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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Today wears the sky: glass cards, a warning where you will see it, a week you can read at a glance
The cards on Today are glass now, lit by the scene behind them: clear glass at night, frosted by day. 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, so you cannot miss it. The week row shows four wide days and scrolls for the rest: each day has its weather and its high (on a frost night, the low), and how many jobs it holds. The tick box moved to the right of each job and draws its check when you tap it; Undo appears in place. The middle button is now "Log". The mic still floats above the bar.
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Try again on any answer
Under each finished answer there is now Try again. Tap it and the same question is asked once more, as a new turn at the end of the conversation, with the same photo or plant attached if there was one. The first answer stays as it was; both are on record.
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Setup now shows you what it worked out, before it asks for anything
A new screen near the end of setting up your garden, headed “Here is what I already know.” Your last frost date, how many growing days that leaves you, what you said you came for, and what you have planted — with a line under each one saying where it came from. A date from your street address says so; a date from the middle of your ZIP says that instead, and offers to sharpen it. Anything we could not work out is simply not listed — no dashes, no placeholders, nothing on it is a guess. It comes before we mention money or an account, so you can see what the app has made of your garden before deciding whether it is worth anything to you.
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The Profile screen says what things are, instead of describing them
Settings on your profile were written as sentences, and you had to read them side by side to tell them apart. They are labels now. The setting for what Rafe may do is called "When GardenTrack asks", and its three choices are "Ask first", "Ask before making things" and "Never ask" — one scale, read at a glance. Four other cards got the same treatment: "How cold your winter gets" is now "Winter cold", "Walk me through setup again" is "Setup walkthrough", and the card about what the chat records is "Saving what you say". The sentence explaining each one is still there, underneath, where a sentence belongs. Nothing about what any of them do has changed, and whatever you had chosen is still what you have chosen.
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Your garden arrives on a new phone in pages
A new phone asks for your garden a page at a time, each page your garden exactly as it stood at a moment. If the signal drops partway, the pages already down stay and the next sync continues from there. Nothing changes for a phone that already has its garden.
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A clear day now looks like a clear day
There was a dark band across the top of Today, put there so the white temperature could be read over the picture. It worked, and it also darkened about a fifth of the screen. On a bright afternoon that read as haze, and the sun turned to gray bars where its pale outer rings met the band. The picture was reporting weather the forecast had not said. The band is now a small panel only as big as the temperature itself, and the clear-day sky is brighter — 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. Cloud, rain and snow all darken from there, so the difference between a clear day and a gray one got bigger rather than smaller. The words are still checked against every color the sun can be, including the palest band it draws — which is where the old fade would have failed.
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A finished task is in your journal, and Rafe’s tasks can be undone
Until now, finishing a job you had asked for — "photograph the underside of that leaf in two weeks" — marked the job done and wrote nothing in your journal, so Rafe never saw that it happened. A finished task is now a journal entry on the plant, with the photo if you took one. And the list of everything Rafe did without asking now includes the jobs he put on your list, with an undo. Every task also carries what kind of thing it is — something you asked for, a warning, a one-off, a project, or a job that comes round — which is what the next version of the daily list will draw from.
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A job about four plants now knows about all four
When Rafe sets you a job covering several plants — "photograph your new seedlings" after you add four — it used to record the first plant and drop the rest. The job existed and read correctly; the connection to the other three was simply missing, so the job could not be found from them. It now holds every plant it is about, and can be about a bed or a zone as well.
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A seed tray is no longer given the pot’s watering test
If you said a plant was in a seed tray, and the spot it stands in was marked as a container, the app started treating the tray as a pot once the seedlings were a couple of weeks old — telling you to push a finger in to the second knuckle, which is most of the way through a seed tray. It now gives the tray’s own test at every stage: lift the tray, a dry one is noticeably light. What you told us about a plant now wins over what its bed is called, which is what the question was for.
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A variety you confirm now joins up with everything else
When Rafe offered to add a plant and you tapped the button to say yes, the variety he had heard — "Cherokee Purple", in your words — was saved into the slot meant for our catalog names. It looked recorded, and nothing could use it: not the variety page, not the growing advice, not finding everything you grow of that kind. Those buttons now look the name up first, exactly like the plant page already did. If we do not have a match, it is kept as your own wording rather than filed as something we recognize.
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Seven fixes from the first evening of the new daily list and Rafe
The watering row’s box now means Watered (it drew no box at all, because its two answers were equal). A sprouts question you answer on the row now stays a moment with Undo, then sits under Done today, and Undo there takes the answer back — before, the row vanished at once and Undo did nothing. An older journal entry’s id could be painted into Rafe’s answer in brackets; it is stripped now, whatever shape the id is. Telling Rafe to forget something now clears it on the phone that asked, not only on the server. And Rafe says “remembered” or “forgotten” rather than “added” for a fact about you. And asking Rafe what he remembers no longer makes him try to write something down. And the “what kind did you plant?” card now appears once per conversation, not under every message.
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"I don’t know" is an answer now, and the list stops asking
When the app does not know when a plant went in, it asks. Until now the only other answer was "not now", which brought the same question back the next day, for good. A gardener who genuinely does not remember when a tree was planted could never close it. There is a third answer: "I don’t know". It is written down, it follows you to a second phone, and nothing asks again — not the daily list, not the plant’s own page, not Rafe. Give a date later and the date wins. Two smaller things in the same release: a plant running late now says "Check for sprouts" rather than a sentence that stood three lines tall, and the soil checks ask less often — a mulched bed every few days rather than daily, a seed tray indoors no longer hurried along by the weather outside. Every interval now cites the extension page it came from.
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Rafe will ask once, later, what kind a plant is
If you added a plant without saying which kind it is, Rafe used to ask only in the conversation that added it. Now, when you talk about that plant on a later day, he asks once — one plain question at the end of his answer — and the same card appears under it that you get after adding a plant: say the kind, or have it made into a task for later. He asks only about the plant you are talking about, never twice in one conversation, and not at all if you already asked for a task about it.
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The list of entries Rafe used is only ever entries you wrote
When Rafe answers from your journal, the entries he leaned on are listed under the answer, dated, as “It used what you had written down.” Every one on that list is checked against the entries he was actually given for that question, so an id in his text that is really a plant’s id can never be mistaken for a journal entry and the list never quietly comes up short. That check has held since late August; on 4 September we tried a different way for Rafe to mark what he used, measured it, and put the original back because it worked better. Nothing about the list looks different.
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Rafe finishes a plan he started
Say “add a raised bed by the shed with three tomatoes in it” and Rafe makes the bed and then the plants in one go. Before, he sometimes made the beds and paused, and the plants never came. He gets exactly one second go at the same sentence, nothing is written that your words did not ask for, and the line above the answer names only what was actually made.
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Rafe writes down what he saw, and can search your whole journal
When Rafe records a pest, a disease or a plant that looks hungry from something you typed, he now writes what he saw beside the entry — "holes eaten in the lower leaves", "clustered on the underside" — in plain words, not the name again. Photo diagnoses have done this since June; typed conversations logged the name and nothing else. Rafe reads that evidence back every time you talk to him, so he can tell whether the same thing is happening again. And Rafe is no longer limited to your last twelve entries: he is told how many older ones exist and can search all of them by topic or by a word, across every plant and every season, before he says there is no record. Every entry also remembers which conversation wrote it.
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Tell Rafe what to remember about you, and see the list
Say “remember that I never spray” in the chat and Rafe writes it down as one line, in your words, with the sentence it came from under it. The list lives on your account page under How you garden, with a Delete on every line, and you can add a line there too. He reads the list on every answer and follows it over his own advice. He never adds a line on his own, and a line you delete — or tell him to forget — is gone from his very next message. The paragraph you could already write stays; the list is for the facts you want to keep one at a time.
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The height box asks in inches now
How tall is it now? used to ask for feet. That works for the tree you bought and for almost nothing else — a bean seedling is not 0.33, and most of a plant’s life is spent at the small end. It asks in inches now, which reads properly at both ends: 4 for a seedling, 72 for a young tree. Heights you had already entered were converted for you. What Rafe says when he reads a height off a photo has not changed — that still says about 6 ft tall, because that is how people say it out loud.
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Watering now comes first, because you can walk away from it
On a morning with several jobs, watering is now at the top of the list — not because it matters more than the rest, but because it is the one you can start and leave. Put the hose where it needs to be and go do everything else while it runs. Hardening off moved up for the same reason: the trays go out and stay out for hours, so a late start costs you the day. Anything you have to stand over stayed where it was. One thing did not change — a frost tonight and seedlings still outside are the two jobs where waiting costs you the plant, and nothing gets to jump those. The hose goes first among equals, not ahead of them.
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The photo path got the sign-in link too
If you asked about a photo before signing in, the app used to tell you to "sign in on Profile" — a screen that does not have the words sign in on it. We fixed that wording for typed questions back in August and wrote here that it was done. It was done in one place. Photo questions kept the old line until now, and they now say plainly that you need to be signed in, with a Sign in link right there that brings you back to what you were asking.
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The tick box is real, and every job has its own page
A job on your daily list now reads like a job — "Water Back Bed" — and the box beside it works. Tap it and the job is logged, with Undo right there, and a moment later it drops into Done today. Tap the words instead and you land on the job’s own page: why it is due, how to do it, a photo where a photo matters, every time it was done before, and a way to put it on a day you choose. When rain has done the watering for you, Done today says so, in inches, with a Put it back if you disagree. A job that needs more than one tap draws no box at all now — the old one looked like a box and opened a different screen.
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While Rafe works, the line above the answer says what he is doing
When you ask something, the wait used to say “Thinking…” for most of what Rafe does. Now it says the actual step — “Reading back through your journal…”, “Searching your whole journal…”, “Looking at your photo…”, “Checking your beds and where things are…” — and it changes as he moves from one to the next. The words disappear the moment his answer starts. Nothing about the answer changed; you can just see the work while it happens.
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Three plant descriptions now read the way you do
When the app describes what is wrong with a plant, it should sound like it was written where you garden. Three of those descriptions said "losing vigour" and "a greyish dust" — British spellings, in our own words. We already had a check for this, and a second, shorter one guarding the plant descriptions, and the shorter one did not know those two words. Both now use the same list, so a word we catch anywhere is caught everywhere.
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A correction: we published a number nobody published
Our post “Nobody Publishes the Temperature Your Vegetables Die At” listed sesame as dying “in the mid-30s”, grouped with chayote under “damage well above freezing”. Two things wrong with that. Sesame dies a degree or two above freezing, not well above it — chayote at 54°F is the surprise, and sesame is not. And Texas A&M, the source, never prints a figure at all: it says the leaves are killed by temperatures “slightly above the freezing point”. The number we showed was our reading of that phrase, in a post about numbers nobody publishes. The post now says so. We have kept our own working figure, because for a temperature a plant dies at, warning you early is the safer way to be wrong.
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What Rafe did on his own now survives a new phone
When Rafe adds a job without asking you, the record saying so is what lets you find it later and undo it. That record was only ever on the phone that made it — restore from a backup and the job came back with no sign of who created it. It now travels with the job, alongside a new note of what made each one: you, Rafe, or the app working from your plant dates.
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What you said you saw now shows on the plant’s page
Tell Rafe “the broccoli isn’t flowering yet”, or answer the question on your daily list, and the plant’s own page now keeps it under What you saw — “No flower buds yet · you said so”, with the date. One read from a photograph says “from a photo”. Remove takes it back, and the app asks again when the time comes. Before, the answer was recorded but nothing on the plant showed it.
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Your answers follow you to a second device
Two answers are drawn by the app rather than written by Rafe — the job list under "what should I do this week", and the ready dates and chart under "when will things be ready". Rafe writes one sentence and the app draws the rest. On a second phone or a new one, only the sentence arrived, so an answer that was a chart and nine rows turned up as a single line about the beans. Both now travel with the conversation. Answers you already have stay where they are.
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A block of our own notes showed on a plant page
Between "What is coming" and "Details" on a plant’s page, a paragraph of our internal notes — asterisks, arrows and pixel counts — was showing as if it were part of the page. It was a comment in the code written without the braces that keep a comment out of the screen. Gone now, and a check in the build refuses any comment sitting where it would show.
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A closer photo is no longer read as a worse plant
Compare two photos of the same leaf, the second one closer, and the app could tell you the plant got worse — because more was visible. Now, when the earlier photo was from further away or you say you stepped closer, it holds back the better-or-worse verdict and says the two photos were taken from different distances. What it saw is still shown. A two-photo comparison also gets the room it needs to answer in one go, instead of running out and paying for a second try.
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A photo goes on the plant it belongs to, or Rafe asks which
When you send Rafe a photo, he now decides where the picture belongs and tells you: the plant you attached, the one you named, or the one it looks like when you have only one of that kind. If two of your plants fit, he lists them by name and bed and you tap the right one. If it looks like a plant you do not have, Rafe says so and offers to add it. If it is not a plant at all, the photo is kept with your unplaced photos and nothing is made up. Rafe never guesses between two plants of the same kind by sight — that is yours to say.