The + button: tap what happened, then who it happened to
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The + in the middle of the bottom bar is the short way to write in your journal. Tap it and the six things you can record are the first thing on the screen — watered, fed, picked, saw a pest, looked it over, wrote a note. Tap one, then tap the plants it happened to, then tap Write it down. You can pick several plants at once, which is the point: watering a whole bed is one gesture, not six. Every line it writes has an Undo beside it. There is a box for your own words if you want it, and it comes last on purpose.
What happened, then who it happened to
Tap the + in the middle of the bottom bar. The six things you can record are right there: watered, fed, picked, saw a pest, looked it over, wrote a note. Tap one and your plants appear. Tap the ones it happened to. Tap Write it down.
You can pick several plants at once, and that is the reason it works this way round. Watering a bed is one thing you did, not six, and it should not take six trips through the same screen.
Each line it writes appears underneath with Undo beside it, and stays there while you carry on. Nothing takes you to another screen and nothing asks you to confirm.
Why a button and not just the chat
The chat knows your garden and it is genuinely the fastest way to say something complicated. But it was the only obvious way in, and that is a problem for two different people.
The first would simply rather press a button. Nothing wrong with that, and a garden app that insists you have a conversation before it will believe you watered something is being precious.
The second is anyone near the end of their credits for the week. With the chat as the only real door to the journal, recording that you watered something would compete with asking a question in Talk — and keeping your own records is not the paid part. The button writes straight to your garden on your own device and costs nothing at all.
The one that is easy to forget
Looked it over — all fine is a button because it is the commonest thing that happens in a garden and the least likely to get written down. Nothing was wrong, so there is nothing to report, so nobody reports it.
It is worth recording anyway. A plant somebody checked on Tuesday and a plant nobody has looked at in two weeks look identical on a screen, and only one of them is actually fine.
What it does not do
It does not try to work out what you meant. Tapping Watered records that you watered that plant, at that time, and nothing else — no interpretation, no guess about how much unless it asks you outright.
And it does not replace the plant's own page, which still holds the full history, the photographs and a box for longer notes. This is the short way in, not the only way in.
Common questions
- Do I have to talk to the chat to record something?
No, and from 19 August 2026 there is a button that says so. The + sits in the middle of the bottom bar. Tap what happened, tap the plants, write it down.
The chat is still there and still the fastest way to say something complicated. But it was the only obvious way in, and plenty of people would simply rather press a button than talk to a computer about their beans.
- Does this use up my AI allowance?
No. Nothing on this path touches AI at all. It writes straight to your garden's record on your own device, the same as tapping a job done.
That is deliberate rather than incidental. The free allowance is a one-off — it counts from the day you sign up and never refills — so if the chat were the only real way to keep a journal, free accounts would stop being able to record anything the day it ran out. Writing down what you did is not a premium feature and is not going to become one.
- Why are there only six buttons?
Because almost everything that happens in a garden is one of them: you watered it, you fed it, you picked something, you saw a pest, you had a look and it was fine, or you just want to write something down.
Looked it over gets a button because it is the commonest thing of all and the easiest to leave unrecorded. "I checked the tomatoes and they are fine" is worth knowing later — it is how you tell a plant that has been watched from a plant nobody has looked at in two weeks.
From 6 September 2026 the six sit on the first screen rather than behind a plant. Before that you picked a plant first, so the screen you landed on showed none of the things it could record — you had to already know. Anything the six do not cover goes in the box in your own words, kept exactly as you wrote it.
- I tapped the wrong thing. Can I take it back?
Yes — every line it writes appears on the screen with Undo beside it, and it stays there while you carry on logging. It removes the entry rather than leaving a wrong fact in your journal with a correction stuck to it.
The undo is the reason the buttons can be one tap. Without a way back, a one-tap log is a one-tap mistake, and we would have had to put a confirmation in front of every one.
- Can I log something for a plant I have pulled out?
Not from here — the + only offers plants that are still growing, because this is for what you did in the garden today.
A finished plant keeps its whole record and its own page, and there is still a box there for a note. Nothing is closed off; it is just not what the quick path is for.
Shipped 2026-08-19. Last checked 2026-09-29. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us — support docs going stale is a bug.