Plant history
Partly live · Harvest cues cover 150 of 153 crops and critical watering stages 149 of 153; the handful without say nothing rather than guessing. The season page compares against last year only from your second season on, and the short paragraph written from your entries appears only when it checks out against your own numbers.
Every plant keeps a dated record of what you did and what happened. A bed shows the same for everything growing in it. Entries are sorted by what kind of thing they were, whether they went well or badly, and how much they mattered — so a season of watering does not bury the day your first tomato came in.
Two histories, one record
A plant's page shows its own life. A bed's page shows the same thing for everything growing in it, with each row saying which plant it was.
They are the same code reading the same entries, which is deliberate: a bed whose story disagreed with the sum of its plants would be worse than no bed page at all.
How you know it is ready
The app talks to you all season — when to sow, when to feed, when to prune — and it used to go quiet at exactly the moment the year pays off. That is also the moment most likely to be got wrong. A tomato picked early is mealy. Garlic lifted late splits its wrapper and will not store.
So once a plant is inside two weeks of its harvest window, it tells you what to look for, in that plant's own terms:
- Bush beans — a pod snaps cleanly in half instead of bending.
- Garlic — the lower leaves yellow and the tops start to die back.
- Onions — the tops flop over on their own. Do not bend them over yourself.
- Oregano and thyme — the buds are fat but still closed. Once they open the flavor drops away.
150 of our 153 crops carry one. It stays quiet until the window is close, because "ready when the color turns" in May is trivia and the same sentence in August is the answer.
Cover crops get the opposite instruction from the same signal. First flower on a zinnia means start cutting. First flower on crimson clover means cut the whole thing down now, before it sets seed and comes up all over the bed next year. Those cannot share a sentence, so they do not.
The two or three weeks where water decides the crop
Every plant needs water. That is not useful. What is useful is knowing the handful of stretches where missing it costs you the harvest itself — and where watering afterwards does not put it right.
- Bush beans — flowering, and again as the pods fill.
- Garlic and onions — while the bulb is swelling.
- Lettuce — germination, then again as the head forms.
- Potatoes — flowering, and while the tubers bulk.
149 of our 153 crops carry a list of their own. Open a plant while it is in one and the app says so, plainly. The rest of the time it says nothing, and that silence is deliberate: an app that tells you to water something every single day has told you nothing at all.
What the app works out on its own
Every entry gets sorted three ways, and none of it is stored — it is recalculated each time you look, from the whole record.
- What kind of thing it was — something you did for the plant, a stage in its life, something you got out of it, a problem, a loss, or a note.
- How it went — a win, a setback, a loss, or neither.
- Whether it mattered — routine, notable, or a moment. The first harvest of a plant is a moment. The ninth is a Tuesday.
Recalculating rather than stamping is what lets a backdated entry fix the record. Add a harvest you forgot from last week and the "first harvest" badge moves to it, where it belongs.
What only you can say
The app can tell that a picking was the biggest so far. It cannot tell that the reason was the compost you finally got around to, or that losing one plant mattered more than losing four others.
That is what Mark or remove is for. Seven options, and your tag overrides whatever the app concluded.
Taking back something that never happened
The same quiet link is where you remove an entry. Open it and, under the tags, there is This never happened — remove it. It asks before it does anything, and it names what is going: Remove “Watered” from 3 days ago?
Until 23 August 2026 there was no way to do this. The card you had just answered offered an undo, and that undo lasted until the next card — so a double-tap you noticed the following morning stayed in your record for good. That is the wrong way round for a journal: a log you cannot correct is a log you stop trusting.
Removing is for something that never happened — a thumb that bounced, a tap on the wrong plant. If it did happen, it stays, even if it went badly. That is the same line the app draws between deleting a plant and recording that it died.
Two things it tells you before you tap. A photo on the entry stays on the plant, because a picture of your plant is still a picture of your plant. And removing the entry that says a plant died does not bring the plant back — that control is Actually it is still going, on the plant’s own page.
The season, read back
The reason entries are categorized at all is that a season summary needs something to read. Since 7 September 2026 it has one: open your journal and tap This season.
We built it in this order on purpose. A year-in-review written before the data exists has two options, and both are bad: invent something, or show an empty screen in December. So it reads only what you recorded, and in a first season it says nothing about last year.
Common questions
- An entry says "now in the ground — was in a pot". I never logged a move.
You did not have to — every entry quietly notes where the plant was when it happened, and from 2 September 2026 the journal reads those notes back.
When the place a plant sits changes between one entry and the next — a seed tray, a pot, a raised bed, the ground — the later entry says so, in that line. Nothing new is stored and nothing is guessed: it is the placement your own plant record carried on each day. If it is wrong, the plant's placement on its page is the thing to fix; the line follows it.
- I added a plant for next week and it says "Planting tomorrow" — when does it start tracking growth?
On the day you said you would plant it, and not before. A plant you have entered but not yet put in the ground is a plan, so the app says when you are planting it rather than pretending it is already growing. There is no growth stage, no countdown to sprouting and nothing on your to-do list, because there is nothing to do yet. On the morning of the day you chose, the job to plant it appears, the growth clock starts, and the row goes back to telling you what stage it is at.
- Can I add a plant before I have actually planted it?
Yes — put in the day you plan to do it, and the app stays quiet until that day arrives. You can stand in the kitchen the night before with a packet of bean seeds, add them, and set the date for tomorrow. Nothing appears on your Today screen that evening, because nothing needs doing yet. On the morning of the day you chose, the job to plant them is there waiting, and ticking it off is what turns the plan into a real plant in your garden. Before this, the app assumed that adding a plant meant you had already planted it, so it never asked you to.
- What is the growth stage on each journal entry, and is it about MY plant?
It is now. Until 17 August 2026 it was about a typical plant of that crop, and that is a real difference. Every entry records roughly where the plant should have been on that date, so that later you can see how yours is running against what is normal — three weeks behind is the most useful thing this app could notice. The stage was being worked out from your frost dates and nothing else: not the day you actually sowed it, not how many seasons the plant has been in. So a tomato you sowed in late July was recorded with the stage a tomato sown in May would be in.
About a third of them were wrong, and on some crops there was no stage at all. Basil, broccoli and cabbage recorded nothing for the whole of January to September, because their stages are counted from the day you sow rather than from a frost date — and the sowing date was the one thing not being used. Across our whole catalog, 68 crops recorded nothing for those nine months. That is now 4, and those four are crops we genuinely cannot place.
Why we did not go back and repair the old ones. The whole value of the stamp is that it was written at the time. If we recalculated a season of them from the planting date, what you would be looking at is our model checked against itself, which tells you nothing about your plant. So the old entries stay as they are, honestly, and the new ones are right — which is why this was the fix we hurried.
If you never told us when it went in, a photo can stand in for the date — also from 31 August 2026. For most crops our calendar cannot say anything at all without a planting date. But if you photographed the plant and we could see it was a seedling, only a narrow band of sowing dates fits that — so we use the middle of that band, and the entry says planting date estimated from a photo wherever it shows. ⚠ It never replaces a date you gave us, and it is never used to judge the photo it came from: that would be our own guess agreeing with itself, which would look like confirmation and mean nothing. It only ever describes days AFTER the picture was taken.
And from 31 August 2026 you can actually see it on entries with no photograph. Recording the stage on every entry and showing it on hardly any of them was the state this was in until now: the line was built to compare what we expected against what you photographed, and when it only had one of the two it said nothing at all. Most entries are a few words and no picture, so on most of your journal the half we always had was being thrown away for want of the half we did not. It now says model: flowering on its own.
⚠ It says "model" on purpose, and it will never tell you a plant is on track off a photograph that does not exist. Nothing was looked at, so there is nothing to compare and we do not pretend otherwise — an agreement nobody checked would be the most confident wrong sentence we could print. When you did photograph it, you get the comparison exactly as before.
- Some entries say a stage was "worked out later". What does that mean?
It means we placed it after the fact, and we would rather say so than let it pass for something we knew at the time. Every journal entry records roughly where the plant should have been on that date, worked out from your frost dates — which means an entry written before you pinned your garden could not be placed at all, because there was nothing to work it out from. Those entries sat blank. When you add your location, they get placed, and each one says it was worked out later so you can tell it apart from a stage recorded on the day. The two are not equally good and it would be easy to hide that. A stamp made at the time was made when the plant was in front of you; one placed afterwards was worked out from dates alone. Both are useful, one is better evidence, and a journal that blurred them would be a journal you could not lean on. We only fill in the ones that were genuinely blank — an entry we already placed is never quietly recalculated, and one your crop has no stage model for stays as it is.
- I tapped the button twice. Did it log the same thing twice?
No. If two identical entries land within a couple of seconds — same plant or bed, same thing done, same note, same amount — the app keeps one. A thumb bouncing on a button is not two waterings — and this covers watering a whole bed, which is one tap that reaches every plant in it. Anything genuinely different is kept as two: change the note or the amount and you get two entries, because those are two real things that happened.
- I logged something that never happened. Can I take it back?
Yes, from 23 August 2026, in the plant's own history. Open the entry's control — it reads Mark or remove — and there is a This never happened — remove it link under the tags. It asks first, naming the entry and when it was: Remove "Watered" from 3 days ago? Before this the only way back was the undo on the card you had just answered, which lasted until the next card, so a duplicate found the next morning could never be taken out. Removing is for something that never happened. If it did happen and you got the details wrong, that is a different thing — the entry keeps its place.
- If I remove an entry, does the photo on it go too?
No. The photo stays on the plant. A picture of your plant is still a picture of your plant, whatever the entry beside it said, so it keeps its place in that plant's photos. The confirm says so before you tap, because it would otherwise be a fair thing to assume the other way. The entry itself goes for good, here and on your other devices.
- I removed the entry that says my plant died. Is my plant back?
No, and the app says so before you do it. Died is two things: an entry in the story, and the plant being marked finished. Removing the entry takes the first and leaves the second. The control that actually brings a plant back is on the plant's own page — Actually it is still going — and the confirm points you at it rather than letting you find out afterwards.
- Where do I see what is coming up for one plant?
On the plant itself, under "Next" — the two soonest things ahead of it: a stage it will go through, a once-a-year job like pruning or feeding, or something you asked to be reminded of, with yours ranked first. For a tomato that is usually the date you can expect to be picking; for an apple tree it can be as far out as next March's feed. The plant's whole year, everything past those two, is on the Calendar.
- Why does a tree show next spring but my tomato does not?
Because a tomato only gets one go. An annual's stages hang off the day it went in and its life is a single run at the frost, so a stage that has finished is finished — showing it again as "in 300 days" would be a lie. A tree's year repeats: its stages hang off the frost dates and describe the same shape every year, so a window that has passed genuinely comes around again and the list says when.
- Why does my bed's history show things I did to individual plants?
Because that is the bed's story. Watering one tomato is recorded against the tomato, so a bed that only showed bed-wide actions showed almost nothing — which is how it worked until 31 July 2026. A bed now shows everything that happened in it, with a tag on each row saying which plant it was.
- What does 'worth remembering' mean?
It is a filter that hides the routine. A season is a few hundred waterings and about nine things you will actually recall: the first harvest, the biggest picking, the day something got eaten, the day something died. Those are the entries it keeps. Nothing is deleted — the full record is one tap away.
- How does it know which harvest was the first?
By looking at everything before it. That matters more than it sounds: if you log a harvest today and then remember one from last week and add it, the badge moves to the earlier one. We work these out fresh every time rather than stamping them on an entry, precisely so a backdated entry corrects the record instead of leaving a wrong badge behind for ever.
- What are the colored dots?
Green for something that went well, amber for a setback, orange for a loss, and plain for everything else — which is most of it. A setback and a loss are kept apart on purpose: aphids are a bad afternoon, a dead plant is the end of a plan you had in March, and one shared color for both would flatten the difference.
- Can I mark something myself?
Yes. Every entry has a quiet link — Mark or remove — with seven tags behind it: a win, a setback, lost it, first time, best yet, learned something, or not sure what this is. Your tag always beats what the app worked out, because you were standing in front of the plant and it was not. The same link is where you take an entry back if it never happened; before 23 August 2026 that link only did the tags.
- Why can I not write my own tags?
Because free text stops being searchable within about a month. You write aphids, then aphid, then APHIDS, and the fourth one is a different tag from the first three. A short fixed list is the difference between something that can drive a season summary later and something that is decoration.
- Is there a year-in-review?
Yes, from 7 September 2026 — open your journal and tap This season. It reads the season back off your own record: the first harvest and how it ran against last year, the biggest picking, the days you wrote something down, the photos, the moments worth remembering, and anything lost. A first season says nothing about last year, because there is nothing honest to say yet.
- What are the chapters at the top of a plant's story?
The plant's life as milestones, from 7 September 2026 — sown, came up, planted out, first flowers, first harvest, biggest picking, a setback, the end — each with its day count and the photo from that week. The line above them says how it ran against a typical plant of its kind: came up two days late, flowered about on time, first picked five days late. That comes from the crop's own growing windows, and it says about on time for anything inside the window rather than counting days from the middle of it. The full day-by-day list is still there, one tap below, under Everything, day by day.
The moments Rafe sees in your photographs are chapters too — first seed leaves, first blooms, tiny fruit forming, color turning — once they are confirmed. A reading within three days of something you logged yourself is folded into your entry rather than shown twice.
- Does the plant page remember what happened this week last year?
Yes, if it was around then. Under the chapters, This week, last year shows anything that plant has on record from about a week either side of today's date, in any earlier year you have — newest first, in the same words the journal uses, with a photo where there is one. It also reads your earlier plantings of the same variety — a tomato you replant every year has no earlier year of its own, but if last year's was the same variety, its record from around this date shows here, named so you know which planting it came from. When you never said which variety a plant is, it reads earlier plantings of the same crop instead. A plant in its first season, or one you only just added, with no earlier planting of that variety either, shows nothing there rather than an empty line — there is nothing honest to say yet.
- Does any of this need an account or a connection?
An account, yes. A connection, no. The app needs a free account with your email before it opens. After that, the whole history is worked out on your phone from records already stored there, so it reads the same with the radio off. The one exception is the short paragraph on the season page: it is written on our server, so it needs a connection, and the page shows its plain facts without it.
Shipped 2026-07-31. Last checked 2026-10-07. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us — support docs going stale is a bug.