What shipped
Newest first. Short entries — what you can now do, and whether it fully works yet. The longer stories about how any of it went live on the blog, and the how-does-this-work pages are in help.
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Rafe decides how long to answer
How much to say is now his judgment: as much as the question needs and no more. The one thing we still ask for is plain language, at about an eighth-grade reading level, so an answer is readable standing in a garden with dirt on your hands.
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Rafe notices the first flower, even when you asked about something else
Send a photo to ask about a spot on a leaf, and if that plant is also in its first flower, Rafe now writes the flower down. Four moments count: the first sprouts up, the first flowers, the first fruit set, and the first color on it. He used to record only the thing you asked about, which meant the moments most worth having back in January were the ones most likely to be missed. He says how sure he is, and leaves it out when he is not — a guessed milestone would put a date on something that never happened.
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Your journal is now your garden’s memory
The journal opens on your own photograph — this season’s best moment, then the same week in earlier years — and folds your record by week and then by month, photos first, with the waterings and feeds folded into one line you can open. One search finds a plant, a bed, a problem, a month or a word, and photos come back as photos. The long list you had is still there as the Days zoom, unchanged. And a plant you add after it went in now gets its first entry dated the day it was sown, not the day you typed it in — so recording that it came up no longer gets refused as impossible.
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Your week is one list now, and a job due in exactly seven days stops showing up twice
The week screen used to end in four blocks — a section per day, then No rush, then After that, then Further off. Two of those four meant the same thing: both were jobs more than a week away, and the only difference was whether you had asked for the job or we had worked it out. Nothing you could see told them apart, and the one defined purely by its date was the one that did not show a date. So the headings are gone and the answer moved onto the row. Every line now says its own when — Today, Tomorrow, Thursday, Sep 18, Was due Tuesday, Any day, No hurry — nearest first, all the way down. It also fixes something that was showing up twice. A reminder due in exactly seven days — not six, not eight — appeared under two headings, one you could tap and one you could not. Two parts of the app were each deciding separately what counted as more than a week away and they disagreed about that one day. The fix was not to make them agree: everything now goes through one list that recognizes a job it has already seen, so a job reachable two ways can only come out once. Two more things moved. The once-a-year jobs on trees and bushes had a list of their own at the bottom of the page; they are ordinary rows now, sorted in with everything else, because a job kept hopping between the two lists as its window opened and shut. And a once-a-year job now sorts by when its window opens rather than when it shuts — before this, a prune you could have done that morning sat near the bottom of the page with a date in December beside it. The seven days themselves are on your daily list, where the day chips carry the weather too.
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A growing space now opens on what is in it
Tapping a bed used to land you on its measurements — what you call it, what kind it is, how big, how deep, how much sun — with the plants somewhere below all of it. You answer those once and never look at them again, so they now sit under Details at the bottom, and the page opens on the plants instead. Under them: water the whole space, add a plant, and everything that has happened there. The plant rows are the same rows you see on the Garden screen, so a bed looks like itself wherever you meet it.
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A bed that cannot be deleted comes back whole
If you delete a garden bed on one device while another device still holds a plant in it that has not caught up yet, we stop the delete rather than lose the plant. Putting the bed back is the part that was wrong: it returned with no name. It now returns exactly as it was. Nothing you would have noticed unless it happened to you, and if it did, this is why your bed went blank.
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A plant's page now shows the plant
Every plant row in the app carries a small picture of the crop. The one screen that is about a single plant carried none — just a name, a line of facts and a photo button. The crop art now sits beside the name, so arriving on a plant feels like arriving at the thing rather than at a record of it. The two photo controls share one row instead of stacking, and the note about whether a sowing has come up yet sits on our own surface instead of a leftover color.
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Ask about a plant, then get back to it
Tapping "Ask about this plant" or "about this space" now takes you straight to the chat with that plant or bed attached, instead of opening a small panel over the page first — which took you to the chat anyway once you sent. The top of the chat shows where you came from, and tapping it takes you back, so you can ask, read the answer and carry on where you were. The empty chat screen also stopped scrolling before anybody had typed anything.
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Asking from a bed gets an answer about the bed
This morning we said Rafe had stopped asking which plant you meant. He mostly had — but we tested him 147 times and he still did it in about one answer in sixteen, almost always when a bed holds several different plants and you ask what is wrong with it. He also had a habit of replying "send me a photo" without naming anything on the bed, which is not the same question but is not an answer either. He now gets told, at the moment your bed is in front of him, that a question about a bed is answered for the bed: what is on it and how long it has been in. Asking for a photo is still often the right thing — asking instead of answering is not.
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Answers look at your records every time again
This morning we made answers start sooner by only searching your garden when the question seemed to need it. Asked about a plant from last season, it replied that it had no record of last year — while the notes were sitting in the record. We took the change back the same day. Answers are a few seconds slower again, and being told your garden is not remembered is worse than waiting.
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Answers start sooner
Before answering anything, we used to search your garden records — every single time, even for a question like "how deep do I sow carrots?" that your records cannot help with. That search took about four seconds and you waited through it in silence. Now Rafe starts answering straight away and only looks something up when the question actually needs it. When he does look, he says so, and carries on in the same answer.
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Ask about a job without leaving it
Open any job on your Today list and there is now an "Ask about this task" button under the headline. It takes you to the chat with the job already attached and named, so you can ask why it is due, whether it can wait, or how to do it — without typing out which job you mean. The top of the chat shows the job you came from and takes you back to it. The buttons under it are unchanged: those are what you do with a job, and this is what you ask about it.
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A garden zone has its own screen, and it can tell us whether rain reaches it
A covered porch never gets the rain — but the app counted a good soaking as a watering everywhere, so it could tell you a plant had been watered when nothing reached it. Garden zones now have their own screen: open My garden, tap Open on a zone, and answer "Does rain reach here". Everything in that zone follows the answer, so a covered porch is one answer rather than one per pot — and a single growing space can disagree, for the pot you pulled out into the rain. Leaving it alone means rain counts, which is right for almost all of a garden.
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It stops asking which plant you meant
Tapping "Ask about this" on a bed or a plant is how you say what you are asking about — so being asked to name it again was the app forgetting where you were standing. Fixed. It also stopped inventing facts it does not have: if you have not recorded whether a bed is covered or how much sun it gets, it now says so instead of guessing.
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He stops telling you that you do not grow something you grow
If you have more than forty plants, Rafe sees a slice of the list rather than all of it — the longest-established and the most recent — because sending every plant on every question is slow and expensive. He was told the list was cut. He sometimes forgot, and answered "I do not have a record of broccoli in your garden" about broccoli in the front bed. He now gets the full list of what you are growing alongside the slice, so a crop you have can never read as one you do not.
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He stops guessing about sun and cover from a plant, too
Earlier today we said Rafe had stopped inventing facts about whether a bed is covered or how much sun it gets. That was true when you asked from a bed, and not when you asked from a plant — on that path he had nothing recorded to go on and filled the gap himself. In one test it described a photograph of a plant that has no photographs. He now says he does not have it, whichever screen you asked from.
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Every screen now looks like the same app
The home screen got its new look first — the sky, the glass cards, the one amber button. Now the rest of the app is drawn from the same small set of colors, shapes and type, and all of it works in both light and dark. Buttons say what they are by weight rather than by color: the one amber button on a screen is the thing that acts, and everything else is quiet glass. Corners agree with each other now, because there is a set of four to choose from instead of seven. And the setup flow you see when you first arrive is finally the same app as the one it introduces — it used to stay cream even with dark mode on.
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Screens rebuilt around what you came for
Earlier today we said the app had one look. That was the paint. This is the part underneath: several screens have been laid out again around the thing you opened them for. Your garden leads with the beds and what is growing, not with a list of settings. The log screen shows what it can record, and the undo sits on the receipt. Your account page groups what we keep on you, and says plainly that the box about how you garden is all Rafe knows on that subject. Text fields stopped being white boxes on every screen that has a form, which was hard to miss in dark mode. Beds now open on what is in them rather than on their own measurements. And every history list in the app — plant pages, bed pages, the journal — had a white slab behind its Mark or remove button that made it look broken; that is gone. Plant pages are next.
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The light and dark switch is gone, and nothing got brighter
The app already paints itself from the real sky — your garden's own sunrise and sunset, the hour, and what the weather is doing. So it was already dark at night without being asked, and the light and dark switch had become a second answer to a question that was answered. It has been removed. Nothing about how the app looks has been taken away: the dark look is simply what night looks like now. One upshot we did not expect — three quarters of the readability problems we were tracking came from the switch and the sky disagreeing with each other, and removing the switch removed them.
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The conversations panel, on a wide screen
On a computer, opening your past conversations dimmed only the middle column and left the rest of the window bright — and clicking in the bright part did not close it. On a phone it was always right, which is why it went unnoticed. Fixed. Nothing was ever lost by it; it was only the dimming and the click-to-close.
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The + screen now shows what it can record
Tapping the + used to open on a list of your plants, so the screen for writing things down showed none of the things it could write down — you had to already know. Now the six are the first thing you see: watered, fed, picked, saw a pest, looked it over, wrote a note. Tap one, then tap the plants it happened to. You can pick several at once, because watering a bed is one thing you did rather than six. Every line it writes now sits on the screen with an Undo beside it and stays there while you carry on.
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The temperature at the top is what it is now, and the week chips count the right day
Two numbers on your daily list were wrong. The big temperature in the corner was showing today's high, with a running clock beside it — so it read 84 while it was 68 outside. It now shows what it is right now, and on the rare occasion we cannot say, it prints the high and labels it as the high rather than letting a forecast pose as a thermometer. Separately, the day chips across the week were counting jobs the app had put in *this week* under today, so one chip said 9 while the list underneath it showed 2. A job with no particular day is now counted in the *more this week* line, where it belongs. Your week still shows every one of them under Today, deliberately — that screen exists to show you everything at once, and the two screens are answering different questions rather than disagreeing.
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Fewer words in front of the buttons
Starting a walk opened on two paragraphs of instructions above a list of two beds, so the explanation was three times the size of the thing it explained. The list teaches itself: tap a spot and it gets a number, tap it again and the numbers close up. One short line survives, and it sits with the list rather than above it. Elsewhere, the small print on the season band now carries its own dark backing so the frost dates stay readable wherever the year marker falls, and the Look buttons on the add screen match the rest of the app instead of standing out.
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Asking what is wrong with a bed gets an answer
Earlier today we taught Rafe to answer a question about a bed for the whole bed. It worked for questions about timing and not for questions about symptoms — ask "what is wrong with it" from a bed with three crops on it and he would still ask which plant you meant, more often than before the change. The reason was ours: the example we gave him was about planting dates, so that is the shape of question he learned. He now gets the symptom case too, and answers it by naming the plants the symptom could belong to and what it would mean on each.
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He stopped saying you had written nothing down
Ask about a plant when you have several with similar names, and Rafe could tell you there were no journal entries for it — while your notes sat right there. What had actually happened is that too many of your plants matched, and "which one did you mean?" came out as "there are none." He now picks the one you plainly meant, or answers for all of them, and never claims a record is missing when it is only one of several. Asking about a plant you have never grown still tells you so.
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Rafe can look back at an older photo
Ask "is this getting worse?" and Rafe can now open the picture from three weeks ago, not just the newest one. He has been told which photographs a plant has since the start of September; until today he could only ever open the most recent, so a question about last month was answered off this morning's photo. He always says which photograph he looked at and when it was taken, and he will only open pictures of the plant you asked about — if he reaches for the wrong one he says so rather than quietly showing you another.
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Rafe knows how much sun a bed gets
Each growing space has a sun setting — full sun, part sun or shade — and the plant page has always used it to say whether a crop is in the right spot. Now Rafe can see it too, so a question like "why isn't my tomato fruiting?" can take a shaded bed into account. Beds you have not set it for stay unmentioned rather than assumed.
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Rafe knows which beds the rain reaches
You can tell us that rain does not reach a bed — under cover, on a porch, in a greenhouse — and the watering list has always respected it. Now Rafe can see it too, so "why isn't the greenhouse bed on the watering list?" has an answer instead of a shrug. Beds you have not answered for stay unmentioned rather than guessed at.
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A problem description now reaches only the plants it was written about
One of the five descriptions added earlier today was written about rhubarb's crown rot and said so, but it was being shown for crimson clover and sweet alyssum too, which name a crown rot of their own. Now a description carries the plants it is valid for, and a plant outside that list shows the bare name instead — worse-looking, and honest. Rhubarb keeps its description; the other two get theirs when it is written from a page about them.
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A heat limit the source states for bloom now waits for bloom
The temperature we hold for oranges is stated by its source for bloom and fruit set, and the app was applying it in every month, so a small tree with no flowers got a warning about flower drop. Nine limits are like this — oranges, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, both beans, peanuts, tomatillos and quinoa — and each now applies only while the plant has flowers to lose: from the first flower to the end of the season for the ones that keep flowering as they bear, and during bloom and fruit set for an orange, which flowers once. A limit whose source names no stage applies as before.