One deck of cards, and each one closes with a tap

Common questions

My list is long on busy days. How does it stay manageable?

From 2 October 2026, the list opens with its size, and the watering is one row. A line over the list says how many jobs today holds and how many can't wait, like 8 jobs · 1 can't wait. All of the watering is one row for the whole garden, Water with 7 growing spaces over it. Tick it once when the whole garden is watered, or tap it and it walks you through the beds one at a time. Seed trays keep their own rows. Every other job sits with the rest of its bed, in the list's usual order.

A busy day folds each bed to one line. At seven or more rows, a bed with two or more jobs becomes one line naming the bed and its jobs. Tap it to open them where they are, and tap the bed's name to fold it again. About five lines show, then one line says how many more jobs there are and where, like 4 more today · Porch pots, Herb box. An urgent job, or one whose window closes today, is never behind it.

A job says why it is today only when there is a reason: Can't wait, Last day, By Sat for a window that closes this week, or Dry for a tank that is already empty. Ticking jobs off does not change the shape while you are on the screen, so nothing jumps under your thumb.

The week's day cards were hard to read over the picture. Did that change?

Yes, from 1 October 2026 they are thick glass. They were thin enough that the trees behind them showed through the numbers, and on a busy part of the picture that made them hard to read. They are still glass, the same as the rest of the screen, just solid enough that only a soft blur of the picture comes through. The This week label above them matches.

They also end where the picture ends, so none of the plain ground below it shows behind them. And the picture stays put when a card goes away: dismissing one near the foot of the page, like the beta welcome, used to make the whole page jump.

Tonight's frost used to be the first job on my list. Where did it go?

Up under the temperature, from 1 October 2026 — it was never a job.

A warning has nothing to tick. Sitting first in your list it looked like one more thing to do, and it sat below the week, so you met it late. Tonight's frost, a hot spell and a run of cold nights now sit right under the temperature, where a notification goes. Tap tonight's frost and you get its answers: Covered them, Picked what was on them or Leaving them.

One shows at a time, the soonest first, with a count of the rest under it. And the week row stops counting a warning as a job, so the number on a day is jobs and nothing else.

I planted mint yesterday and it told me to harvest it. What?

Fixed on 24 August 2026, and the reason it happened is worth knowing, because it explains a whole family of odd answers.

Some plants come back every year — mint, sage, chives, lemon balm, rhubarb, a raspberry cane. For those, what we know is the shape of a normal year: leaves from spring, cutting through summer, dying back in autumn. That is a description of an established plant, and it is genuinely useful for one.

It is nonsense for a plant you put in yesterday. The app was reading the established plant's year and applying it to a seedling — so a mint planted in June landed in the middle of "cutting season" and got told to go and cut it.

What it does now is ask how long the plant has actually been in the ground. We hold, for most crops, how many days from planting to something worth picking. Until a new plant has had those days, the harvest job is held back. From its second year on, the normal-year description is about your plant and we use it.

Two things we deliberately did not do.

We did not write down that mint takes a year to become cuttable. It does not — you can cut mint the summer you plant it, just not the day after. Recording a false year to silence a wrong message would have made the database lie to fix a screen.

And if you have told us the fruit is sizing or the plant is ready, you win. Our day count is a catalog figure for a good season; you are looking at the actual plant. Answering the question always beats our arithmetic.

Still not perfect: a handful of crops have no day count in our records yet — mint, rosemary, lemongrass, mulberry, raspberry and strawberry — so those can still do it. We are sourcing them, and the last two kinds need different numbers: a raspberry genuinely takes a year or two to bear, while a mint just needs a few weeks.

Three more crops joined that fix: lavender, sweet potato and tarragon. These count their picking season from the day the plant goes out rather than from a seed, and for those three we have no date for that step at all — so the app was falling back on when the step usually happens in your area. Sweet potato is the clearest one: our figure of 90 to 120 days is right, but hung on a borrowed date it could land on any day of the year, including tomorrow. The number was correct and the calendar was somebody else’s. Now the app asks first whether your plant has actually been in the ground that long.

It kept asking whether something had come up, months after the plant was finished.

Changed again on 23 August 2026, and this is the version that reaches every plant. The first fix, in August, stopped the question two weeks after the plant's whole season closed. That worked for a bean and reached nothing else: it counted days from the day you sowed, while more than a third of our crops have their stages worked out from your frost dates instead. Two different clocks, so the stop never arrived. We measured 55 crops still being asked whether they had sprouted three years after planting — every fruit tree, every berry, asparagus, rhubarb, garlic.

The question now stops when the plant is visibly past it, on the plant's own calendar rather than on a day count. Three things end it: the app telling you to pick something, every window that plant has being behind it, or the sprouting checkpoint itself running out — the same point the overdue warning stops, because should you have seen this by now and have you seen it are the same question from two ends.

And a crop we hold no sprouting figure for is not asked at all now. Garlic, potatoes, sweet potatoes, mint, horseradish and 29 others have no sourced answer to when should this show, so the question was one we could ask and never read. Your plant's own page has always stayed quiet about those; the daily list now agrees with it.

A plant still inside its window is asked exactly as before, including one that is running late — that is the moment we know least about it, and going quiet then would be the wrong way round. Nothing you recorded is affected; this only stops a question.

It asked whether my seed had come up on the day I sowed it.

Fixed on 17 August 2026, and it was asking a question that could not have a yes. Broccoli sown at 9:35 in the evening got "Any sign of the broccoli yet?" nineteen minutes later, with "a quick look at the row settles it" — in the dark, on bare soil. Radish and basil did the same thing. What makes it worse is that the app already knew better: the plant's own page said "First sprouts in 5–10 days", and the explanation behind the question itself quoted the same window. It held the right number, used it to decide when to STOP asking, and ignored it when deciding when to start. The question now waits until the first day a yes is actually possible for that crop — the early end of its sprouting window, not the late end, because plenty of seeds come up at the fast end and waiting for the slow one would miss them. A crop we have no sprouting window for is not held back at all: not knowing when something sprouts is not a reason to assume it sprouts instantly.

It kept asking whether my radish had come up, when the radish was ready to pull.

Fixed on 17 August 2026. While the app is waiting to hear that a seed came up, it holds back anything that talks about parts of the plant — including picking it. For most crops the point where it gives up waiting and assumes the plant is there comes well before anything is ready. For a radish it did not: ready in about three weeks, assumed up at four, so there was a week where it would not tell you to pull a radish that was sitting there. Now the waiting stops as soon as your own sowing date says the crop is pickable. Some plants work differently and still wait — sage and anise hyssop have picking seasons worked out from your local frost rather than from the day you sowed, and a season being open tells us about the year rather than about your seed.

Rafe made me a job about four new seedlings. Does it know about all four?

It does, from 4 September 2026. Before that it knew about the first one.

When Rafe sets you a job that covers several plants — "photograph your new seedlings" after you have added four — the job is about all four. ⚠ It used to record the first plant and drop the rest, so the job existed, it was about one seedling, and the other three were never connected to it. Nothing looked wrong: you got a job, and it named the plants in its wording. The connection underneath was missing.

A job can also be about a place now — a bed or a zone — and not only about a plant. This does not merge jobs you already have: two watering jobs on two plants are still two jobs, because they are two things to do.

Why it matters beyond tidiness: a job that knows every plant it touches can be looked up from any of them. Standing at the third seedling, the job is there.

Two jobs on my list say exactly the same thing. Which plant is which?

The plant is in the job itself now, from 23 August 2026 — not in a line under it.

The first go at this, in August, put the plant's name on a third line beneath the job. That was better than nothing and it was still the wrong size: measured on a phone, the job read at 16px and the name underneath at 12.8px, with the bed smaller again at 9.9px. The largest words on the row were the ones every row shared, and the only part that told you which plant it was about was the smallest text on the screen. Two watering rows still opened with the same seven words.

So the job says it: Feel the soil where you sowed the carrot, Feel the soil in the tomato pot. Where one job covers two crops in the same bed it names both, and past two it names two and counts the rest — watering a whole bed is still one trip and one job. The bed is still there, underneath, and it is no longer the thing you have to read to tell two rows apart.

It asked about each of my peppers separately. They were all started together.

Fixed 29 September 2026: plants started together are asked about together. Five peppers added as one, dated the same day, get one question on Today, did you start the peppers?, and one answer covers all five. Before, each plant got its own card, and three of them could fill the list and push everything else off it.

The same goes for the job on the day. It reads start the peppers once, not once per plant.

And answering a job on its own page now stays on the page. Answering usually finishes the job, and the page used to lose it at once, so it said Not on your list right now where it should have shown what you did. It now shows a tick, what you said, and Undo.

It rained overnight. Will it still ask me to water?

No, not after real rain — from 25 August 2026. Before that it would, and it was wrong to: the app had the forecast on the screen and never once looked at it when deciding whether a plant needed water.

Rain is now counted as a watering, because that is what it is. About four tenths of an inch in a day is enough, and a few smaller days running together add up the same way — three days of drizzle really does soak a bed. Below that it stays on the list, because a shower that darkens the surface has not reached the roots, and telling you a dry plant is fine is the one mistake worth avoiding here.

It knows how long the rain lasts, because that part was already right. A pot dries out in a day and a mulched bed holds a week, and the app already worked in those terms — rain simply goes in as the last watering and everything downstream follows. Anything under cover is left alone: a greenhouse bed or a tray on a windowsill got none of that rain, so its job stays exactly where it was.

And if you watered anyway, your own record wins. Logging a watering this morning always beats rain from last night.

The watering job used to explain itself at length every time. Where did that go?

Behind a line reading "How to check", from 23 August 2026. A plant's page gave you the whole lesson on every visit — how far to push a finger in, what half an inch of soil is doing, why a hard jet of water moves seed about, how often to look. Ninety-seven words, on a job that comes round every two or three days from May to September.

It is all still there and none of it was cut. The page now shows the job and the two answers — Still damp and Watered it — and everything else is one tap away under How to check. The first time you meet a crop you want the lesson; the fortieth time you want the two buttons. Opening it once does not mean you never see it again either: it is a fold, so it is there whenever you want to look.

I am halfway through my jobs and I only want to do one of them. Do I have to tap through the rest?

No — and from 24 August 2026 the way out finally looks like one. Working through your jobs one at a time, the small 1/7 at the top opens the whole list: every job with its plant and its bed, so you can jump straight to the one you came outside for.

It always did that, and nothing said so. It had no border, no background and no underline, and it was the same muted color as the label next to it — and a fraction is exactly the shape that reads as a readout rather than a button. It was also 23 pixels wide, against the 44 we hold ourselves to for anything you tap.

There were really two buttons up there doing the same job, the progress bar and the number, and only the bar had a name — so if you use a screen reader it announced the same door twice, once as see all of today's jobs and once as 1 slash 7. They are one control now: the whole strip is pressable, a chevron says it opens something, and it announces itself as Step 1 of 7. See all 7 jobs for today.

Can I tick something off without opening it?

Yes — today's jobs are listed on the home screen, each with its own button, so a job you have already done takes one tap and no screens. If there is anything left to fill in, it appears right there rather than sending you somewhere: log that you watered and the how-much question opens on the same screen. The only jobs that move you are the ones where the moving IS the job — a photograph of a leaf, or letting us send you an alarm — and those buttons say what they will do rather than a bare word like Open. Everything you tap can be undone from the same line. And the list is ordered by what cannot wait: a tray that has to come in tonight sits at the top with a mark, because that is the one job where being late costs you the plant.

What is the difference between app tasks and garden tasks?

Garden tasks are things you do outside — water, prune, pick, stake. They are time-sensitive, they depend on the weather, and they come round again. App tasks are things you tell us — which variety you planted, what kind of space a bed is, your ZIP code. They take a moment, they are done once, and they are what makes every garden task accurate. App tasks sit above garden tasks because they feed them: with no ZIP, every date underneath is your zone's average rather than your garden's. Once they are finished they disappear until there is something new to sharpen.

Why is the setup list above my jobs for the day?

Because it feeds them. A garden with no ZIP code gets the typical dates for your zone, so every deadline underneath is an average wearing a date's clothes — fixing what the app knows about you outranks working through what it worked out. It is only above your jobs because it shrinks: once there is one thing left it is a single line, not a checklist, so it cannot push the morning's work off the screen. Finish it and it disappears until the next round, which is about accuracy rather than basics — which variety, and what kind of space each bed is.

How do I get to my week without waiting for a link to appear?

There is a Today / This week switch at the top of both screens now, so you can flip between them whenever you like. Before this, the week had exactly one way in — a line on Today saying how many jobs were left — which meant the moment you cleared everything, the screen became unreachable. You had earned the right to look at your week and the way in disappeared. They are two views of the same question at different ranges, so they sit side by side rather than one hiding behind the other.

The home screen changed. Where did everything go?

It is one screen now instead of four and a bit, and nothing was deleted — everything moved somewhere it makes more sense. The big number used to be everything you had to do this month; it is now just today, with the actual job named under it. The rest of the week is one line you can tap. The season chart moved to Calendar, under Week, and the tree jobs and the pollination note to Calendar, under Year — because they are things to look at rather than things to do this morning, and they were sitting above the one thing you opened the app for. Your plants moved to the Garden tab, which already listed every one of them grouped by bed. The setup checklist stayed put, because that is what tells you what the app still needs from you.

A frost job used to just say "cover plants when frost is forecast". Why does it name a temperature now?

Because we had the number and were not showing it. From 8 August 2026, sixteen crops say the actual temperature — cover the beans when nights head toward 32°F — so you can check it against tonight's forecast instead of guessing what counts as cold. Some crops still get the plain sentence, and that is deliberate: where the figure we hold does not answer the question the job is asking, the job stays general rather than becoming confidently wrong. An orange tree was the case that proved it. The only figure we had for one was the temperature it is still fine at, not the temperature that hurts it, so "cover it at 20°F" would have told you to wait for a night the tree does not mind — the app said nothing instead, and then we went and found the right number rather than leaving it at that. The same care applies to numbers that only hold while a tree is in blossom: those say so, so nobody goes out to cover a bare apple tree in November.

Why is a job I never set showing up on my list?

Because the app worked it out from the plant. It knows what you planted and when, so it knows roughly where that plant is in its year and what usually comes next. Those are suggestions and they sit below anything you asked for yourself. If one is wrong for your garden, closing it teaches it nothing yet. It costs you a tap. Nothing dies over it.

My tomato is still covered in fruit and the app went quiet on it. Why?

It should not any more, as of 17 August 2026. Every plant stage has a typical end date, and when the picking window passed, nothing took over — so a tomato you were still eating from every other day got "nothing scheduled right now" for about 54 days. Cucumbers went quiet for 88, summer squash and leaf lettuce for 83, pole beans for 48. There is now a standing state for exactly that: the window has closed, the plant is still producing, keep picking on the rhythm the crop already has — every two to four days for a tomato. It runs until the first frost in your garden, because for a tender plant that is the real end, rather than a date we would have had to make up.

Not every plant qualifies, and that is the point. Some crops you pick over and over; some you pull once and they are done. A tomato keeps cropping. A radish does not, and telling you to keep picking a radish for three months would be a worse answer than saying nothing. Which leaves one gap we have not closed and are not going to pretend we have: a radish that finished six weeks ago still gets silence, when what it deserves is "this one is done — pull it, or sow something else". That is a separate job.

And a fruit tree, bush or cane is not "until frost", corrected 23 September 2026. A tomato's picking window is pinned to the day you planted it, so a live plant really does mean more fruit coming. An apricot, raspberry or blueberry's window is pinned to your frost dates instead — it already describes the crop's whole season, wherever your plant is on it — so once that window closes the crop is over for the year, whether or not frost has come yet. We had been extending those to frost too, which told a two-year-old apricot to keep harvesting into October, weeks after its own fruit was gone. A herb like mint or chives still gets the extension — its window is pinned to your frost dates too, but you cut it all season the same as a tomato, so what actually decides this is whether the plant is woody, not which calendar its window sits on. 22 crops get it now.

I added something I am planting next month and it gave me jobs for it today. Why?

That was a bug and it is fixed. You can add a plant with a date in the future and plan a bed before you dig it, and the app was treating that plan as a plant already in the ground — telling you to water it, watch it for pests, and on plenty of crops to harvest it. It would even tell you the seeds had never come up, on a packet still sitting on your counter. Nothing appears now until the day you said you were planting. On that day everything starts properly, including the reminder to go and plant it. The one thing kept on purpose is the chart: you still see the whole year ahead for something you are only planning, because that is the useful part of adding it early. And a tray of seedlings you are hardening off still asks to be watered every day of the two weeks before it goes out — a planting-out date in the future means the plant has not been moved yet, not that it does not exist.

I asked for a reminder. Where did it go?

Into the list, as an ordinary card. There used to be a separate section for things you asked for and it is gone. A reminder is a job, so it queues with the rest, counts on the door, and closes with the same tap as everything else. That includes reminders you create by talking — say you want to prune the apple in December and it becomes a card in December.

Why can I not see a reminder I set for next month?

It only comes onto the daily list within about a week of being due. A job six weeks out is not what you opened this screen to find out. It is still there — it lives on that plant's own page until its week comes round. One rough edge worth knowing: a reminder with no plant attached and no near date will not surface anywhere until it comes within the week.

What order are the cards in?

Overdue first, then due today, then the rest of the week. Inside that, anything you asked for outranks anything the app suggested. Two things jump the whole queue: frost coming tonight, and seedlings still outside that need bringing in. Those two are there because they are the only ones where waiting until tomorrow costs you the plant.

And from 4 September 2026, one more rule inside all of that: watering comes before jobs that need your hands the whole time. That is not because watering matters more. It is because you can start it and leave it — put the hose where it needs to be, walk away, and do everything else while it runs. Hardening off works the same way: the trays go out and stay out for hours, so starting late costs you the day. Anything you have to stand over stays where it was.

⚠ It never jumps the two that outrank everything. A frost tonight and seedlings still outside are the jobs where waiting costs you the plant, and no amount of convenience is worth that — so the hose goes first among equals, not ahead of them.

A card wants a photo. What happens if I back out?

The job stays done. It is marked complete the moment you tap it, before the camera opens, so changing your mind about the photo cannot un-finish something you actually did. Take the picture later from the plant's page if you want it.

I have garlic in the ground. Why did the app act like winter was empty?

Because until 7 August 2026 it could not count past New Year. A plant's stages are stored as day numbers, and garlic that goes in during October is still going the following July — day 544 of a year that only has 365. Every check said that day had not arrived, so the app showed a countdown to the planting you had already done: on 15 January the row read "Taking root in 237 days". Thirty-three of our 151 crops were affected and garlic was the worst — invisible for 227 days of the year, including the whole of its harvest. It now works out which year the plant is in before it compares anything, so garlic reads "Dormant" in January, "Growing leaves" in April and "Ready to pick" in July.

What does the app have to say in the middle of winter?

Whatever is actually in the ground. Garlic sitting through the cold, a cover crop holding a bed, rosemary or sage or thyme going dormant, straw to put round the strawberries, and the winter jobs on fruit — the bare-wood prune on apple, peach, currant, gooseberry and kiwi, and peach's dormant spray, which can only be done while the tree has no leaves on it.

And from 23 August 2026, one thing that does not need anything planted at all: what to start indoors. If your beds are empty in February the app used to say nothing, which is the wrong answer at the exact moment the year starts — it's time to start tomato, pepper and cabbage indoors, plus 30 more, counted from your own last frost rather than a national date. It names the crops and says when the first window closes.

It shows up on a screen that would otherwise be blank, and it goes quiet the rest of the year, from about the middle of May until the new year. There is nothing to sow in August, and inventing something to fill the space would be worse than the silence.

The app called my plant something I would never call it.

Fixed on 24 August 2026. Every plant in our records is filed under one name, and it is often not the one you would use. We file zucchini under Summer Squash, collard greens under Collard, green beans under Bush Bean — so somebody who typed Zucchini was being asked about a summer squash.

It was worst on the one sentence where it mattered most. The question asking whether something has come up exists to sound like it knows your garden, and it was the sentence reading from our records instead of from you. Now every card about one of your plants uses your word for it: the question, the running-late note, the reminder to sow it, and the one asking whether it ever went in.

If you picked a variety, that is your word too. A plant recorded as Beet · Chioggia is asked about as Chioggia. And if you never gave it a name of its own, it still uses ours — a question with no plant in it would be worse than one with the wrong name.

One place still says the crop, on purpose: the pest card. That is one row covering every bed growing the same thing, so there is no single plant of yours it could honestly name.

The same question about my seed was on my list twice, in two different wordings.

Fixed on 24 August 2026, and it was two cards that could not see each other. Two separate parts of the app had each grown a way to ask whether a seed had come up — written months apart, sitting 250 lines apart, neither one aware the other existed. On the crops where both fired you got “Any sign of the broccoli yet?” and “Any broccoli sprouts?” on the same screen, about the same bed, on the same morning. We swept every crop at every age and it happened on 147 of them.

There is one question now, with one set of words and one place it comes from. Nothing about when it arrives has changed: it still starts on the first day a yes is possible for that crop, and still stops when the plant is visibly past it.

What made this worth doing carefully rather than quickly is that deleting one of the two was the obvious fix and the wrong one. They did not overlap everywhere — on most crops the older card covered the early weeks and the newer one only spoke up late, so removing either would have left a silence. Measured on broccoli, deleting the older one on its own would have meant nothing asking between day five and day twenty-four, on a plant whose own page says first sprouts in five to ten days. The surviving card took over that window before the other one came out.

It asked me "Any bean sprouts?" — why is the app asking ME?

Because we cannot see your bed and you can, and until 17 August 2026 we never asked. Every plant carries a rough window for when the seed leaves should be up. The question arrives on the first day a yes is possible — day five for broccoli, not day twenty-five — because that is the stretch where looking is worth more than counting, and it stays until you answer. If the window closes and you still have not seen anything, the wording changes with the situation: it stops asking and starts saying, “the broccoli should be up by now”. A cold spring, deep sowing or old seed all push it later, and none of them are your fault. It asks once, and it calls the plant what you call it — if you typed Zucchini it asks about your zucchini, not about a summer squash.

Answering yes stops it asking about that plant, for good. It is not a chore we invented; it is the app admitting the calendar has run out and you are the one holding the information. Saying "not yet" logs nothing at all — there is no such thing as a plant that failed to come up on schedule as far as we are concerned, and we are not going to record one on your behalf.

Some plants will never ask. The question only exists where there is a yes-or-no thing to look at — seed leaves, flower buds, tiny fruit forming. Where the plant record is waiting on something like "growing fast", there is no answer you could give, so we do not put a question mark on a phrase and call it one.

I added a plant for today and it is asking me to plant it. Is that not obvious?

It is, and that is rather the point — it is the one job the app should never be silent about. Until 17 August 2026 only three crops out of 152 ever offered it, which was an accident rather than a decision: the reminder depended on the plant record happening to list "sow" as a care step on a stage that happened to be open that day, and almost none of them do. So somebody who added beans the night before, planning to sow them in the morning, opened the app standing over the bed and saw nothing about beans.

Now it comes from your own date instead. You said today, so it is today's job, on every crop. Ticking it is also what starts that plant's clock — every date afterwards is counted from the day it actually went in rather than from an average, so this is the tap that makes the rest of the year about your plant.

Why is "Planting dates" sitting above my watering, and how do I make it go away?

Because without it we cannot tell you much of anything about that plant. Give the dates, or tap Don’t know: either one closes it for good.

The planting date is the day every other date is counted from: when to expect it up, when it fruits, when it runs out of season. A plant with no date is given the jobs of one planted this morning, because that is the only thing left to assume. On a tree that means being told to stake it, mulch it and rub the suckers off something that has been in the ground for years.

It sits with the app tasks, not with the watering. Those are two different kinds of job and they have been separate for a while: things you do in the garden with your hands, and things you tell the app so that everything else it says is about your garden rather than an average. The date is the second kind, and it goes above the first because it feeds it.

Hide does not hide it. Everything else in that list does. This line stays because skipping it costs you something you cannot see happening — months of slightly wrong dates on a plant, which you would have no way to spot and no way to repair afterwards. So it carries its own answers instead: tap the line to give the dates, or tap Don’t know to close it for every plant it names, with an Undo for a few seconds in case of a slip. A date you give later still wins over a Don’t know. Until 1 October 2026 the button beside it said I’ll find my own way and left this line on the screen, which looked broken. It now says Hide, and it is not offered on this line at all.

And it never blocks you. You can always add a plant without a date, from the chat or anywhere else. It just becomes a job afterwards instead of a wall in front of you.

I added something with a future date and it already has jobs. Is that right?

No, and it stopped on 21 August 2026.

You can add a plant with a date in the future — that is deliberate, it lets you lay out a season before you dig anything. What should happen then is nothing: a plant that is not in the ground has no jobs, because there is no plant.

What actually happened was three cards. A garlic dated three months out was asked "any sign of the garlic yet?" — about a seed still in its packet — and given a job to harvest it and a job to cure it. The part that stings is that the app already knew better: everything underneath had correctly worked out that the plant did not exist yet, in seven separate places. The screen just never asked.

Now it does. A planting dated in the future shows nothing until its day arrives, and on the day it arrives you get the one job that matters: plant it.

Three things still show, on purpose. Hardening off, because that whole routine happens in the two weeks before a seedling goes in the ground. Anything we are missing about the plan — where it will go, what date, what rootstock — because you can answer those from the sofa. And if you sowed something last week and have another sowing planned, we still will not tell you to sow more of it.

My garlic has no jobs at all, just a note about what garlic is usually doing. Why?

Because the date you gave us says this plant is not on the calendar we would be reading from — corrected 21 August 2026.

A few crops are grown to a fixed time of year rather than to a clock that starts when you plant them. Garlic is the clearest one: it goes in around the first frost of autumn and its scapes come the following summer. So everything the app knows about garlic's year is pinned to your frost date, not to your planting date.

That works perfectly for a garlic planted when garlic is planted. It fell apart for one planted at the wrong time of year — a garlic put in during May was asked, five days later, whether its scapes had emerged. The plant was fine. The question was about a different garlic, one planted eight months earlier, and nothing was checking.

Now if your planting date is well outside the window that crop normally goes in, we stop giving you jobs for it and keep the general note instead — garlic is usually scaping about now is true about garlic, and your garlic needs its scapes removed would not be true about yours. Two weeks late still counts as on time; a whole season out does not.

Four crops are affected: garlic, horseradish, cereal rye and hairy vetch. Everything else works from the date you gave us, so this never comes up.

I sowed tomato seed last week and it told me to harvest it. How?

Because it was reading a calendar for a different tomato — stopped on 23 August 2026.

Most plants have two ways of starting: from seed in the ground, or raised indoors and set out later. Our records give the picking season for a tomato from the day it goes OUT, and a tomato you sowed straight into the bed never has that day. So the app quietly used the typical date for tomatoes in your area instead, and then said it about yours. In late August that typical season is wide open, so a seed sown on Tuesday was told to pick on Wednesday.

Now a date we borrowed from the season cannot give you a job. The test is simple and it is the plant's own: if the season we borrowed had already opened before your seed went in, that season is not about your plant, and we say nothing about it. Tomato, pepper, eggplant, tomatillo and ground cherry all stopped doing this.

It changes nothing for a plant put in at a normal time. We swept every crop, both ways of starting it, every age up to seven months: a plant sown or set out on its own usual date is not held back from a single harvest. That was the whole design problem — the obvious version of this fix silences a tomato you sowed in May for the rest of its life, and it is the tomato you are actually picking from.

And the season itself is still shown. Tomatoes around here are usually picked from mid-July is true and stays on the chart. What has gone is the app turning that into an instruction about your plant.

The weather at the top changed. What am I looking at?

Seven days instead of three, from 23 August 2026 — and three things it was holding back.

Before, it was one gray line: tonight's low and the next three highs. We already had the whole week cached and were showing a fraction of it. Now each day gets a column: a weather icon, the temperature, and how many jobs that day holds.

On a frost day it swaps to the night's low with a snowflake — the number you act on — because the high is not what decides whether you cover anything.

The old three-day line is what this replaced. It is the number that decides whether you water, it is the commonest garden decision there is, and we were showing none of it. It only appears where it is worth a glance — under 20% it is noise.

And it disappears entirely if the forecast is more than twelve hours old. That is deliberate. A weather row showing yesterday is worse than no weather row — especially for a frost that has already been and gone.

One of the nights is in purple. What does that mean?

That night is forecast at or below freezing — 32°F. It is the same number your first and last frost dates are worked out from, so it is not a threshold we picked for this row; it is the one the whole app already runs on.

It is on the night, not the day, because that is when it happens and that is when a tray has to be inside. Tonight still has its own card if you have something that a frost would end — this is the rest of the week, which nothing was telling you about.

The picture when I tap a day looks different, and where did the sun go on rainy days?

That picture is drawn on your phone rather than downloaded, which is why it works with no signal and why it can move through the day instead of being one fixed image. The sun climbs and sinks across it with the real hour, so a glance tells you roughly where you are in the day without reading a clock.

Until 26 August 2026 it was not drawn at all on cloudy, rainy, snowy, stormy or foggy days. Not hidden behind the cloud — absent. So on five of the eight kinds of day the picture quietly stopped telling you the time, which is the one thing it was best at. It now shows through the cloud as a bright patch in the right place, the way an overcast sky actually looks. After dark the moon does the same, in its real shape for tonight.

The weather itself is redrawn too. The clouds were a row of identical lumps with a straight edge along the bottom, the rain was one mark repeated at one angle, and the snow was made of small squares. Clouds are one soft shape now with a shaded underside, rain varies in length and weight, snow is round, and fog — which was a flat gray rectangle — is layered banks of haze sitting thickest near the ground.

None of this changes a single number. The temperatures, the rain chance and what we say about your plants are exactly what they were; only the drawing changed.

The big temperature at the top was wrong. It said 84 when it was 68 outside.

It was showing today's high, and the clock ticking beside it made that look like a thermometer — fixed 6 September 2026.

The number was never wrong about what it was. The clock next to it was what told you it was something else, and the two had been sitting together since the corner was built.

It now shows what it is right now, from the hour-by-hour forecast for your garden.

On the rare occasion we cannot say — no signal since yesterday, nothing fresh cached — it shows today's high, says Today's high, and takes the clock away. A forecast does not get to wear a thermometer's clothes. Tap another day and you still get that day's high, named, as before.

After dark it is still the temperature now, not the night's low, as long as we have a reading for the hour you are in.

Can I see the weather hour by hour?

Yes — tap any day in the row and the whole screen becomes that day. The sky, the temperature and the list of jobs all move to it. The week row stays under it, so the next tap steps to another day and the first day takes you back to today.

It leads with when, because when is the only thing an hourly view can tell you that the daily row cannot. Rain from 2pm is what decides whether you water this morning; coldest at 5am, 29° is what decides whether covering at nine in the evening is enough. On an ordinary day it says nothing at all and just shows the hours — a panel that always has something to announce teaches you to stop reading it.

It covers about six and a half days, which is how far ahead the weather service publishes by the hour. The seventh day in the row will tell you it has nothing yet rather than showing you an empty box.

Why is there no wind on the weather row?

Because the forecast never gives it to us as a condition of its own. We looked at what the National Weather Service actually writes — 51 different descriptions harvested from sixteen cities in four climates — and wind only ever turns up appended to something else, as "and Breezy" or "and Windy". There is no day whose weather IS wind.

So an icon for it could never appear. We would rather leave it out than ship a picture nothing can ever draw, which looks like coverage and is not. If wind earns a place later it will come off the wind speed, which is a number, rather than off a description that never mentions it.

Same reasoning for what else is missing. No humidity, no pressure, no sunrise, no feels-like. Your phone does all of that better, and a row that only repeats your phone is not worth the space it takes on the screen you open first.

Do I have to clear the whole list?

No. There is no streak, no score, and nothing goes red at you for stopping halfway. Close what you did, leave the rest, and the ones that still matter will be there tomorrow. The list answers one question: what should I do this morning. It was never meant to be homework.

The setup list got shorter. Did I lose the things I had already done?

No — they moved behind a line that says how many, new on 31 August 2026.

Finished items used to sit in the list with a tick beside them. That is fine on your second day and silly on your fiftieth: the longer you use the app, the more of that card was a list of things you had already done, sitting right above the jobs you actually have today.

Tap the line to open them. Nothing is deleted and nothing is hidden from you — "did I ever pin my garden?" is a real question and the answer is one tap away.

And the card asks rather than announces now — Let’s finish setting up your garden. The way out says what you are choosing, too: I’ll find my own way, rather than Hide this.

There is a setup task telling me to say something to Rafe. Can I just tick it off?

No, and that is deliberate — new on 31 August 2026.

It clears when you actually reach a conversation, not when you press a button saying you understand. Say something, or type it — either counts. The moment your words reach Rafe, the task is done.

Why it works that way: the microphone on every screen has always gone straight to Rafe, and almost nobody knew. A card telling you so is exactly the thing that was already not working. Using it once teaches it in a way reading about it does not.

⚠ And if your browser has no microphone, or you said no to the permission, the task clears on its own and the wording changes to tell you to type instead. You are never left with a job you cannot finish — saying no to a microphone prompt is a perfectly reasonable thing to do on an app you have just met.

Today looks different — there is a sky behind the top of it now.

From 2 September 2026, yes. The top of Today is drawn rather than flat: the sky, the light and the weather you are actually having, with the day's big number sitting on it.

It is the same picture you already get when you tap a day in the forecast — that screen has been drawn like this for a while, and Today had not caught up. Same sky, same hills, same light for the time of day, so the two screens now look like they belong to each other.

Nothing moved. Your jobs are in exactly the same place, the same number of taps from the top — we measured that before and after, because a nicer page that buries the work would be a worse page.

And the words stay readable on it. Text sitting straight on the sun is almost invisible, so the temperature sits on a small dark panel of its own. From 4 September 2026 that panel is only as big as the words — it used to be a band across the whole top of the screen, which darkened about a fifth of the picture. On a clear day that read as haze, and the sun's pale outer rings turned gray against it, so the drawing was reporting weather the forecast had not said. The sky itself is brighter on a clear day now for the same reason: a sunny day is the one kind of day that adds no color of its own, so that sky had to be right to begin with. That is not a matter of opinion — every color the app can print on that scene is checked against every color the sun can be, and the check refuses to pass if any of them gets hard to read.

There are hills and trees behind Today now, and the sky runs into them.

From 5 September 2026, yes. The sky used to stop at a hard edge with a flat dark ground under it. Now it runs down into hills that fade with distance, a treeline of firs with a few oaks among them, a near bank with a fence, and the earth continuing under your jobs. The clouds are big and near, because the weather is the point of the picture. The sun rises and sets where it really does for your garden, the half hour before sunrise and after sunset has colors of its own, and after dark there are stars.

The season is yours, not the calendar's. The oaks leaf out around your last frost, turn as your first frost nears, and stand bare after it — so early September in a cold-winter garden is still green, because it still is.

Nothing moved and nothing was downloaded. Your jobs are in exactly the same place, the temperature still sits on its own small panel, and the whole scene is drawn on your phone, so it works with no signal.

The cards on Today are see-through now, and the frost warning moved up into the sky.

From 5 September 2026, yes. Everything that sits on the scene is one kind of card now: clear glass at night and frosted glass by day, lit by the sky behind it. The temperature and the words under it sit straight on the sky, with the day and the time above them.

A frost or heat warning sits right under those words, like a notification on a lock screen, because that is where your eye goes first. Tap it and you get that day.

The week row shows four wide days and scrolls for the rest. Each day carries its weather and its high (on a frost night, the low, since that is the number you act on) and how many jobs it holds; a dash means none. A few days at a glance is enough, and the forecast further out changes anyway.

The tick box is on the right of each job and draws its check when you tap it; Undo appears in place. The middle button of the bar is now "Log", and the mic still floats above it — saying what you did is the fastest way to log it.

More on this

• Your week
• When nothing is wrong
• Asking your garden a question
• Frost alerts
• What shipped and when