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The variety can move your dates by weeks

Partly live · Both kinds of variety — one you PICK from our list and one you TYPE because it was not in it — are backed up and follow you to another device, as of 12 August 2026. Before that date a typed one stayed on the device you typed it on.

When you add a plant, you are asked which variety it is, because the variety can move your dates by weeks. You get three honest answers: pick one from our list and your dates sharpen automatically; say "I'm not sure" and the app keeps asking later, because it genuinely doesn't know; or type the name if it isn't in our list, and the app stops asking and quietly notes the gap so we can add it. Since 13 August 2026 there is a fourth way that involves no tapping at all: mention it in a chat — "my kale is Red Russian" — and a button appears to save it onto the kale you already have.

Three answers, not a form

Adding a plant used to have no way to say which variety it was at all — the name you typed sat in the plant's label and nothing behind the scenes knew it. So the plant page kept asking “which kind of tomato?” above a plant that already looked like it had an answer.

Now there are three ways out, and each one is a different, honest fact:

You know it, and we hold it

Search or scroll the list for your crop and tap the one you planted. This is the answer that sharpens your dates — a Sungold and a Cherokee Purple are both “tomato,” and they ripen weeks apart. The list is grouped by how the plant grows where enough of a crop's varieties record it — vining, bush, that kind of thing — because that is easier to answer than days-to-maturity, which nobody knows off the top of their head. Tomatoes are the exception, and it is worth knowing. They group by whether the plant fruits all at once or keeps going until frost, and those headings still read Bush and Vining because that is how seed catalogs label them. It is not something you can settle by looking at a young plant — if you are unsure, the seed packet says it, and skipping the question costs you nothing.

You genuinely don't know

Say so. Nothing is saved for the variety, and the app will ask again another day, because it should — “I don't know” is a real answer and pretending otherwise would just hide the question, not answer it.

You know it, and we don't have it

Type the name. Your plant is saved with it, the app stops asking, and the name is logged against the crop so we know what people are actually growing that our list doesn't cover yet. That last part is the point: every name typed here is a real gap in our catalog, reported by the person growing it.

Or photograph the seed packet

If the packet is in your hand, that is the fastest answer of the lot. Take a picture of it in the chat and say what you want — “I want to plant this” is enough. It reads the packet, tells you what the crop is and roughly how long it takes, and fills in a card with both the crop and the variety already set. Tap save and the plant is in your garden with its kind recorded, which is the part that sharpens every date afterwards.

What it is reading is the printing on the packet, so a clear photo of the front, with the name legible, is what it wants. A packet at an angle in poor light is a harder job, and so is a plant already in the ground — a seedling in a bed does not have its variety written anywhere on it, and no amount of looking will find one. For that, tell it the name instead; the section below is exactly that case.

Or just say it

The three answers above all happen while you are adding a plant. For a plant you already have, there is a fourth way that involves no tapping at all: say it in a chat, the way you would say it to a person. “My kale is Red Russian.” A button appears under the reply offering to save it onto your kale, and tapping it writes it on the plant.

Say the crop as well as the kind. That is how the app works out which plant you mean — it takes the crop word and looks for it among the things you are actually growing. “It's Red Russian” on its own has nothing to attach to.

If the kind is one of ours, saying it links to the real variety and your dates sharpen, exactly as picking it from the list would. If it isn't, your words are saved on the plant and the app stops asking — the same two honest outcomes as before, without you having to know which one you're in. And it only ever fills a blank: a plant that already has a kind recorded is left alone, because a passing sentence should not be able to overwrite something you chose yourself.

Who's talking when it says “drought tolerant”

Scroll the list for a crop and some varieties carry a short line under the name — “takes the heat,” “keeps a long time after picking,” that kind of thing. Once you've picked one, that same line shows up again on the plant's own page, and there it comes with something the scrolling list doesn't have room for: who said it.

Here's why that matters. Most of what we know about a variety's traits came from the seed catalog selling it, and a seed company describing its own product is a sales pitch with a URL on it — true, maybe, but not the same kind of true as a university testing it in the ground. So instead of just stating “drought tolerant” as our own fact, the plant page says who is saying it: “Johnny's Selected Seeds describes this as drought tolerant” when it's the seller, “NC State Extension records this as drought tolerant” when it's an actual research source. Same trait, two different sentences, because they're two different kinds of claim and you should get to weigh them differently — the way you already know how to read a product review versus a lab result.

And when we don't know who to credit for a claim, we don't make one. Some varieties show no trait line at all, on the list and on the plant page both. That's not us missing something obvious about the plant — it means nobody we can name told us, and printing the word anyway would just be us guessing out loud.

Common questions

I typed the name off my nursery tag and it said you do not have that variety. Why?
**If the tag carried an alternate name in brackets, that is fixed as of 25 August 2026.** Some plants are sold under two names, and we store both — our apricot record is *"Chinese (Mormon) Apricot"*, because it is genuinely called both. **But if you typed "Mormon", we only looked for the whole thing** and told you we did not have it. We had it. Sixteen of our varieties are stored with a second name like that, and either name now finds the plant. **The size class on the tag was already being read.** A label like *"Mormon semi dwarf"* is two facts: the variety, and what it is grafted onto. Semi-dwarf, dwarf and standard change how big the tree gets and how far apart to plant it, so we keep that separately rather than treating it as part of the name. **We still will not guess.** If the name you type is not one we hold, we say so and save the rest of what you told us — we do not quietly pick the closest-looking variety, because that would silently change every date we work out for your plant. A missing variety is a much better wrong answer than the wrong one.
It told me my plant is a species but would not name the kind. Is that a gap?
No — it is the honest answer, and from 20 August 2026 it is allowed to give it. Some plants cannot be told apart from a photograph no matter who is looking. English lavender is the clearest case: you cannot tell Hidcote from Munstead by eye, and anyone who says otherwise from one picture is guessing. **What changed.** It used to have to pick a kind from the list for whatever plant it had settled on. With no honest answer available it returned the closest words it could see — so "English lavender" came back with the kind "English", which is just the plant's own name again. It can now say the kind is unknown, and say what would settle it: often a cut fruit, a flower close up, or a leaf laid flat. **It can also tell you it is a different plant entirely.** Photograph a mandarin while asking about an orange and it will say mandarin, rather than filing mandarin as a *kind of orange*.
I typed "wax" looking for the wax beans I planted and only Wax gourd came up.
**Fixed on 18 August 2026 — the search had never looked at varieties, only at crops.** So typing *wax* asked "which crop is called wax?" and answered honestly: Wax gourd. Meanwhile four wax bean varieties, a wax onion and a wax pepper were sitting in the data we ship, and nothing could reach them. **The most confident thing you can type — the exact name of what you planted — was the thing least likely to work.** **It now searches both.** Crops first, then a **Varieties** heading with the matching kinds under it, grouped so all the beans sit together rather than interleaved with the gourds. **Tapping a variety fills in both the crop and the kind**, in one tap. Finding *Golden Wax Bush Bean* and then making you pick "bush bean" from a list would be finding the thing and throwing half the answer away. The variety list downloads once, quietly, the first time you open the add screen — it is about the size of a photo, and after that it works with no signal like everything else.
It asked me "which kind of may tomato?" — which is not a question.
No, it is not, and it stopped on 13 August 2026. The question was being built from **your own name for the plant** instead of the crop's name. Call something *May tomato* and you got *which kind of may tomato?*; a plant already showing its variety got *which kind of tomato · sungold?*, which asks which kind of a thing that is already a kind. **It only ever went wrong for a crop we do not carry in our catalog**, because for everything else the crop's own name was there to use. There is no honest way to name a crop we do not hold, so the question now stops trying: it reads **which kind is it?** and works exactly the same. Fixed in both places it appeared — the plant's own page and the list in your garden. The second one we found by looking for it rather than being told. **The garden list stopped asking plant by plant on 18 August 2026** — see the next answer — so the two examples above are what it used to say, not what you will see.
My garden says "6 plants here have no kind yet". Why not ask about each one?
**Because it did, and it was too much.** Until 18 August 2026 every plant missing a kind got its own dashed strip in the list, threaded between the rows. Six plants in one bed meant six of them, and a screen for looking at your garden was more than half our own questions. **Six copies of a question are not six times the information.** You learn that some of these need a kind from the first one; the rest are the same sentence again, each pushing a real plant further down the screen. So there is now one line per bed, and it sits under the plants rather than over them — the plants are why you opened the screen. **One honest limit:** tapping it opens the first plant that needs a kind, not all of them. Answer that one and you come back to a list that says five. We would rather it walked you through the lot, and that is a bigger job than this line — so it says what it does instead of promising what it does not.
Can I just take a picture of the seed packet?
**Yes, and it is the fastest way in.** Photograph the packet in the chat and say what you want — *"I want to plant this"* is enough. It reads the packet, tells you the crop and roughly how long it takes, and hands you a card with **both the crop and the variety already filled in**. One tap and the plant is in your garden with its kind recorded. **What it is reading is the printing on the packet**, so a clear photo of the front with the name legible is what it wants. Two honest limits: a packet photographed at an angle in dim light is a harder job than one held flat, and **a plant already in the ground is a different question entirely** — a seedling in a bed has its variety written nowhere on it, and no amount of looking will find one. For that, tell it the name instead.
Do I have to go into each plant to fill this in?
Not since 13 August 2026. If the plant is already in your garden, say it in a chat the way you would say it out loud — **"my kale is Red Russian"** — and a button appears under the answer offering to save it onto that kale. Tap it and it is written on the plant; ignore it and nothing happens. Say the crop as well as the kind, because that is how the app works out which plant you mean: it matches the crop word against what you are actually growing. If you are growing kale and you say kale, it finds it.
What if I say a kind that isn't in your list?
The same thing that happens when you type one on the plant's own page — your words are saved on the plant and the app stops asking. Your dates keep using the crop's own range, because we hold no data for a name we don't recognize and would rather use an honest range than invent numbers. If the kind IS one of ours, saying it does the better thing automatically: it links to the real variety and your dates sharpen. You don't have to know which case you are in.
Can it overwrite a variety I already set?
No, and that is deliberate. The button only appears when the plant has no kind recorded yet. Filling in a blank costs you nothing if we misheard you — you just don't tap it. Replacing something you chose by hand with a guess pulled out of a sentence is a different thing entirely, and it is not something a passing mention should be able to do.
Why does the app ask which variety I planted?
Because it changes real numbers. A Sungold tomato is ready in about 57 days; a Cherokee Purple takes closer to 80. Both are still "tomato" — but if the app only knew the crop, it would have to guess somewhere in between, and that guess is wrong for almost everyone. The variety is what turns a wide range into a real date. **One rough edge in that was fixed on 17 August 2026.** When your variety is slower than the crop average, the app pushes the whole picking window later, which is right. It was leaving one thing behind: the day it starts asking whether something has gone wrong. So a Murasaki sweet potato had its harvest window moved out to 120–150 days while the are-you-sure-this-is-alive check stayed at day 130 — meaning that on day 130, with three more weeks of digging ahead of you, the app said the crop was overdue. That check now moves with the window. Fourteen varieties were affected: twelve sweet potatoes and two buckwheats.
The picker says a variety is "drought tolerant" or "takes the heat" — who says so?
We tell you, right where you picked it. Most of what we know about a variety came from the seed company selling it, so we say that: "Johnny's Selected Seeds describes this as drought tolerant" is a different, more honest sentence than us just stating it as fact. When the source is an actual university or extension office instead, we say that too — "NC State Extension records this as" — because a researcher's finding and a seller's pitch are not the same kind of true, and you should get to weigh them differently.
Why do some varieties show no traits at all, even ones I'd expect to?
Because we have nobody to name for the claim. If we can't say who told us a variety is disease-resistant or extra sweet, we would rather show nothing than print an adjective with no one standing behind it. That is a gap in what we have sourced, not a fact about the plant — the variety may well be exactly what you think; we just are not going to say so until we can say who says so.
What are the three answers?
Pick one from the list if you know it and we hold it — that sets your dates from the real variety. Say "I'm not sure" if you genuinely don't know — the app will ask again later rather than pretend the question is settled. Or type the name if it isn't in our list — the app stops asking and remembers what you typed, even though it can't yet sharpen your dates from a name it doesn't recognize.
What happens if I say I'm not sure?
Nothing is saved for the variety, on purpose, and the app keeps asking about that plant later. That's the honest behavior: "I don't know" and "I know and it's not in your list" are different facts, and only the second one should make the question stop.
I typed a variety name and it wasn't in the list. Did that do anything?
Two things. Your plant's record now says what you typed, and the plant page stops nagging you about it, because you already told us. And separately — without showing you anything or asking again — we log which crop and which name, so a variety enough people type becomes one we go and add to the real list. It's the cheapest way we have of finding out what people are actually growing that we don't carry yet.
Does a typed variety change my dates the way a matched one does?
No, and it shouldn't. We don't hold any data for a name we don't recognize, so the app keeps using the crop's own range rather than inventing numbers for a variety it has never seen a source for. If we later add that variety for real, you can switch to it from the plant's own page and your dates sharpen then.
Will my typed variety show up if I use the app on a different phone?
**Yes, since 12 August 2026.** Both kinds now follow you — one you picked from our list and one you typed yourself. **Before that date a typed name stayed on the device you typed it on**, which looked completely fine until the day somebody opened the app on a second phone and found the name gone. It was never lost from the device that had it, and it was never anywhere else. If you typed a variety before that date, it is still on the phone you typed it on and will go up the next time that phone syncs.

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