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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Every photo of a plant now notes how tall it stood
When you file a photo under a plant, the app already looks at it and writes down what it can see. From today it also writes down how tall the plant looks — in inches under the photo in "How it has looked", next to the day count — so the row reads like a growth chart instead of a row of pictures. It is a reading, not a fact: it does not change the height on the plant’s own card, and when the app cannot find anything in the picture to judge scale by, it writes nothing rather than a guess. Rafe can read those numbers back too, so "how tall was it in September?" is answered from what was written down at the time, not by looking at the photo again.
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"I planted it on Saturday" now lands on the right day
Tell the chat you planted something on Saturday, or yesterday, or two weeks ago, and the plant now gets that date. Before today the chat was asked to work the date out itself and was bad at it: told Saturday it would pick a Monday, a guard refused the wrong day, and the plant was left with no date at all — while the chat read the wrong one back to you. Now the app does the sum from today's date where you live, the same way the add-a-plant card already did. A date matters more than it looks: every job, every "how long ago" and the whole frost and heat calendar hang off it.
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If its first reply forgot to ask the kinds, the question now follows
Earlier today the chat began asking what kinds of plants it had just built for you, in the same breath. In practice it remembered to ask about one time in three and otherwise left the asking to the card under its words. Now, when its first reply forgets, the question follows a moment later as a second line — "What varieties did you plant of each?" — worked out from the plants that were actually made, so it asks about the right ones. Building did not change; the question just stopped competing with it.
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Name a bed the app does not have yet, and the chat offers to add it
Say "three Cherokee Purple tomatoes in the raised bed by the shed" before that bed exists and, until today, the chat asked which bed the tomatoes went in — of someone who had just said. Now it names the gap: it does not have a bed called that yet, and asks whether to add it with the tomatoes in it. Say yes and the bed and its plants go in together.
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One photo, one card per thing seen
When the app looks at a photograph it could describe the same thing three ways — "actively growing true leaves", "vigorous leaf expansion", "new leaflets expanding" — and each wording became its own card to agree with. That is how one bean photo asked three times whether the plant had leaves. Now a photograph makes one card for each thing it actually saw; the repeats are never written down, and looking at the same photo again adds nothing.
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Past forty plants, Rafe sees your garden bed by bed
Rafe is shown your living plants one by one up to forty. Past that he used to see the twenty longest in the ground and the twenty planted most recently, and only a count for the rest — so a plant in the middle could drop out of view, and Rafe would sometimes say he had no record of a plant you had. On a sixty-plant test garden that happened nineteen times in twenty. Now, past forty, Rafe sees each bed with how many plants are in it and which crops, plus the plant you are asking about, and he is told exactly how many are on record. On the same test the false “no record” fell to one in twenty, and Rafe had less to read, not more.
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Plants that said their own name twice
Sixteen varieties in the plant database repeated a word inside their own name — a bok choy filed as "Toy Choy Bok Choy", a blueberry as "Blueberry Glaze Blueberry", a yarrow as "Common Yarrow Yarrow". Each one had the crop word tacked onto a variety name that already ended in it. They are fixed, so the name you see in your garden list, in a reminder on your lock screen, and when you ask about a plant is now the name a seed catalog would print. Five varieties still repeat a word and always will, because that is genuinely what they are called — Cara Cara Navel oranges and Walla Walla onions among them. Those are written down by name so nobody helpfully corrects them later.
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Room to finish the sentence
An answer about a photograph could stop in the middle of a word — "staying on those older le" — because the length limit was set for words alone, and looking at a picture uses part of it before a single word is written. The limit is now twice what it was. It is a ceiling, not a target: answers are no longer than they need to be, and the short "that answer was cut short" line still appears on the rare one that reaches it.
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Routine care Rafe tells you to keep doing can now go on your list
When Rafe's own answer tells you to do something, it offers to put that on your list. Until today that only covered one-off jobs — feed it, net it, repot it. The routine care it tells you to keep doing — pick every two or three days, water at the base rather than the leaves — read as information and never got an offer. Now it can, one offer per thing. It is still only for advice Rafe gave: an answer that explains or reassures offers nothing, because an app that offers to remind you about every sentence is one you stop reading.
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Rafe can make a garden zone
Tell Rafe "I have two raised beds in my main garden" and he now makes the zone, puts both beds inside it, and says so under his answer. A garden zone is the place a bed sits in — main garden, back yard, the greenhouse — and until today Rafe could make beds and plants but not the zone, so he wrote the place into each bed's name instead. If you already have a zone by that name he uses it rather than making a second one, and a zone Rafe made appears on the What it did list with an undo like everything else he makes.
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Rafe knows your beds now, including the empty ones
Rafe used to be shown your living plants and nothing else about the place they were in. A bed with nothing planted did not exist to him, a garden zone never did, and a garden with six empty beds was described to him as “nothing recorded yet” — so he could not say which beds were free. Now he is told how many zones, beds and trays you have and how many are empty, and he can open the whole map by name whenever a question or a new plant calls for it. He does not get the map on every question, on purpose: given the full list every time, he started asking about your beds instead of adding the plants you named. A signpost, and the map when he needs it.
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Rafe names each plant he adds
Ask Rafe to add a bed with tomatoes and peppers in it and the line under his answer now reads "added Tomato; added Bell Pepper", and the What it did page shows the same names beside each row. Until today every plant Rafe created on his own said only "added a plant", five times over for five plants, and had no name at all on the Garden screen. The plant is now named the moment it is made, the same way a plant you add by hand is: after its variety if you gave one, otherwise after the crop, and numbered when you have more than one.
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When Rafe judges a height from one of your photos, he now offers to write it down
Ask Rafe how tall a plant is getting and he can look at the latest photo he already holds of that plant and tell you — "about 10 inches, from the photo you took on Tuesday". Until today that answer stopped at the sentence: the plant itself never learned its height, and asking again next week meant measuring from scratch. Now the answer comes with a button — "Record it as about 10 in tall" — and one tap writes it onto the plant, the same way confirming a height works when you send a photo in. It is a button rather than something Rafe does on his own because a height read off a picture with nothing for scale is a guess, and a guess should not overwrite what you know.
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Tell it the kind of one of your two lettuces, and it asks which
Say "my lettuce is a Little Gem" and the chat offers to write that on the lettuce. Until today that only worked if you grew exactly one lettuce — with two, it had no way to ask which and offered to add a third instead, which is how the fill card had never once been used. Now it asks: which lettuce is this about? One tap, then the fill, and it only fills what that plant does not already have. A sowing date or a count still means a new plant went in, and still offers to add one.
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Tell Rafe how you garden, in one paragraph he reads every time
Some things about your garden do not fit a plant or a bed: I never spray, the back bed floods, I travel every August, you keep telling me to plant out too early for my spot. There is now a place for them — How you garden, under Your garden on the account page. Rafe reads it on every message and follows it over his own advice. He only ever knows what you wrote there, never guesses about you, and when you clear something it is gone from his very next message. The spray answer from setup now reaches him the same way; until today it shaped your task list and he never saw it.
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The forecast now says who wrote it
Tap a day on your weather strip and there is a short paragraph describing the weather. Those are the National Weather Service's own words, and until now nothing on the screen said so — the paragraph just appeared, unsigned. It is credited now, once, under the paragraph it belongs to. Everything else in the app traces back to a source you can check, from the planting dates to the temperature a crop starts to suffer at, and the one piece of writing we did not author was the one piece not carrying a name. It is a label rather than a quotation, on purpose: we drop a sentence when it only repeats a number already shown beside it, so the words are theirs but the paragraph is not always complete, and we would rather credit them than claim to be quoting.
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The heat card takes your answer now
When a hot spell is coming and we do not know whether a plant is in a pot or in the ground, the warning says so — because a pot can be moved into the shade and a bed cannot, and we will not guess. Until today that card asked the question and the only button on it said "Got it". Now there is a button that answers it, and the advice changes as soon as you pick. It offers four choices rather than the two the question names — a seed tray, a pot, a raised bed, or straight in the ground — because a plant in a tray is in neither of the two, and making you pick a wrong one just to clear the question would put something untrue on your plant.
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The journal now says when a plant moved
Every journal entry has quietly carried where the plant was when it happened — a seed tray, a pot, a raised bed, the ground. Nothing read it back until today. Now, when that changes between one entry and the next, the later entry says so: "now in the ground — was in a pot". Nothing new is stored and nothing is guessed; it comes from the placement your own plant record carried on each day, so entries you wrote weeks ago get the line too.
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The line under the answer is the record
Rafe no longer tells you whether something was written down — he says the gardening part, and the line under his answer says what actually reached your records. Rafe writes his answer before the app has decided whether a write landed, so "got it, that is kept" was a guess, and it was wrong twice in three tries about a plant that was not in the garden. That line also moved: it used to sit above the answer, which read as "already done" followed by "I will add both beds". It now comes after, so the app has the last word.
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A plant you may already have gets a question, not a guess
When Rafe goes to add a plant and that crop is already growing in that same bed, the app now asks instead of guessing: a card under the answer names the plant it might be, with a button to say “it’s that one” and another to add a second. Nothing is written until you tap. Everything else you said in the same breath — new beds, new crops, plants in other beds — goes in straight away; only the plant that might be a repeat waits. A plant in a different bed, or one you have finished with, is never treated as a repeat.
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Rafe adds the plants first, and asks the varieties after
Tell Rafe about two beds and everything growing in them, and he would add the beds, add the plants he knew the variety of, and hold the rest back to ask what kind they were. That was Rafe being more careful about a variety-less tomato than the app is: a plant with no variety is a complete record, and its page has a picker for adding the kind whenever you know it. So now every plant you name goes in, and the variety question comes in the same reply, afterwards. Measured on our test garden with plants already in it, twenty runs each way: plants added rose from 13 in 100 to 55 in 100.
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The weather card that said "Lab"
Three fixes to the week of weather on your Today screen. A card for a public holiday showed "Lab" instead of "Mon" — the forecast service names that day "Labor Day" and we were cutting names to three letters, so the day now comes from the date instead of the wording. Tapping a day opens a full sheet over the sky, and the day name and the close button at the top of it were sitting on the pale far hill rather than the dark near one, which is what made them hard to read; they have moved down onto the dark ground the rest of the words already use. And a hot spell that counted several plants used to print only the first one's dates — it said "3 plants" and "until Saturday" while one of them was still over its limit on Tuesday. It now runs to the last day any plant it counted is in trouble.
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Today has a sky now
The top of your Today screen 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 looked like this for a while and Today had not caught up. Your jobs have not moved: they sit in the same place they did before, which we measured either side of the change, because a better-looking page that pushes the work down is a worse page. Words printed straight onto the sun are almost impossible to read, so there is a soft dark panel between the two, and every color the app can put on that scene is checked against every color the sun can be.
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Tonight means the night you are in
If you opened the app between midnight and dawn, the frost alert and the weather strip could name different low temperatures for the same night — 63 in one place and 64 in the other. Neither was wrong, which is what made it confusing: the weather service files two nights under one date at that hour, the one you are standing in and the one coming that evening, and we were reading a different one in each place. Both now mean the night you are in. That is the one you can still do something about at three in the morning, and it is the safer way round — an alert naming a night twelve hours away while you are standing in a colder one is how a frost warning costs you a plant.
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Two rain chances for one day
On some days the weather card showed one chance of rain and the forecaster's own sentence underneath it showed another — 7% next to "chance of precipitation is 20%". Both came from the same forecast, and the cause was that we were reading two different parts of it. When the weather service publishes no rain chance for the daytime, we were quietly filling the gap with that night's number, while the paragraph beside it still described the day. Now, if there is no daytime figure published, we show none rather than borrowing one — the same rule we already follow for rainfall amounts, where "nobody said" and "no rain expected" are different facts. It matters beyond a tidy number: the rain chance is what decides whether we tell you a watering job can wait, and it should not be able to say that about the wrong part of the day. Nights still show their own figure, because that is what a night card is.
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Undo everything one answer did, in one tap
When Rafe builds several things from one sentence — a garden zone, two beds and five plants — the line under his answer now has "Undo all of this" beside it. One tap takes back everything that answer did, without leaving the chat, and the line stays with each thing crossed out so you can still read what happened. Until today undo meant the full list, one row at a time; that list is still there as "Change or undo" for when you want to keep some of it. A bed that already holds a plant Rafe did not make stays, and the line says so.
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A small "usage" word under the chat, for when you want to know
Tap it and it tells you two things: how many photos and questions you have left, and how full this conversation is. Rafe keeps the last twelve messages of a conversation in mind when he answers, so once a chat runs long the earliest messages fall out of his memory — when the subject changes, start a fresh conversation. It is a word you tap, not a bar you cannot look away from: we decided in August that watching a number fall is not something this app should ask of you, and that still stands. Nothing shows until you ask.
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What Rafe read from your photo now asks, on the plant's page
When you send a photo, Rafe sometimes reads things about the record itself — that the plant is in the ground, what kind it is, that it is mulched. Until today those were shown once, under the answer, and if you scrolled past they were never asked about again. Now the plant's own page carries a small card: "From the photo on 2 September, Rafe read: In the ground · Little Gem — right?" Yes writes it on the plant; no means it will not come back. It sits beside the list of things Rafe noticed about the plant but stays separate from it, because a thing seen and a claim about your record are not the same kind of fact.
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What Rafe sees in a photo is now kept in his own words
When Rafe looks at a photo he notes what he can see against the app's short list of growth signs. Anything with no name on that list — dark spots with yellow halos, rings, curling, chewed edges — used to reach you as words and then vanish from the record. Now that sentence is kept on the plant, in Rafe's own words, and Rafe reads it back later: ask about the plant in a few weeks and "has this happened before?" is answered from what he wrote at the time. We kept the sentence rather than invent a list of disease codes, because a code narrower than the picture would have made the record vaguer and called it data.
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Your name for a plant stays yours
Tell Rafe which kind a plant is — "my Wax Bean is a Golden Wax" — and the card that saves it used to rename the plant as well, so Wax Bean came back as Bush Bean · Golden Wax. The kind is still written on the plant; the name you gave it now stays exactly as you typed it. Only a name the app made up itself, like Bush Bean 2, gets filled in. And the card no longer vanishes silently after you tap it: it says "Written on the plant", with a link to it.