app won't name any later stage at all — heads, bulbs, roots, flowers, dormancy — and says Sprouting instead. Plants that don't start from a seed, like a sweet-potato slip or a potato, are untouched: leaves on day one is right for those.
- The chart used to be on my home screen. Where did it go?
It moved to your week, then moved again. From 16 September 2026 it lives on Calendar, its own tab at the bottom of the app — and it's what Calendar opens on. It first left your home screen because it was in front of the thing you open the app for: measured on a real garden of eleven plants, the home screen had nineteen separate things asking for attention before you scrolled at all, and the chart was two of the biggest. The Calendar's chips — each a small picture rather than a word since 17 September 2026 — now cover what your week used to hold on one long page, with the whole season and what still fits both reached from the grid's own head rather than a chip of their own.
- There used to be a second chart for my trees and bushes. Where did it go?
Cut on 13 August 2026. Its own caption is the best argument against it: established plants — this is their usual year, not a countdown. A picture of a normal year, for plants that aren't racing anything, drawn in the same shape and the same colors as the chart above it and carrying its own copy of the same color key. Two near-identical striped blocks where the honest summary of the second one is nothing is happening to these. And the part of a perennial's year you can actually act on was already directly underneath it, with dates — cut back the rhubarb on 2 November, winter prune the apple on 1 December. The chart and that list answered the same question and only the list gave you a day. The split itself was still the right call: the two kinds of plant keep different calendars, so what we did is stop drawing one of them on the other's axis, not put them back together.
- My winter squash showed "Resting" after I picked it. It was dead.
It was, and that was our word being wrong — fixed 31 August 2026.
Seven crops have a curing step: garlic, luffa, onion, pumpkins, shallot, winter squash and sweet potato. Curing is what happens to the crop after you pick it — skins hardening in a shed for a week or two so it keeps. It's not the plant having a rest. The plant is finished.
We had it filed under the same heading as dormancy, which is a real rest: an apple tree in January is asleep and comes back. So the chart said Resting over a squash that was on a shelf.
Curing now shows as Cropping, because you're still getting your crop in — it's the last step of it. And Resting now means only one thing: a plant that's asleep and will come back. 45 crops do that; the other 111 never will.
Shipped 2026-07-24. Last checked 2026-10-08. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us — support docs going stale is a bug.