When will it be ready?

The number on the packet is answering a different question

“Days to maturity” counts from the day a seed goes in the ground. That is what the number means on every seed packet, every catalog and every extension page — including ours.

A cutting was never a seed here. A nursery plant was somebody else’s seed, months ago. Both of them walk in partway through the story, and the published number has no way to know that.

So if you bought a tomato in a pot and the app says it is weeks off, the app is not looking at your plant. It is counting from the only day it knows about: the day you told us you planted it.

What to tell us, and what it changes

A tree, a bush or a cane

Open the plant and fill in how old it was when you planted it. It is on the plant’s own page, and a guess is fine — about four years is plenty. Leave it blank if you grew it here.

This is the one that matters most, because without it we read your planting date as the plant’s whole life. A six-foot apricot you put in this April reads as a first-year whip, and a first-year whip gets told to stake itself, strip its fruit and drink every three days — every spring, forever.

Tell us it arrived at four years old and that stops. It also changes what we say about bearing: a plant that needs three years before it fruits has already done two of them in somebody else’s field.

An annual you bought as a starter

Record it as a transplant, with the day it went in your ground. Where the crop publishes a day count measured from setting a plant out, we use that one. Plenty of crops do — it is the normal way to quote a tomato or a cabbage.

Where we only hold a count measured from seed, we use it anyway, and it runs long. Your plant will be ready before we say so.

A cutting

The same box takes it, but it asks in years, so a cutting you struck three months ago goes in as 0.25. That reads oddly on a plant that has never seen a birthday, and we know it — the box was written for a nursery tree.

Put it in if you want the age counted. Otherwise record it as a transplant with the day you planted it and read our dates as the far edge rather than the answer.

A photo can measure your tree. It cannot age it, and we will not let it try

There is a box for how tall the plant is, and a picture can fill that one in — send a photo and the app offers something like about 6 ft tall. It is offered rather than applied, you can change it or ignore it, and it goes stale after about six weeks rather than standing for ever.

The age box works the other way round: only you can answer it. That is a decision rather than a gap, and it is worth a sentence because it sounds like something we are just not doing yet.

A photograph can see size. It cannot see age — and the trouble is not that it would sometimes be wrong. It is that a guessed age does not come out looking odd. It produces a perfectly sensible schedule for a completely different plant: the wrong growth stage, the wrong answer about whether it can bear yet, the wrong advice about pruning it hard. Nobody reading it would spot a thing.

So the picture contributes what it can actually see, and the age stays yours. A nursery size is a better thing to know than a guessed birthday, and yours is checkable — the plant is standing right there.

When nobody knows the start, the answer is a range, not a shrug

If we do not know how old your plant was and the crop only publishes a from-seed count, the honest answer is not “we cannot say”. It is a span with a near end and a far end:

• The far end is our figure, counted from your planting day, as though the plant started here from seed. It cannot be later than that.
• The near end is that figure minus however long the plant had already been growing when you got it. A garden-center tomato in a 4-inch pot is usually five to seven weeks along. A one-gallon shrub is often a year or two.

That span is a real answer, and it narrows every week — because the plant keeps giving you the thing that closes it.

Why we round toward “not yet”

When we do not know how far along your plant already was, we could round either way. We round late, on purpose, and it is worth knowing why:

• Saying not yet about a plant that is ready costs you a few days of looking at it. You will notice. The fruit is right there.
• Saying ready about a plant that is not costs you the fruit, because you go and pick it.

Those are not the same mistake, so we do not treat them as the same mistake. An app that runs a little late is annoying. An app that runs early takes your crop.

The thing that beats every number: flowers

Here is the part worth more than any of the above.

Once a plant is flowering, the rest is measured in weeks — and it is the same few weeks whether your plant came from a seed, a cutting or a garden center. A tomato that has set fruit is six to eight weeks from a ripe one. It does not matter how it got there.

So the honest answer, when nobody knows the start date, is: stop counting from the beginning and start counting from what you can see.

Write down the day you see the first flower. Write down the day the first fruit sets. Two dates you observed beat one date we guessed, and they are the two dates that actually predict the picking.

That is also what we do with them — a sign you record moves the plant’s own timeline, rather than leaving it on the crop’s typical one.

And when we hold no number at all, we ask you

Some plants have no maturity figure we trust in either direction — not from seed, not from setting out. A strawberry crown and a raspberry cane are the two you are most likely to own.

For those, if you planted partway through the picking season, we used to say nothing at all — and that was the wrong kind of honest. An everbearing strawberry crowned in July genuinely might fruit in September. We cannot work out whether it has. You can, by walking out and looking.

So now the app asks:

Any strawberry starting to turn color?

One look at the bed settles it — we cannot see it and you can.

Say yes and the picking job appears. That is the whole point of asking: we do not ask questions whose answers change nothing. The thing we ask about is the same thing that unlocks the job.

Two things this deliberately does not do:

• It does not ask about a plant we do have a figure for. A two-year-old apple stays quiet, because we know its answer and asking would invite you to overrule a number we are confident in. Silence there is us being sure, not us being stuck.
• It does not ask about the early signs. Any tiny fruit starting to form? is a different question, and answering yes to it does not mean there is anything to pick. We ask about the last sign before picking, not the first sign of the season.

Today this is strawberries and raspberries — the two crops where we hold no figure and the question is worth your time. It will cover more as the plant records fill in.

And nothing gets told to pick in its first two weeks

Underneath all of the above there is now a floor: no plant is told to pick, cure or cut in its first 18 days, whatever we do or do not hold about it.

That sounds obvious. It was not happening. A mint cutting put in yesterday was told to harvest itself, because the app had no figure for mint to argue with — and no figure had been letting the job through rather than holding it back. Four plants behaved that way: mint, rosemary, lemongrass and mulberry.

Why 18 and not a rounder number: it is the fastest thing in our whole plant database. Mizuna goes from seed to a cut leaf in 18 days, and nothing else we hold is quicker. So it is the longest floor we can use without contradicting something we already know — and if we ever add a faster plant, the check that guards this fails rather than quietly telling you that plant is not ready.

What it does not fix. Eighteen days is a floor, not an answer. Past it, those same four plants are back to having no figure, and can still say ready before they are. That is a gap in the records rather than a rule, and filling it is the actual fix.