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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A hot spell tells you once, and says what it actually means
The hot-weather notice used to appear every morning for as long as the heat lasted, dressed as a task with a tick box you could not really tick. It is now a notice rather than a job — an orange mark, no tick — and you hear about a spell once: the first hot day, then quiet, and again only if the weather cools off and heats back up. The wording changed too. The figures behind it are the points where a crop bolts or stops growing well, not damage temperatures, so that is what it says now. We do not hold damage figures for most crops because for most crops nobody publishes one, and we would rather tell you what we can stand behind.
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When Rafe judges a plant, he now says where, what kind and how much
A reading like "pest damage" used to stand on its own. Now, beside the reason Rafe gives, he can say where the damage is (which part, lower or new growth, at the edges or between the veins), what it looks like (holes, stippling, blotches, wilt — a list, because one leaf can carry two), and how much of the affected part is affected right now: a leaf or two, some, about half, most. The words come from extension diagnostic guides and a published severity scale, not from guesswork, and every value has a source on record. What he deliberately does not say is "spreading" — that takes two looks, and the app will compare them for you rather than let one photo claim a trend. The plant page shows the reading in plain words under the plant, dated, the way it already shows what Rafe saw.
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A question asked with no signal waits, then sends itself
While your phone has no signal a line above the box says so. Ask anyway: the question is kept, and when signal is back it is sent once, by itself. Before this the question failed with "No signal just now" and sat there until you pressed Try again.
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Answers arrive word by word
An answer used to reach the screen in steps of about an eighth of a second, each step a write to the phone's own storage. Now the words are painted as they arrive, with a cursor at the growing edge, and the storage is written a little behind them. What is kept has not changed. Answers also keep their paragraph breaks again: a tidy that closes the gap a removed source reference leaves had been closing the blank line between paragraphs too.
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A bed, pot or tray can be asked about the same way a plant can
A plant page has had an "Ask about this plant" button since September. A growing space now has the same one. Open the bed, pot or tray and tap "Ask about this space" — the chat opens with that space named at the top of the box, and you can switch it off if you meant something else. Nothing is sent until you send it; the button opens the box with the space attached and the words are still yours to type or speak.
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Copy an answer
A small Copy control now sits under each of Rafe’s answers; tap it and the whole answer is on your clipboard, with the label reading Copied for a moment. Two status lines are shorter, too: an answer that ran out of room says "Cut short", and an empty conversation list says "No conversations yet".
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Edit a question and ask again
Under each of your own messages there is now Edit. Tap it and the words go back into the box to change; send, and it is asked as a new turn at the end. The first question and its answer stay as they were.
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Every setup question now says why it is asked
Three small changes to setting up a garden. The address field says what becomes of your answer, right under the box — used to find the spot, then let go; we keep the coordinates and your ZIP, not your address. The plant list says there is no limit at the moment you are choosing, because a garden memory that knows about 8 of your 20 plants is worth very little. And each suggested plant now says what it means for your garden rather than gardens in general: a tomato reads “Goes out after Apr 18” if that is your last frost, a carrot reads “A light frost is fine, a hard one is not.” Where we do not hold that fact, there is no line — we would rather say nothing than print something that fits everything.
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Every reading a photo or a sentence left on a plant now has its own dated line
What a photograph read off a plant and you confirmed — how it looked, roughly how tall, mulched or not, the stage it seemed to be at, a thing seen — now sits under What you saw on the plant’s page and at the foot of your journal, each line dated and saying where it came from: from a photo, Rafe read it, or you said so. Remove takes any of them back. Before, a confirmed reading vanished with its card and could not be corrected anywhere.
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Five more plant problems now say what you would see
When Rafe names a pest or a disease, he can now describe five more of them in the words of the extension page that knows them best: citrus snow scale, California red scale and cottony cushion scale on citrus, the carrot weevil on parsley and celery, and Phytophthora crown rot on rhubarb. Each description quotes its source and says which plants that source was written for. That takes the count of described problems from 138 to 143; the 165 still without a description are the rare ones, none named by more than four crops.
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French marigold joins the plant pages, and honest gaps stop counting against a plant
Ninety-four of our plant records said "no source states this" for one germination question in a way our scoring counted as an answer, while one record that said the same thing the honest way was scored as a gap and kept off the site. Both now say it the same way, and a gap we searched for and can name no longer counts against a plant. French marigold, the record that had been honest all along, is published for the first time: 153 crops, 3,202 varieties. No plant fell below the bar.
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When something will not back up, the app now says how long it has been trying
If a change cannot reach the server, your phone keeps trying — a problem at our end is often fixed within the day, and the change goes through on its own. The screen already told you something had been refused several times. It did not tell you whether that was five seconds ago or five days ago, and those are very different things. It now says "refused for 4 days" once it has been going on longer than it ever should, and asks you to tell us. Nothing is deleted and nothing stops retrying — this only changes what the screen tells you.
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Setup does not tell you that you have killed plants
One of the four answers to "what do you most want from your garden?" was subtitled "You have killed a few" — the app saying that about you before you had said anything. It now reads "The most common reason people start. Knowing what went wrong is most of the fix." Same option, same result, no accusation.
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One + for everything you add to a chat
The camera and photo buttons have moved into the + menu, so the box has one control on the left: tap it and pick Camera, Photos, a plant or a growing space. Attaching a plant tells Rafe which plant you mean.
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One setting was worded two opposite ways, and pointed at a screen we do not have
The switch that decides whether Rafe shows you a card before saving appears in two places: on the card itself, and on your profile. One said "Don’t ask me again — just save it" and the other said "Show me the card first" — the same switch, worded in opposite directions, in two different voices. They now read "Save without asking" and "Show the card first". The note underneath also told you to change it "in Settings", and there is no Settings screen — it is your profile, which is what it says now.
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Rename a conversation
In Past conversations, Rename turns the name into a field; a name you give sticks. Delete now asks once, in the row, before a conversation goes.
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Restarting your garden now clears your conversations from our server too
Restarting deleted every conversation from the phone you did it on, but the instruction to remove them from our server was refused — so a second phone could pull them back. Fixed on both sides: the app now sends what the server needs, and the server works out the rest for itself, which also clears gardens already in that state the next time they sync.
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Rafe can see the weeks ahead, and you can tell him when you garden
Ask “how busy will I be over the next few weeks?” and Rafe answers from the app’s own projection of every plant’s coming jobs: the heavy week, what makes it heavy, and about how long. You see the next two weeks in detail and only milestones beyond; he sees the whole run. Tell him when you garden — four taps on your account page, or answer when he asks — and he can point a busy week at the days you actually have. When he adds plants for you, the line under the answer now says what that adds to your calendar.
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Search your conversations
A search field above Past conversations narrows the list to the conversations whose name or messages contain the word, each with a line of what matched. It reads only what is on your device, so it works with no signal.
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Six more plant problems now say what you would see
The last six problems that three or more of our plants name without a description now have one, each in the words of the extension page that knows it: Florida red scale on citrus, San Jose scale on apricot and plum, the peachtree borer, Ascochyta blight on chickpea, the six rots that spoil a pumpkin or a winter squash, and stem rust on oats. Where a page covers fewer plants than name the problem, the description shows only for the plants it was written about. That takes the count of described problems from 143 to 149. The problems still without one are named by one or two plants each, and a search check found nobody looks them up, so they stay as plain names.
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Stop an answer where it is
While Rafe is writing, the Send button becomes Stop. Press it and it stops where it is: what had arrived stays as the answer, marked "Stopped here", and the box is yours again at once. The turn still counts, because the work was already done.
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Tapping a day now changes the jobs, not just the weather
The week strip on Today already moved the weather and the sky when you tapped a day — the job list underneath went on showing today’s, on every date. It follows the day now. A future day is usually shorter than today, which is the honest answer rather than a gap: whether your soil is dry on Sunday is not knowable on Friday, so those checks are worked out on the morning and stay on Today. What a future day shows is anything with a date of its own — a reminder you set, or the day a sowing window shuts. When there is nothing pinned to that day it says so, rather than leaving you with an empty list to puzzle over.
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The apple tree in the treeline is gone
Earlier today we said there was an apple tree hidden in the treeline behind Today that buds, blossoms, fruits and goes bare on your own frost dates. It is gone, the same day: seen on a real screen it looked odd, so we cut it. The trees that turn and drop with your frost dates are still there. Nothing else about the scene changed.
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The chat bar stays put, and photos come in together
The Chats and New controls stay at the top of the chat while you scroll. Picking photos from your library takes several at once. The box you type in sits slimmer until you start typing.
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The menu button sits in a bar now, and the bar tells you where you are
The menu button used to float over the top-left corner of whatever you were reading. It now sits in a slim bar along the very top of the screen. Scroll down and that bar quietly picks up the name of the screen you are on, so you always know where you are without scrolling back up. On the Today screen the bar stays clear, because the sky is meant to run all the way to the top.
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The minutes in the weeks-ahead forecast have sources now
The forecast puts minutes on every job it projects. Until today those minutes were our own estimates, labeled as such. Six of them now come from published figures: how long a hose takes to put an inch of water on a bed, from Iowa State and NC State; a weekly scouting walk, from Georgia; hand transplanting and harvest rates from a published time study on ten vegetable farms; and tomato pruning, training and picking from a Tennessee production budget. Most moved down — a watering is one to three minutes a plant, not two to six; setting a transplant two to five, not ten to fifteen. The rows we could not source keep our estimates and still say so, and every number is still shown as a range with the word about in front of it. The count of jobs was always real; the hours are now closer to it.
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The page stays put while Rafe writes
While an answer is arriving the page follows it if you are at the bottom, and stops following the moment you scroll up to read something. The answer keeps growing below, and a small "Jump to latest" button brings you back. Before this, a growing answer was not followed at all, and any new message pulled the page down whether you were reading or not.
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One screen, one name
The screen listing everything Rafe has done answered to two names at once: the menu called it "What Rafe did" and the screen itself said "What it did". It is "What Rafe did" everywhere now.
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Today's sky becomes the ground
The scene behind Today used to be a sky with a hard edge and a flat dark ground under it. Now the sky runs down into hills that fade with distance, a treeline, 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. The sun rises and sets where it really does for your garden, the half hour before sunrise and after sunset has its own colors, and the trees turn and drop their leaves on your own frost dates, not the calendar's.
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See the busy week before it arrives
A new screen takes every plant you have, works out every job it will need for the rest of its life, and stacks the lot into twelve weeks — so the week where four things ripen and two need pruning is something you can see coming instead of something that lands on you. Tap a bar to see what is in that week, grouped by where it grows. Dates that are still a window say “about” rather than pretending to a day, and when no week stands out from the rest it tells you that too. Find it from Your week.