A pot and a raised bed want different watering

Common questions

How much soil do I need to fill a new raised bed?

**Tell us how deep the bed is and we will tell you how many bags — new on 25 August 2026.** We already ask how wide and how long a raised bed is. Add the depth, in inches, and the bed's page works out the fill: *"About 16 bags of 2 cu ft — 32 cu ft in all"* for a 4 by 8 foot bed a foot deep. **Bags, because nobody buys cubic feet.** The number you need standing in the aisle is how many bags go in the trolley, and the total is there underneath if you are buying it loose by the yard instead. It always rounds **up** — you cannot buy four fifths of a bag, and being one short means a half-filled bed and another trip. **We ask for the depth rather than guessing it**, because a rectangle has no volume without one and a guess here is wrong by whole bags. Most raised beds are built 6 to 12 inches deep, and the question says so, so it is a choice rather than a test. **This tells you how much, not what of.** Filling a raised bed with plain topsoil is a mistake — there is a proper mix, it matters, and getting it wrong costs a season. That is gardening advice rather than arithmetic, so we are sourcing it properly before we say anything, and the screen says as much.

Does the app know my front porch gets less sun than my lawn?

**It does now — you tell it once, per spot, added 21 August 2026.** Open a spot from My garden and there is a question under the size: *How much sun does it get?* Three answers — full sun, part sun or shade — and the hours each one means are shown as soon as you pick, so you can check yourself against them. **Then it is used.** Open a plant living in that spot and, where it matters, you get one line: *Front porch gets part sun. Grows in part sun, but expect a lighter crop than in full sun.* **Most plants say nothing at all, and that is the design.** Nearly every food crop wants full sun, so a warning keyed on that would appear under every plant in every shaded bed and mean nothing. What we hold instead is how well each crop copes with less: 57 of them lose nothing worth mentioning and stay silent, 22 crop less and say so once, six are actually happier in shade and are told so as good news. For the rest we have no record either way, and the line says exactly that rather than predicting a failure.

A new line appeared on Today asking how much sun my spots get. I have had these beds for months.

**Added 24 August 2026, and you have not missed anything.** The sun question itself has been on each spot’s own screen since 21 August. The problem was that you had to go and look at that screen to find it — so if your beds were already in the app, nothing ever told you the question existed. **The app was quietly unable to say a plant was in the wrong place, and never mentioned it.** So it now appears in the App tasks list on Today, counting how many of your spots have an answer. Tap it and you land in My garden; open each spot and answer once. **Nothing was assumed on your behalf while you had not answered.** A guess read off a bed’s name is only ever shown to you for confirmation — it is never saved as your answer, and the item does not tick itself because of one. It is a one-off. Once every spot has an answer the line goes for good, and a new spot inherits nothing — it asks you.

It said my spot “sounds like part sun” before I told it anything. Where did that come from?

**From the name you gave the spot, and it is a suggestion waiting on you — nothing is saved until you agree.** Call somewhere *Front porch*, *Under the oak* or *South-facing lawn* and the word itself settles the question, so the app offers the answer and a button that says **Yes, that is right**. That is the whole job. **It only speaks where the name genuinely names it.** *Back garden* comes back with nothing, because it says nothing. A bare *Balcony* says nothing either — plenty are open to the sky and plenty are tucked under the floor above, and the word does not tell you which; *Covered balcony* does. *Shady patio* names two different things at once, so it refuses rather than picking one. **A reading off a name is never written into your record.** If it were, we could not afterwards tell it apart from something you actually said, and it would go stale the moment you renamed the bed. That is also why the advice on your plants stays quiet until you have confirmed: the app will not tell you a crop is going to crop lighter on the strength of a word it read in a label.

I do not know how many gallons my pot is. Do I have to go and measure it?

**No. If you have taken a photo of the plant in it, the app has already seen the pot and will tell you what it thinks — added 19 August 2026.** The pot’s own page shows you a line like *"From your photo, it looks like about 5 gallons"*, along with what in the picture made it think so, and one button that says **That is the size**. Tap it and it is saved. That is the whole job. **The number is never typed into the box for you, and nothing is stored until you agree.** A guess sitting in a field looks exactly like a number you gave us yourself, and a wrong number you believe is your own is worse than an empty box — everything downstream trusts it. If it has got it wrong, tap **Not right**, or simply type your own number over it. Either way we keep a record of what we guessed and what you made it, which is how the guessing gets better. And if you already put a number in, it will not argue with you — an answered question stops being a question.

Why does it ask my pot for gallons now instead of width and length?

**Because that is how a pot is sold, and it was the wrong question before — fixed 18 August 2026.** A raised bed has a footprint: you walk around it, you fill it, width times length tells you how much room is in it. **A pot has a volume.** It is stamped on the bottom, it is what you ask for at the nursery, and it is the number that decides whether a tomato can actually live in it. Asking a pot for width times length measures the shadow it casts — the one dimension nobody has and nobody needs. Standard nursery sizes are 1, 3, 5, 7 and 15 gallons, and a half-gallon is a real answer too. **If you already measured a pot the old way, we have left your numbers exactly where they are.** You will see them on the pot’s own page with a note. We did not convert them, and that is deliberate: turning a rectangle into a volume means inventing a depth you never told us, and we would rather show you what you actually said and let you correct it than quietly invent a number and present it as yours.

My garden says "Bed missing" over some plants. Have I lost them?

No — they are all still there, and the heading is us telling you the truth rather than hiding it. Every plant is filed under the spot it lives in. If that spot goes away — nearly always because you deleted the bed on another device and the change reached this one part-way through — the plants that were in it have nowhere to sit on the screen. **Until 12 August 2026 they simply vanished from the page while still being counted at the top.** You would read "20 plants", scroll the whole way down, find fifteen, and nothing anywhere would tell you the other five existed. Now they get their own heading, the count at the top matches what you can actually see, and tapping one opens it so you can give it a new spot. Nothing was deleted and no history was lost — the plant keeps every note, photo and date you ever put on it.

Why does it ask what kind of space one bed is, but not another?

Because your name for it already answered. Call a bed **raised bed**, or **deck pots**, or **the orchard**, and the app reads the kind straight off the name and stops asking. Call it **Back bed** and it still asks — a bed is raised about as often as it is in the ground, and the word settles nothing. **It will never guess on an unclear name**, and this is the reason: the kind of space decides watering advice. A pot holds a fraction of what a bed does and dries from every side, so calling a bed a pot would have you watering wrong on the strength of one word. If the name says two things at once — "greenhouse pots" — it asks, rather than picking one. And nothing read off a name is saved as though you had chosen it: what you pick always wins, and if you rename the bed the reading changes with it.

I followed a link and got "that address does not exist". Have I lost my garden?

No. That screen means the ADDRESS was empty, not your garden — a link to a page we do not have, or to a plant that has since been removed. Nothing you have saved is touched by opening a bad link. It used to be worse: a wrong address quietly showed you the Today screen, and if your garden had not loaded yet that read as "nothing planted yet" — the most alarming sentence in the app, as the answer to a typo. Now it says plainly what happened and gives you two ways back.

Why does it keep asking what my plants are planted in?

Because the answer changes the advice more than anything else we know about a plant, and because there is no good moment to stop asking. You add plants in March and again in July, and the July ones are just as unanswered as the March ones were. It is one tap per plant and it never asks about that plant again.

My plant is in the ground but it sat in a bed I had called a pot. Was the advice wrong?

**Yes, and it is fixed — 19 August 2026.** If you marked a plant as going straight in the ground, or into a raised bed, but the spot it sits in was called a pot or container, the app gave that plant the POT watering advice: check often, water little. That is written for a five-gallon pot that dries from every side. Given to something in open ground, which holds moisture for a week, it has you watering far more often than the plant wants. It happened because "in the ground" was being read as though you had said nothing at all, so the name of the spot filled the silence — except there was no silence, you had answered. **What you pick now genuinely wins**, which is what this page has always said it did. It shows up most on a mixed spot: a porch or a patio with some things in pots and something else planted into a bed there. Nothing to redo — the advice is worked out fresh every time you look at it, so it is already right. **And from 23 August 2026 there is no answer left that defers.** A greenhouse used to be the one that did — a greenhouse tomato really is in a pot or in a bed, and saying "under cover" did not tell us which, so the app went back to guessing from the spot. That answer has been taken off the list, because it was never an answer to this question. Say your bed is a greenhouse and your plant is in a pot, and both are held. Every one of the four answers now settles it on its own.

What difference does it actually make?

A seed tray under a light can dry out in a day. The same seed in open ground has a week of moisture underneath it. Before this, we inferred the answer from the KIND of bed a plant was assigned to — which says nothing at all about a tray on a windowsill, and is how established-plant watering advice once ended up under four-day-old seed.

Do I have to name a tray?

No, and most people should not bother. Saying "a seed tray" is a complete answer and gets you the right watering advice. Naming one is a refinement that buys a specific thing: everything on a named tray gets brought in together during hardening off, because it physically comes in together.

What does naming a tray change?

It replaces a guess with a fact. When several plants are hardening off, the app has to decide which ones you will carry in on the same trip — without a tray it uses a two-hour window around their bring-in times, which is a reasonable guess. With a tray it just knows. Everything on it comes in together whatever the clock says.

I typed the tray name slightly differently the second time. Did I make two?

No. Tray names match without regard to capitalisation, the same way bed names do — "Windowsill tray" and "windowsill TRAY" are the one tray. Quietly making a second would teach you the app is not paying attention.

Do I have to remember to update this when a plant moves?

No — from 11 August 2026 the app asks. Finish a **Plant it out** job, or a potting-up job, and the very next thing it does is ask where the plant went. Before that it recorded the date and nothing else, so a tomato you had planted in open ground was still on file as a seed tray, and the watering advice went on treating it like one. The move was recorded; the plant never moved. Any job that records a transplant asks, including moving a seedling into a bigger pot, because that is the same kind of change — a different container means different watering.

What happens when I plant something out of its tray?

Change its placement to a bed or the ground and the tray link is dropped automatically. A plant in the ground is not on a tray, and leaving the link would keep grouping it with a tray it is no longer on for every bring-in from then on. From 10 August 2026 it also ends hardening off — the daily job, the evening bring-in alarm and the line on your home screen all stop together. A plant rooted in a bed cannot be carried inside, so asking you to was never a real job.

Does it matter if I never answer for some plants?

The watering advice gets less accurate, and one job keeps appearing that may not apply. Hardening off ends when you say a plant is in a bed or in the ground — but only when you have said so. Until then the app keeps offering it, on purpose: going quiet about a tray of seedlings over a question we never asked is the worse mistake of the two. The hardening card carries a button saying it is already in the ground, which answers this question from where you are standing.

It asked where a plant was, and I had already told it. What changed?

**The question was badly named, and we renamed it on 19 August 2026.** It used to read *"Say where the plants are"*. If your tomatoes live on the front porch, you have already told us that — the porch is a bed, it is on the screen, and being asked again reads as the app having forgotten. It was never asking that. The buttons behind it are a seed tray, a pot, a raised bed and straight in the ground: **what the roots are in, not where the plant is standing.** (There was a fifth, *a greenhouse or tunnel*, until 23 August 2026 — see below.) Those are different facts and both matter. A pot on the front porch and a bed on the front porch are the same place and want completely different watering. It now asks *"What is it planted in?"* and names the bed you already gave us right above the buttons, so it is clear we still have it. **And since 25 August 2026 it also marks the likely answer.** If you told us the bed is in the ground, *Straight in the ground* comes up with a border round it and the line *You said this about Back bed*, so you can see where the guess came from. ⚠ **It is marked, not chosen** — a seed tray can sit on any bed there is, so the bed only ever makes one answer likely. The other three are one tap away and nothing is recorded until you pick. Where the bed cannot suggest anything honestly — a greenhouse names a roof, not what the roots are in — nothing is marked at all.

I answered "a seed tray" a while back and nothing seemed to change. Was I imagining it?

**No. Until 19 August 2026 four of the five answers we offered then changed nothing at all, and this page told you otherwise.** The answer was saved, and the question stopped being asked, but only *a pot* actually reached the part of the app that works out watering. A seed tray, a raised bed, straight in the ground and a greenhouse were all recorded and then ignored — so a tray of seedlings kept getting the advice for a row in open soil, which is exactly the mistake this question exists to prevent. It is fixed, and nothing is lost: the answer you already gave is on file and started working the day the fix shipped. You do not need to answer again.

The app is asking when a plant went in. Did I not already tell it?

**Probably not, and it is worth answering.** If you added the plant through one of the add screens we took the date then. If you added it by talking to the app — a photo, or a message — the date is optional there on purpose, because a plant is worth adding even when you cannot remember. From 19 August 2026 the app comes back and asks, rather than leaving it blank forever. **It matters more than it sounds.** With no date, every job we show you is worked out from a typical plant of that crop planted right about now. On a tree that means being told to mulch it, weed round it and rub the suckers off something that has been in the ground for years. Answering drops those the moment you tap. **A rough answer is worth far more than none.** For a tree the year is the whole of it — pick *last year*, *2 years ago* or *longer ago than that* and we count from today''s date in that year, because what matters for a tree is how many seasons it has had, not which week. For anything annual the exact date is the one that counts, and there is a date box for it: a bean''s whole life is shorter than the error in "last year".

Where do I change a planting date I already gave?

On the plant''s own page, under **Details** — there is a date box called *When it was planted*. It has been there a while; nothing pointed you at it, which is the real complaint somebody made and the reason the app now asks rather than waiting to be found.

Can I skip it?

Yes, and it will be back tomorrow. Skipping is respected for the rest of the day. Nothing breaks while a plant is unplaced — the app falls back to what it can infer from the bed — it is just less accurate than it could be, which is why it keeps mentioning it.

More on this

• Hardening off
• Timelines
• What shipped and when