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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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.
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A photo Rafe kept with a plant is on that plant now
When Rafe answered "Kept with Bush bean" the picture was filed on our side but your phone was never told, so the same photo stayed in Photos with no plant. Now the phone files it the moment the answer arrives — on the plant’s page, with a journal line — and it leaves the unplaced pile. Not that plant? still puts it back.
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A photo you send Rafe now lands on its plant
When you photograph a plant and ask Rafe about it, the picture is meant to be kept on that plant’s page — the plant you attached, the one you named, or the page you asked from. The part of the server that does this only ever ran on a reply path the app does not use, so since the end of August almost every photo sent through the chat was kept with no plant at all. It now runs on the path the app takes, and the photos you send from here on land where they belong. Photos already in the unplaced pile stay there until you place them.
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A plant you describe over three messages now actually gets added
Tell Rafe you planted tomatoes, answer his question about the kind, then answer his question about the bed, and the plant is added. Until today that conversation ended with Rafe saying he had not written anything down — he quotes your words back before he adds anything, and he was joining your three messages with full stops you never typed. We were checking that quote letter for letter. Now the check reads the words and their order, and ignores the punctuation. It still refuses anything you did not say.
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A plant our database does not know is still recorded — and Rafe no longer says so unless it is
Tell Rafe you planted a durian and he used to answer "I'll record it" and record nothing; there was no way to tell. Now a plant we do not hold is added under the name you used, without growing guidance, and a reply can only say a plant was recorded when it was. If nothing was recorded, Rafe says so and offers to add it anyway.
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A question that came back blank now comes back answered
Asking Rafe something that needs a look through your records — what you grew last year, say — occasionally returned nothing at all: the message "It came back with nothing. Try asking again." Rafe had decided he needed to fetch something and asked us for it, and we were ignoring the request at the last moment. Now what he asked for is fetched and he gets one more go at answering. If that is still empty you get the same honest message, and the question is not counted against you.
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A row of radishes is a row, not "which radish?"
Radishes, carrots, spinach, onions, potatoes, chives and crops like them go in by the dozen, in rows or bunches, or grow underground with only the greens showing. Nobody points at one. So Rafe now treats a sowing as the thing: a single row is never a question, two rows sown on different days are told apart by date, and the chips read "Radish row · sown Aug 14". A tomato or a tree is still a plant you point at.
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The app stops asking you to confirm that your plants are doing what plants do
After a photo, the plant page used to ask you to confirm signs like "true leaves" or "fast new growth" — on a healthy seedling, five times over. Those are not news. A sign a plant is expected to show at some stage is now kept as a reading and not asked about. What still gets a question: a warning sign the crop record lists, anything the app cannot place, a reading that says the plant is not doing well, and a change of stage.
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Today shows a temperature in the evening again
Open the app after about six in the evening and the top of Today had no temperature on it at all — just the garden name and the sky. The forecast switches to an overnight period once the day is done, and that period carries a low rather than a high, which is the only number the corner was reading. It now shows the overnight low, under the word "Tonight" so it cannot be mistaken for a daytime high. It deliberately does not reach forward to tomorrow’s high, which would have filled the gap with a number that is not about today and looked perfectly correct doing it.
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A variety you name in chat is written down the way you said it
Tell Rafe your tomatoes are Cherokee Purple and the plant could come out called cherokee_purple, with the same code in the box meant for your own words. Rafe now keeps the variety as you said it, a code that still slips through is turned back into words, and the plant is named Cherokee Purple.
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A warning at the top, and the week one tap away
Today now opens with any important warning sitting at the top of the screen — a frost coming, a heat spell, whatever the forecast has found for the plants you actually own. It looks like a notification because that is what it is, and tapping it opens the day it is about. Underneath your jobs for the morning there is a new line showing how many jobs the whole week holds, which opens This week. Your morning stays a morning, and the planning lives one tap away rather than on the same screen. If there are three warnings you see the one arriving soonest and a count of the rest — a screen that always has three things shouting teaches you to read none of them.
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"When was it planted?" can now say about three weeks ago
The choices went a few days, a week, two weeks, a month — so a radish you sowed three weeks ago, which is about when it is ready to pull, had no answer within a week of the truth. There is now an "About three weeks ago" step. The calendar underneath is still there when you know the day.
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Your bed now has an order, so "the third tomato from the left" means one plant
Open a bed and tap Set the order. Stand facing the bed; the plant on your left is 1. Two arrows under each plant move it left or right, and every plant shows its place — "3 of 5". From then on, telling Rafe about "the third tomato" or "tomato 3" files the note and the photo on that plant, on your phone and on the server alike, with no question asked. A bed you never ordered works as before: Rafe asks which one you meant.
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A promise Rafe made without saying "I" is caught now too
Rafe sometimes says he will write something down when nothing gets written. There is a guard for that, and it was looking for promises starting with "I" — so "Let me add those for you" went straight through, with nothing added and nothing to tell you. That phrasing is caught now, along with "I'm going to record that" and any claim he had already done it. The sentence you get instead is more careful as well: it no longer guesses why nothing was written, because at that moment it cannot know.
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Let Rafe guess where your unplaced photos belong
Photos with no plant now has a Let Rafe guess button. For every picture Rafe already read when you took it, the app checks that reading against your garden on your phone — nothing is sent anywhere — and proposes the plant: one tap to put it there when exactly one of yours is that kind, a choice by name and bed when two could be, and the add form with the kind filled in when you have none. Put them all there shows you the list first, files every sure match when you confirm, and one tap puts them all back; the rest wait for you.
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Mention a plant you have and Rafe offers to add it
Ask Rafe about a plant that is not in your garden yet — "I gave my rhubarb a good soaking, was that too much?" — and he answers, then offers to add the rhubarb. He used to answer and let the plant stay missing, even when he said out loud that he had no record of one. Asking about a plant you do not have is different: "how do I grow rhubarb?" gets an answer and no offer.
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One job in five beds is now one line
If four beds need watering, your morning list used to show four rows saying the same thing, told apart only by the bed name. Now it shows one: how many growing spaces need it, with the beds still there when you tap in and work through them one at a time. Nothing is hidden — the list is just shorter. Seed trays and freshly sown seedbeds keep their own line, because they dry out faster than a bed does and want looking at more than once a day. Pots and new transplants too, for the same reason.
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One stage at a time on a plant page
A plant page could show two growth stages both marked "now" — and on a raspberry it could show six, including flowering and dormant at the same moment. The cause was not a mistake in the dates: growth stages genuinely overlap, because "seedling runs somewhere between day 14 and day 30" is a range rather than a boundary, and we were showing every range your plant fell inside. Now the page names the single stage your plant is most likely in — or the one you confirmed yourself, which always wins — and the neighboring stages say whether the plant is moving into them or leaving them.
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Rafe keeps your finished seasons short, and looks up the detail when you ask
If nothing is growing in your garden right now, Rafe used to open every conversation holding a full table of what finished and how — harvested, died, removed, year by year. Now he holds one line: which years you gardened, how many plants, and roughly what was in them. Ask what you grew last year and he looks the rest up, so you get the beds and the dates as well.
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Rafe no longer asks for the plant and the bed you just told him
When Rafe planned a bed with a name you had not used, the plant meant for it quietly failed and Rafe asked you for the plant and the bed together, as if you had said neither. Now he says which bed name he could not place and lists your beds to choose from. He offers to make a new bed only when the name is one you actually said.