GardenLooking after the plants that stay
Partly live · One spray window is in — peach leaf curl, and only after you say you spray at all. No other spray job exists, and feeding gives you the month but never an amount. 22 of 26 fruit crops carry a sourced pruning window and 19 carry a feeding date; seven — currant, goji, grape, honeyberry, kiwi, mulberry and raspberry — still have no feeding job because we have no source covering those crop groups. The only spray window is the peach leaf-curl one; there is nothing for scale, mites, apple scab or fire blight. Bramble pruning is also deliberately generic, because whether you cut a raspberry cane down depends on which cane it fruits on and our record of that is not trustworthy enough to act on (see below).
The once-a-year jobs your fruit trees and bushes need are listed, with when each one falls, and it checks whether your trees can actually set fruit — seven of our fruit crops cannot pollinate themselves, so one planted alone blossoms every spring and drops the lot. The timing is per crop and sourced: apples and pears are pruned bare in late winter, citrus only in spring, and cherries and apricots must NOT be pruned in winter at all — cuts made in cool wet weather let bacterial canker in, and the limb above the cut can die the following summer.
Three or four jobs a year, not one a week
A tomato needs something from you most weeks. An apple tree needs pruning once, maybe thinning once, and then it gets on with it. Those are different shapes, and a screen built for the first one answers "nothing today" for the second about eleven months out of twelve.
So the plants that come back get their own list, on the This week tab: every job still ahead, soonest first — how many days away if it is close, the month it lands in if it is further off. It is short on purpose. Watering and weeding are not on it — they are true of every plant in every month, and four useful lines buried in forty is the same as no lines at all. Anything whose window is open today has left this list and become a job in your day.
The timing is per crop, and it is the whole point
"Prune your fruit trees in winter" is the advice everyone has heard, and for a cherry it is how you lose a limb.
| What you grow | When it gets pruned | Why then |
|---|---|---|
| Apple, pear, plum, peach, fig, blueberry, currant and the rest of the deciduous fruit | Late winter, bare, before the buds swell | You can see the shape, and the cut heals as growth starts. Not early winter — a hard freeze on a fresh cut does damage. |
| Cherry and apricot | Warm dry weather after flowering — never in winter | Cuts made in cool wet weather let bacterial canker in. The limb above the cut can die the following summer. |
| Orange, lemon, lime, grapefruit, mandarin | Spring only, once hard frost is past | Summer cuts sunburn the newly bare wood. Fall cuts wake up soft growth just in time for it to freeze. |
22 of the 26 fruit crops have a pruning window. Every one of those windows is counted from your own frost dates rather than a fixed month, because "February to April" is right in Arizona and wrong almost everywhere else. The four without are blackberry, raspberry, grape and strawberry. The first three are for the reason below. Strawberry sits in this group because it is a fruit, not because it is a bush — it is the one plant here that is not woody at all, it stands under a foot tall, and nothing on it gets pruned.
Feeding: the month, not the amount
One feed as growth gets going is most of what a fruit tree wants, and more is not better. That is the whole shape of it.
Deciduous fruit — apple, pear, plum, peach, cherry, apricot, blueberry — feeds in spring as the tree wakes up. UC IPM puts nitrogen "in the spring or split between spring and just after harvest", and says levels "should be low but not deficient as the harvest nears". Citrus is on the same idea with its own calendar: nitrogen "just prior to bloom", then again in late spring.
We give you the month and not a quantity, and that is a decision rather than a gap. How much depends on your soil and the size of the plant, and being wrong is not merely unhelpful — UC IPM lists what too much nitrogen buys you: "softer fruit, poor fruit color, and reduced storage and shelf life", plus more pest trouble. On citrus, feeding late in the season delays coloring and roughens the rind. A number we cannot stand behind is worse than no number.
What the app does hold for every crop is how hungry it is — light, moderate or heavy. That is the honest version of the same question.
19 of the 26 fruit crops carry a feeding date. The seven that do not — currant, goji, grape, honeyberry, kiwi, mulberry and raspberry — are missing it because no source we fetched covers those crop groups, not because they do not need feeding.
The one spray window, and why we ask before showing it
Peach leaf curl is the disease that puckers and reddens new peach leaves in spring. By the time you can see it, the year is decided — the infection happened months earlier, on the bare twigs.
There is exactly one window a year to do anything about it: after the leaves drop and before the buds swell. UC IPM puts it at "just after leaves have fallen", says "a single early treatment when the tree is dormant is effective", and is blunt that outside the window there is no point: treating in leaf "won't be effective and may harm foliage". Penn State gives the reason — the spores are only exposed while the leaves are off, and a swelling bud shelters them.
That deadline is the useful thing, and it is what the app gives you. It does not name a product or an amount. What goes on food you are going to eat is your decision.
And because it is your decision, the app asks before it will show you the job at all. The first time the window comes round it puts one question on that row — do you spray your fruit? Answer no and spray jobs never appear again.
Whether your tree can fruit at all
This is the one thing on the screen that looks at your whole garden rather than one plant, and it is the most expensive question in home fruit growing — expensive in years, which you cannot get back.
Seven of our fruit crops cannot set fruit from their own pollen: apple, pear, sweet cherry, kiwi, honeyberry, mulberry and persimmon. Plant one on its own and it blossoms beautifully every spring and drops everything, and nothing about the tree tells you why. Six more — blueberry, currant, elderberry, mandarin, plum, pomegranate — will fruit alone but crop noticeably better with a second variety.
So the app counts what you actually own. One apple gets a warning. Two apples of the same variety still get the warning, because two of the same cannot pollinate each other. Two different varieties, and it goes quiet.
It uses the variety, not just the crop, and that changes the answer a lot. Apples as a crop need a partner; Golden Delicious does not. Sweet cherries need one; Stella, Lapins and Sweetheart do not. 749 varieties carry their own sourced answer, so if you have told the app which kind you planted it is using that rather than a rule of thumb.
It knows which way the pollen flows, too. Mutsu, Jonagold, Stayman and Winesap need a partner and cannot be one — their pollen is sterile. Plant two of those together and it looks like a pair and sets nothing, so the app says so and tells you to add a third variety. Clemson puts it plainly: those varieties "should not be used as pollen sources for other varieties; therefore, plant at least two other varieties with any of these."
Kiwi and mulberry get a different answer, because a different variety is not what they need. Those plants are male or female, and only the females fruit. Two female kiwi vines will never crop no matter how well matched — what is missing is a male, and one male serves several females. The app says that rather than the generic advice, which for these two is not merely incomplete but wrong.
It never says your tree will not fruit. A neighbor's apple over the fence does the job perfectly well and we cannot see it. Nor will it pick the partner for you: whether two varieties work together depends mostly on flowering at the same time, and we do not hold bloom dates per variety yet. What it can tell you is which ones to rule out.
Dead and removed plants do not count as partners — a tree that died two years ago is not pollinating anything, and treating it as one would cause the exact failure this check exists to prevent.
“Why is it not fruiting yet?”
Usually because it is young. A pear can take ten years. Open any tree and it now tells you how many seasons it has been in and what the range is for that crop — so two summers into a pear reads as nothing is wrong yet, and eleven summers in reads as worth looking into.
25 of our 26 fruit crops carry a sourced range for this. Mulberry is the one without.
One of these we had wrong
Until August 2026 the app told cherry and apricot growers to prune in late winter, along with everything else. No source ever said that — the note attached to it admitted as much, calling it the standard deciduous scaffold and adding that some growers delay to summer to reduce disease.
It was a placeholder that read as advice, and it survived because it sounded like every pruning tip anyone has heard. It got found because a gardener asked why the app never distinguished a winter prune from a summer one.
What is honestly not here
Pruning and feeding are in. Spraying is not, seven crops still have no feeding date, and bramble cane management stays deliberately vague — the reasons for each are in the questions above. Naming them here rather than quietly leaving them out is the point — a care list that looks complete and is not is worse than a short one.
If your tree went quiet
Until 16 August 2026 there was a fault worth knowing about, because the symptom was nothing happening. The app remembered which day of the year you did a job, but not which year — so a watering or a feed you logged in the autumn was read the following spring as something you had done on a day still months away, and that job never came back onto your list.
It affected trees and bushes more than anything else, because they stay in your garden for years and keep collecting history, and it compounded: each autumn job you recorded pushed the date further out.
It is fixed. The app now remembers how long ago you did something rather than what date it was. Nothing you recorded was lost — it was only being read wrongly — so a tree that had gone quiet will start asking again on its own.
Common questions
- I bought a tree that was already five feet tall. Where do I say how old it was?
- **On the Add a plant screen, from 25 August 2026 — and before then you could only say it afterwards, on the plant''s own page.** Pick your tree, choose **A plant I bought** under *How did it start?*, and a box appears: **How old was it when you planted it?** A guess is fine — whole years is all we use, and the difference between a two-year and a three-year nursery tree changes nothing we tell you. The difference between nought and three changes almost everything. **Why it matters:** the app works every date off the day a plant went in the ground. Without this, a five-year-old apricot you planted in April reads as a first-year seedling — so every spring it would tell you to stake it, strip its fruit and water it every few days, advice meant for a whip you grew yourself. **Leave it blank if you grew it here from seed.** Blank has always meant *it started here*, and it still does. The question only appears for trees, bushes and other plants that come back each year — a lettuce you bought as a seedling is not asked, because the answer could only ever be nought. **And it is still on the plant''s page too**, so a tree you added before today can be aged whenever you get to it.
- Why did the tree page stop asking which rootstock my tree is on?
- **Because for some trees the answer changed nothing, and we were asking you to go and read a nursery label for it.** On an apple, a pear, a mandarin or a peach, the rootstock really does decide how far apart to plant — a dwarf apple wants about 6 feet and a standard one about 25. Those still ask, and the answer still sharpens the number. **On an apricot and a persimmon we were offering exactly one answer.** A question with one possible answer is not a question, so that card is gone. **On a cherry, a plum, a grapefruit, a lemon and an orange we were saying "the rootstock is what decides" about the spacing — and it does not.** We hold one spacing range for those, whatever they are grown on. The card still appears where it earns its place — citrus rootstock does change how many years until you get fruit — but the spacing line now just tells you the number instead of promising to sharpen it later. **And one tree was showing nonsense.** A seed-grown orange read "we can only say 15–15 feet", because our source gives oranges a single figure and the sentence printed it as a range with the same number at both ends. It says "15 feet" now.
- I grew my tree from a seed — why does the app say it should be fruiting already?
- **It should not any more, once you tell it.** Nearly every fruit tree sold in a nursery is two plants: a variety joined onto somebody else's roots. That is what makes it fruit in two or three years. A tree grown from a seed is on its own roots and takes far longer — seven to ten years for a citrus. On the plant's page, under **How did this tree start?**, there is an option for **grown from seed / cutting** — and from 19 August 2026 the app asks you outright once a tree has been in a season, rather than waiting to be found, and picking it moves every fruiting date out to match. If you planted a pip, that is the one you want. **Cherry, pear and persimmon used to offer a confusing extra choice here and no longer do.** It was called *seedling*, and in the nursery trade that means the opposite of what it sounds like: a grafted tree whose ROOTS were grown from seed. Anyone who had grown a pear from a pip read that word, recognized themselves, and picked the option meaning the opposite — getting a grafted tree's dates with more confidence than before they told us anything. Those three now say **standard**, which is what the trade means by it and what the sources actually describe.
- Why does one plant show chill hours and another shows nothing?
- Because we only print the ones somebody published. Fruit trees and bushes need a stretch of winter cold before they will flower properly, and how much depends heavily on which variety you bought — a peach can want anywhere from 200 hours to over a thousand. Extension services publish a figure for the common fruits and simply do not for others: currant, elderberry, goji, honeyberry and mulberry have no species-level number anywhere we could find, and we checked every chilling table we know of plus each plant's own pages. Mulberry used to show a number here and it has been taken down, because it was ours rather than anybody's. A blank means we looked and came up empty, not that nobody has gotten around to it.
- Why does my cherry say to prune in summer when my apple says winter?
- Because cherries and apricots are the exception, and it is not a small one. A cut made in cool wet weather is an open door for bacterial canker; the infection shows up the next summer when a limb wilts and suddenly dies. UC Agriculture and Natural Resources say to wait until late spring or early summer for these two, UC Marin Master Gardeners say they are pruned only once the rains have ceased, and Michigan State explains the mechanism — the bacteria are active in cool wet conditions and go quiet after sustained warm weather. Apples and pears have no such problem and are pruned bare in late winter.
- Why is citrus different again?
- An orange tree is evergreen, so it has no leafless season to prune in, and the risk is what a cut EXPOSES rather than what it lets in. University of Arizona names both bad seasons: prune between May and mid-October and the newly bare limbs can sunburn, prune from November to January and the soft regrowth a cut provokes runs straight into a frost. That leaves spring. Arizona also notes citrus needs far less pruning than a deciduous tree — the wood is strong and it does not need opening up for light.
- Where do I see these jobs?
- On the **This week** tab, in a list headed "Coming up on your trees and bushes". It shows every once-a-year job that is still ahead of you, soonest first — a countdown inside a month, the month itself past that. **Anything due right now is not on that list**; it is already a card in your day's jobs, which is where you would act on it. Watering, weeding and pest-watching are deliberately left out — they are true every month for every plant, and including them would bury the four lines that actually change through the year.
- It says Feed but not how much. Why?
- Because the amount depends on your soil and the size of your plant, and a wrong number there does real harm rather than merely being unhelpful. UC IPM is blunt about the direction of the risk: too much nitrogen gives you softer fruit, poorer color, worse storage life and more pest trouble, and on citrus a late feed delays coloring and roughens the rind. So we give you the month, which is sourced and portable, and we do not print a rate we cannot stand behind. The app does hold how hungry each crop is — light, moderate or heavy — which is the honest version of the same information.
- Which of my plants get a feeding date?
- Nineteen of the 26 fruit crops, including apple, pear, plum, peach, cherry, apricot, blueberry and all five citrus. Seven do not: currant, goji, grape, honeyberry, kiwi, mulberry and raspberry. That is not a claim they do not need feeding — it means no source we fetched covers those crop groups specifically, and we would rather leave a gap than borrow a tree-fruit rule and hope.
- It asked whether I spray. Why ask instead of just telling me?
- Because whether you put anything on your fruit is your call and not a horticultural fact. We ask once, on the one job it governs, the week it becomes relevant — a question about spraying means nothing in March and means something when the leaves come off a peach. Say no and spray jobs never appear again. Say yes and it behaves like any other job. The answer is saved to your garden, so you are not asked twice on another device.
- Why does it not tell me WHAT to spray?
- Because the useful thing we have is the deadline, not the bottle. Peach leaf curl can only be treated while the tree is bare — the spores overwinter on the twigs and a swelling bud shuts them away until next year. UC IPM is explicit that treating in leaf does not work and can harm the foliage. That timing is worth real money to know and most people do not have it. What you choose to put on your own food, and how much, is not ours to decide.
- Is that the only spray the app knows about?
- Yes, and deliberately. Peach leaf curl is the clearest case in home fruit growing: one disease, one hard deadline, one window a year, thoroughly documented. Scale, mites, apple scab and fire blight are all real and all messier — they need monitoring, repeat applications, and a judgment about whether you have the problem at all. Adding them badly would be worse than not having them.
- How would the app know if I actually have leaf curl?
- It would not, today, and that is the honest gap. By the time you see puckered red leaves in spring the infection happened months earlier on the bare twigs, so the person who most needs the reminder is the one who saw it last April and never connected the two. Recognizing it from a photo in your own journal is exactly the job for the photo diagnosis we are building, and it is written down as the highest-value case for it.
- Why is my raspberry's pruning advice vague?
- Because the honest answer depends on something we cannot reliably tell you yet. A raspberry either fruits on canes that grew this year or on last year's, and the two want opposite winter treatment — cut the wrong ones down and you remove next summer's entire crop. Our record of which is which is currently unreliable for 52 varieties, and we would rather be vague than confidently wrong about something that costs a season.
- My little tree is being told it should be fruiting. It is a foot tall.
- **It should not be, and from 19 August 2026 it is not — but it depends on one thing we have to ask you.** Nearly every fruit tree sold in a nursery is grafted: a named variety joined onto somebody else''s roots, which is what makes it bear in two to four years. A tree you grew from a pip or a cutting is on its own roots and takes far longer — seven to ten years for a citrus. **Until you tell us, we assume you bought it**, because that is true of most fruit trees. It is the right guess and it is still a guess, and on a tree you raised yourself it is wrong by about six years. So the app now asks, once a tree has been in the ground a season: *was it grafted, or grown from seed?* Answer **I grew it myself** and every fruiting date moves out to match — the fruit-set stage disappears, the harvest task goes, and the plant page says plainly that nothing is wrong yet. **One more thing was wrong until the same day, and it was the sentence rather than the dates.** The line explaining your tree''s age read the nursery-tree figure even after you had told us the tree was seed-grown — so a three-year-old could be told *"it is old enough to start"* directly above a stage list, worked out from the corrected figure, with no fruiting in it. One screen, two answers. There is one figure now and both read it.
- My orange tree was told to pinch out suckers. Is that right?
- **No, and it was wrong in a way that could have cost you branches.** Until 13 August 2026 that job read "pinch out suckers where branches meet the main stem" — which is what a sucker means on a tomato. **On a grafted citrus it means something else entirely.** Your orange is two plants: a hardy rootstock below the graft and the sweet orange above it. The suckers worth removing are the shoots coming from the rootstock, low down, below that join — they are sour orange or trifoliate, they will never fruit, and they steal from the top. **Following the tomato version means cutting off the tree's own scaffold branches.** The correct instruction was written into our records by the person who sourced them and the app was printing a generic sentence over the top of it. A crop's own instruction now wins — and on 14 August the short version was fixed too. **It had been corrected in one place and not the other**, so the sentence read correctly while the job was still headed "Pinch out suckers", and you told us so a second time. It now reads "Remove suckers" everywhere, which names the job and leaves the how to the plant. **And if your tree was never grafted, the job should not be there at all** — a seed-grown citrus has no rootstock to sucker from. **That last part only became true on 19 August 2026, and this page said it a week early.** You could pick *grown from seed / cutting*, we saved it, and the sucker job stayed exactly where it was — in three separate places the answer failed to reach the part of the app that decides what to show you. It is fixed now and checked on the screen in both directions: pick it and the job goes, unpick it and the job comes back. If you already answered, you do not need to answer again.
- Why does my fruit tree not get a weekly watering amount any more?
- Because we did not really know it, and printing it anyway made a guess look like a measurement. Our record listed one inch a week for citrus with a note beside it saying citrus is basin-irrigated and no weekly figure is actually stated by our sources. **An inch a week is a vegetable-bed unit** — for a lettuce it is both the right amount and the right method. For a thirty-foot tree it is neither. So on fruit trees and berry bushes, where the figure is our own estimate rather than a sourced one, the sentence is dropped rather than halved, and you get the thing that is actually true: feel the soil around the roots and water if it is dry.
- I planted strawberries this spring and they are ripening — why did the app not offer me a harvest?
- **That was our mistake and it is fixed.** The app holds a figure for every fruiting plant: how many seasons it waits before you can pick anything. For an apple that is two to eight years, and holding back a harvest job is exactly right — a tree planted yesterday is not ripening fruit. But the figure was written down two different ways by two different people. Some records counted the season you plant in as season one; ours counts it as season zero, so a plant you put in this spring and pick this summer is a zero. Fourteen records were filed the other way, and every one of them told the app to wait a year. **Strawberries were the worst of it** — an everbearing type fruits the same summer you plant it, and the app quietly withheld the pick. Also affected: artichoke, raspberry, chayote, sage, lovage and horseradish. All corrected. **Asparagus deliberately still refuses** — its two-to-three years is not about when it can bear, it is the rule that you must not cut the first spears at all, because those spears are what builds the crown. Cutting them is how people lose an asparagus bed.
- My year planner told me to thin the fruit on a tree far too young to carry any. Why?
- **That was a real bug and it is fixed.** Your plant has two lists: today's jobs, and the year's dates. Only the first one was checking how old the plant is. So the daily list correctly said nothing about picking a three-year-old pear, and the calendar right beside it scheduled a fruit-thinning for June. Seven plants did this — apricot, asparagus, grape, kiwi, peach, pear and rhubarb. **Asparagus was the one that mattered most:** it was scheduling a spear-cutting in the establishment years, and cutting those first spears is how people lose a bed that should have fed them for twenty years. Both lists now read the same record, so they cannot disagree. **The fix also gave the young trees something back.** The old check hid the plant's whole late-summer stage, and on an established tree that stage is the only one still running — so a three-year-old pear, peach or persimmon was getting no watering reminder at all for the entire year. Now the fruit jobs are held back and the watering stays: pear went from 47 days of watering advice a year to 138.
- I am adding a tree that has been there for years. The longest choice was "a couple of months ago".
- **It was, and from 23 August 2026 it is not.** The *When was it planted?* list on the add screen now carries **Last year**, **2 years ago**, **3 years ago** and **Longer ago than that** underneath the day-and-week answers. Until then the honest options ran out at sixty days, so an established tree came in either as a two-month-old seedling or with no date at all — and both of those get planting-year advice every spring: stake it, water it every few days, strip the first fruit. **You do not have to be exact, and that is not us being vague.** On a tree the year is the whole of it. Past its first season the app counts seasons rather than days, so a few weeks either way changes nothing you will ever see. If you do know the day, the plant's own page takes a full date and the run-through asks for one. **"Longer ago than that" is not a shrug.** It records five seasons, which is the point past which everything the app holds back from a young plant has already been released — so naming a bigger number would not change a single job. **And the date now says which year when it is not this one.** *Planted Aug 23, 2023* rather than *planted Aug 23*, which read as this August on the one line whose job is to say how long the plant has been there.
- My tree has been in the ground for years. Does the app know that?
- It does now. Tell it the year the plant went in and it stops giving you planting-year advice — staking a young whip, watering it every few days, stripping the first fruit so the tree builds structure. That advice is right in year one and wrong every year after, and until August 2026 an established tree got it every spring. **One gap in that ran on until 17 August 2026 and is worth naming, because it looked fixed:** it worked for a plant two or more years old and did nothing at all for one exactly a year old. Read near its planting date, 151 of our 152 crops gave a one-year-old plant word for word the same advice as one put in that morning. Two corrections of the same size were pointing opposite ways and canceling out — one pushed the plant's calendar back a year, the other pulled today back a year to work out which season a date belongs to, landing back inside the window that had just been moved. A date you give us is now taken at face value and never second-guessed; only a date we had to estimate from the typical calendar for the crop gets adjusted, because that is the only kind missing a year.
Shipped 2026-08-03. Last checked 2026-08-25. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us — support docs going stale is a bug.