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The season chart

Partly live · Ten of our 152 crops — mostly the ones you start from a bulb, a crown, a runner or a cutting rather than a seed — have no sowing or setting-out offset, so where you have not told us a date yourself their stages cannot be pinned to the calendar and they will not draw. The chart counts them and says why rather than leaving them out silently. Established plants now carry their once-a-year jobs in a list under the chart — pruning, feeding and one spray window — but the year is still not fully described: seven crops have no feeding date, there is only the peach leaf-curl spray, and bramble cane pruning stays deliberately vague. See tree and bush care for what is and is not in there.

The band on your week screen — tap the job count on Today to reach it — is every crop you started this season, drawn against your own last and first frost. Each bar is one plant's life, colored by what it is doing — getting going, filling out, cropping — with today as a lit line. Underneath it, in words, any plant whose fruit would arrive after your frost. Established plants that come back every year get a RING instead, just below — a whole year at once with today as a hand on it, because a tree’s year comes back round and a bar cannot say that December touches January.

What it is

One band, your whole season, left edge to right edge: last frost to first frost, both of them your own dates. Every plant you own gets a row. Today is the lit vertical line.

Each row is that plant's life, not just its harvest. That distinction came from a real complaint — a gardener whose plants had no harvest window inside the season saw a chart of flat gray bars and reasonably assumed it was broken. It was not broken; it had nothing to say, because it only knew how to draw food. Now it draws the whole life, so the shape of the year is visible whether or not it ends in a tomato.

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 chart 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 is 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 were not in.

So the chart 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 a little further down the page. A tree never appears in the “will not finish before your frost” note either, for the same reason — running past your first frost is what a tree does every year.

Nothing is hidden

The chart draws everything you are growing this season. If you have a lot, it draws the first handful and says how many more there are, with a tap to show them. It used to draw five and say nothing about the rest, which is worse than a crowded chart — a crowded chart is at least honest about how much you are growing.

It also used to hide one row behind a + 1 more button, which takes up more room than the row it is hiding and gives you a tap that achieves nothing. Under three, it just draws them.

Plants we cannot draw at all get counted and explained underneath, by reason. That line used to give the same explanation for every case — "we have no growth stages recorded for them yet" — which was false every time it appeared, because all 152 crops we carry do have growth stages. It now says whether the crop is missing from our catalog, or whether we hold its stages but cannot pin them to dates.

Young fruit trees, and what the chart will not claim

A fruit tree's seasons repeat every year — that is what makes the chart work for something that lives a decade. But a tree planted this spring is not going to fruit this year, and for a while the chart 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 is 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 will not feed you this summer, so there is no point answering a frost question about it. That is 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 are perennials that genuinely make you wait.

Common questions

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. The bar runs from your last frost to your first one. That is the right shape for an annual: it is a single life, from a seed, that either finishes before the cold or does not. **It is the wrong shape for an apple.** On that line December and January sit at opposite ends of the screen — and they are the same winter. A prune in the last week of December fell off one edge and reappeared at the other, which is not a small inaccuracy: it is 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 is not a score.** There is 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 are 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. **The list of what is coming next has not moved** — it is still directly under the ring, with the nearest job first. The ring is the shape of the year; that list is the work in it.
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 is nothing to say about a plant you can watch growing, that is 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 could not 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 are still asking whether it came up, the word carries a *probably* and says why. The moment you tell us it is 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 is 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 has not been in the ground long enough to come up cannot be ready for anything. **One thing it still cannot do**, and we would rather say so: for those crops it does not yet know when *your* basil will be ready. It has stopped guessing wrongly, which is not the same as knowing.
The chart used to be on my home screen. Where did it go?
It moved to your week — tap the job count on Today and it is underneath. **It moved 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. It is something to LOOK at, and it was sitting above the one thing you came to DO. Nothing about the chart changed and nothing was removed — the week screen was already the place for looking, so now the week and the season are in the same place at two zoom levels.
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 are not 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 and the reasoning below is why: the two kinds of plant keep different calendars, so what we did is stop drawing one of them, not put them back on one axis.
Which plants go on which chart?
Anything you start fresh each year — sown or planted this season — goes on the first. Anything that comes back on its own goes on the second. 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 with this year's crops, 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 is worth knowing and the chart marks it with an arrow. On the plants that come back every year there is no arrow, because of course they run past the frost — that is what a perennial is.
My plant is not on the chart at all. Why?
One of three reasons, and the chart now tells you which. Either the crop is not in our catalog at all; or we hold its growth stages but cannot pin them to dates, which happens for the 38 crops — mostly fruit trees and berries — that have no sowing or transplant offsets; or it has no stages recorded. For a long time the chart said the last of those about every missing plant, which was wrong every single time, because all 152 crops we carry do have growth stages.
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 chart 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 cannot 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 band 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.

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Shipped 2026-07-24. Last checked 2026-08-25. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us — support docs going stale is a bug.