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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When you are around is now a row per day, not one answer for the whole week
Hardening off schedules itself around the hours you are actually there, and until today you could only give it one answer: what time you leave, and what time you are back, applied to all seven days. That could not say the ordinary thing — home all day Saturday, evenings midweek — which is exactly the week most people have. Profile now shows Monday through Sunday, each with as many stretches of time as you want, a plus button to add another to the same day, and a button to copy one day across all of them. The plan reads it properly too: a day with a gap at lunchtime and another after work has two windows a tray could go out in, and the app picks the one that fits the step rather than the longest one — so it stops proposing a carry at a moment you are not already moving. Times you had already set were carried over as what they actually meant: around before you leave and after you get back, not all day. A day you leave blank means you are not around, and nothing gets scheduled into it.
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A photo limit that gives the room back the moment you delete something
Photos now have a ceiling — fifty on a garden — and the interesting part is what happens when you reach it. Delete a few and the room comes straight back, immediately, with nothing to clear out separately and no waiting. That was the one thing worth getting right: a limit you cannot get out from under by tidying up is a trap rather than a budget, and it would have been the first place in this app where deleting something does not actually help. The camera also tells you before it opens rather than after you have taken the picture. The alternative is worse than it sounds — a photo that looks saved on your phone, quietly never arrives, and is missing the day you go looking for it on another device. It counts photos rather than megabytes, because the app already shrinks each picture as it saves it, and nobody should have to think in file sizes to use a garden app. Fifty is far more than most gardens take in a season; the limit is there to catch something going wrong, not to sell you anything.
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Twenty-three more plant problems the app can now describe
Melanose, sooty mold and tristeza on citrus, black knot on cherries and plums, and black root rot, leaf scorch and red stele on strawberries. Ask what one of them looks like and you get a description written from a named extension service, with the link, instead of "we have not written that one up yet". Each says what you are looking at rather than what to do about it — the sandpaper feel of a melanose leaf, the black galls that wrap a plum twig, the brownish-red core of a strawberry root with red stele — and each says which crops the page it came from actually covers. Where the source itself names a lookalike we pass that on: leaf scorch and Cercospora leaf spot look much the same, and the spots that never get a pale center are the scorch.
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Tell us how deep your raised bed is and we will tell you how many bags
Winter is when people build beds, and the question you actually have standing in the aisle is how many bags go in the trolley. So the bed page now works that out. We already asked how wide and how long a raised bed is; add the depth in inches and it says something like "About 16 bags of 2 cu ft — 32 cu ft in all". The total is there for anyone buying it loose by the yard, but bags lead, because nobody buys cubic feet. It rounds up, always — you cannot buy four fifths of a bag, and being one short means a half-filled bed and a second trip. We ask for the depth rather than assuming it, because a rectangle has no volume without one and a guess there is wrong by whole bags; the question tells you most raised beds are 6 to 12 inches so it is a choice rather than a test. One thing it deliberately does not do: tell you what to fill the bed with. Plain topsoil is a mistake, there is a proper mix, and getting it wrong costs you a season — so that is being sourced properly before we say a word about it, and the screen says which half it is answering.
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A plant you put in yesterday is no longer told to pick itself
Plant a mint cutting today and the app could tell you to harvest it tomorrow. Not a reminder for later — a job for now, on a plant with nothing on it. It happened to mint, rosemary, lemongrass and mulberry, and the reason is the daft part: **it was not that we thought they were ready. It was that we held no figure for them at all**, and having nothing to say had been letting the job through instead of holding it back. Seven plants behaved this way, and for months it was written down as one problem — missing numbers in our plant records. Measured plant by plant it turned out to be three separate faults, and only part of one was missing numbers. A raspberry and a strawberry went wrong on **exactly two days each** — the days you happened to plant them just as their picking season opened, which counted as having been there for it. A shallot was already known to be too young and got told to cure itself anyway, because the app was checking the name of the growth stage rather than the job. All three are fixed, and underneath them there is now a floor: **nothing is told to pick, cure or cut in its first 18 days**, whatever we know or do not know about it. Eighteen because that is the fastest thing in our entire plant database — mizuna, seed to a cut leaf in 18 days — so it is the longest we can wait without contradicting something we already know. Nothing that legitimately picks lost a day: 207 plant-and-planting-method combinations were checked and every one kept the harvests it had. **What it does not fix**, because a floor is not an answer: past 18 days those four plants are back to having no figure, and can still say ready before they are. That is a gap in the records rather than a rule, and it is the next job.
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The frost warning on This Week says one thing once, not six times
Under "Will not finish before your frost", the app lists the plants whose crop would start arriving after the cold does. If you had planted six bush beans, it printed the same sentence six times in a row — "Bush bean would start filling pods 3 days after your first frost" — because the sentence names the plant and six plants of one kind share a name. It was the loudest block on the page, and it was one fact. Identical warnings now collapse into a single line with the number of plants beside it, the same way the jobs above it already say "10 plants". Plants whose timing genuinely differs still get their own line — only word-for-word identical warnings merge, so nothing gets hidden behind a count.
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Places you can make, and keep, without planting anything in them first
Until today a place in your garden only came into existence as a side effect of something else — naming a spot while adding a plant, or mentioning a bed to the chat. There was no way to simply make one, which meant anybody laying out their beds before planting had to invent a plant to hang each place off. Worse, a place with nothing in it was invisible: the garden screen grouped plants by where they live and quietly left out any group that was empty, so making a bed and looking for it appeared to do nothing at all. Places now have their own list on the Garden screen, showing every one of them, with an empty one reading nothing in it yet rather than disappearing. Add a place takes a name and makes it, then opens it so you can add a size or say what kind it is — none of which is required. And the empty-garden screen now offers the same thing, which matters because setting up where things will live, before anything grows in them, is exactly what somebody starting out wants to do.
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It rained all night and the app still asked you to water
A gardener was shown a watering job for a potted bean the morning after a real soaking. The cause was worse than a missed condition: the app had the forecast on the screen and there was no mention of rain anywhere in the part that decides what needs doing. It carried the chance of rain and never the amount, and those are different questions — a ninety percent chance of a passing shower wets nothing, and a forty percent chance of a thunderstorm can drop half an inch. Rain now counts as a watering, because that is what it is. About four tenths of an inch in a day does it, and smaller days running together add up the same way. How long it lasts was already right and did not need reinventing: a pot dries out in a day and a mulched bed holds a week, so the rain simply goes in as the last watering and everything else follows. Anything under cover is left alone — a greenhouse bed and a tray on a windowsill got none of it. And if you watered anyway, your own record still wins. Underneath the week there is now a record of what has fallen over the last two weeks, with a bar for each day. It is what the forecast expected for your area rather than a gauge in your garden, and it says so.
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If you have asked your phone to reduce motion, the app now actually does
The app animates lightly — cards arrive in a short stagger rather than all at once. If you have turned on Reduce Motion in your phone settings, none of that is supposed to happen, because for some people this kind of movement causes real nausea. We had written the rule that switches it off, and one line of it had a typo that made the browser throw that line away: the speed of each animation was set to nothing, but the small pause before each card was left in place. So the cards still arrived one after another, over about a sixth of a second. It was the one thing the rule existed to remove. Fixed — with Reduce Motion on, the whole screen now appears at once. We found it by accident, chasing something else entirely, which is a fair reminder that a setting nobody on the team uses is a setting nobody on the team is checking.
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You can say how old a tree was while you are adding it
If you bought a tree that was already a few years old, the Add a plant screen now asks: how old was it when you planted it? Pick the plant, choose "A plant I bought" under how it started, and the box appears. A guess is fine — whole years is all we use, because the difference between a two-year and a three-year nursery tree changes nothing we tell you, and the difference between nought and three changes almost everything. The app works every date off the day a plant went in the ground, so without this a five-year-old apricot planted in April reads as a first-year seedling — and every spring it would tell you to stake it, strip its fruit and water it every few days, which is advice for a whip you grew yourself. The field itself has existed since the 19th, but only on the plant's own page, which is a screen you have no reason to visit right after adding a plant. Now it is asked at the moment you are describing the tree. Leave it blank if you grew it here from seed — blank has always meant it started here. The question only shows for plants that come back each year, so a lettuce you bought as a seedling is not asked, because the answer could only be nought.
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Setup opens with a choice, and ends by offering to save what you made
The first thing GardenTrack shows you now is a door rather than a question: Start, or I already have an account. Start takes you into the same five screens as before — where you garden, your dates, one thing growing, where it lives, and what the app now knows. Nothing about those changed, and the counter still reads one of five, because a door is a choice rather than a question about your garden. What is new is the end. Instead of dropping you on Today, the last screen offers to save the garden you just built, which is the first time we ask for an email — by which point there is something worth keeping rather than a form standing between you and a look at the app. You can close it and carry on: everything you entered stays on the device and is picked up by whatever account you sign in with later, whenever that is. And if you are already signed in, or already have plants in the app, none of this appears — the app can see it has met you before, and asking anyway would be it forgetting.
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The app no longer tells you to wait for signal you already have
When something you had recorded was waiting to back up, the line at the bottom of the screen said "will back up when you have signal" — and it said that whether your phone had no connection or the problem was at our end. Those are not the same thing, and only one of them is fixed by waiting. If you have a connection and we are the ones having trouble, it now says "Backup did not go through; trying again", which is true and is the right thing to do. No connection still says what it always said. Either way your work is on your phone and nothing is lost — the difference is only whether standing somewhere with better reception would help. Found by killing our own server with the app left running and reading what it said, which is not something a test can do: every test passed the whole time, because the sentence was well-formed and merely wrong.
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One name, two diseases again — and this time the description reached nobody
We describe 115 plant problems in the app, each written off a named university page. One of them was sooty blotch, the smudgy gray marks that turn up on apples in late summer. The description was right and it reached no apple at all, because the name it was filed under belonged to something else: a leaf spot on crimson clover, a cover crop with no fruit for a fruit-surface fungus to sit on. Two different diseases had ended up sharing one label, and each entry on its own was correct — which is exactly why nobody spotted it. Left alone, the app would eventually have described an apple problem to somebody asking about clover. Both now say which plant they mean, and the apple description reaches apples. This is the second time a shared name has caused this: back in August we found that blight is two diseases needing opposite responses. A plant problem has a common name the way a person has a nickname, and more than one of them can answer to it.
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The daily list stops asking you something you answered two minutes ago
When you name a place while adding a plant, the app asks what that place is — in the ground, a raised bed, a pot. Later the daily list asks what the plant itself is planted in, and until today that question came up completely blank, which reads as the app having forgotten. It now marks the likely answer and says where it came from: Straight in the ground, with a border round it and the line You said this about Back bed. It is marked rather than chosen, and that distinction is the point of the whole change — a seed tray can sit on any bed there is, so knowing what the bed is only ever makes one answer likely. The other options are one tap away and nothing is recorded until you pick one. Where the bed cannot suggest anything honestly, nothing is marked: a greenhouse names a roof rather than what the roots are in, so guessing from it would water a potted lemon like open soil. This matters more than it sounds, because what a plant is planted in is the single thing the watering advice turns on.
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The feedback button stops floating in the middle of the add-a-plant screen
The little pencil that sends us feedback floats over every screen. On some of them it lifts higher up so it clears a fixed bar at the bottom — the message box on the chat screen, for instance. The add-a-plant screen was on that list and has no such bar, so the button was lifting clear of nothing and sitting in the middle of the page beside the answer buttons. It now sits down in the corner above the tab bar, where it belongs. The reason this took two changes rather than one is that the extra space at the foot of the page — which does genuinely stop the save button colliding with it — was only being granted to screens on that lift list. Taking the screen off the list would have quietly removed the spacing too. The spacing now depends on the button being there at all, which is what it should always have measured.
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If you told us the day it came up, more of the app now knows
Eighteen crops — cucumbers, peppers, squash, corn, melons, okra and the rest of the warm-season list — work out their seedling stage from **the day the seed actually came up**, not from the day you sowed it plus an estimate. That matters because germination is the step that varies most: cold soil can add two weeks, and everything after it shifts by the same two weeks. **The app has been able to use that date for a long time. Four screens were not sending it.** The chat knew when your cucumbers came up; your garden list, your catch-up list, the hardening-off runs and the screen where you record what you have seen did not — so the same plant could be described as being at two different stages depending on where you looked. All four send it now. **What changes on the screen:** a cucumber that took eighteen days to appear used to be told to thin its seedlings and water them on a day when it was barely up. Now it is told nothing yet, which is correct — and a pepper that used to be told to thin is told to stake or cage instead, because it is further along than the estimate thought. We measured it across those crops and it changes the jobs on more than half the days we checked. **If you have never recorded a germination date, nothing changes for you** — the app falls back to the same estimate it always used, and says so.
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The free plant database was bigger than what our own app reads. It is smaller now.
The download carried all 3,174 varieties at full depth — eighteen months of sourcing and the inputs our planning runs on, in one free file. Publishing our data honestly and giving away all of it are two different decisions and we had collapsed them into one. Every crop is still there with its full care data; that part has not changed and will not. The variety list is now the 500 most-searched, carrying what a seed packet prints: name, type, color, size, heirloom or hybrid, and days to maturity. The 500 were picked by US monthly search volume for each variety name, measured on August 25, with ties broken alphabetically — a fact about what people look up rather than our opinion about what matters, and anyone can re-run it. What is held back is listed inside the file itself rather than left for you to notice, and if you need it you can email us. One thing we would not trade away to make the file look fuller: days to maturity ships only when we can also say what it counts from, sowing or transplanting. That is about a month of difference, and a maturity number without it is a misleading number. Where we do not know the basis, we publish neither.
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The forecast marks the days that threaten your plants, not the hottest day
The week strip used to point at the hottest day. That is a fact about the weather, and it said the same thing to okra as it did to lettuce that went in last week. Now a day only gets a mark when something you actually planted is in trouble on it — checked against each crop’s own recorded temperature limits and against what your plant is doing right now, because an apple’s frost figure is about open blossoms and means nothing to the same tree in January. Tap a marked day and you get the list: which plants, what the cold or the heat does to them specifically, and whether they are in a pot you could move. A run of hot days is marked once, on the day it starts, rather than every day it lasts — a mark that turns up every week is one people stop seeing. Frost is the exception and marks every night, because every one of those nights is a night you go out and cover things. And when nothing in your garden is at risk all week, it says so and gets out of the way.
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The garden walk has a button now, in both the places you would look
The garden walk shipped with one way in: a line of small gray text partway down the garden screen. It worked, and nobody could find it. There is now a proper button — "Walk your garden", with a camera on it — at the top of your garden above your beds, and the same button behind the + in the bottom bar, above the list of plants to log against. It is purple where the other buttons are orange, on purpose: orange is for doing something to a bed, and a walk is somewhere you go. Both are the same button, so they can never end up describing the walk two different ways. The + is there for a reason rather than for symmetry: a walk is logging. You are going outside to record what you see, and the + is where your hand already goes to record something. Neither appears until you have a plant, because a walk photographs your plants and attaches what it finds to them — with an empty garden it would be an invitation to a dead end.
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The indoor stretch was always too short, and two plants came out as zero days
For anything you start inside, we need to know roughly how long it spends indoors before it goes out. We hold two figures for that, and both are ranges: a tomato is 6 to 8 weeks in, then 7 to 14 days after the last frost. We were taking the shortest of each — 6 weeks and 7 days — which pairs the two ends least likely to happen together. Somebody who starts as late as they might does not also plant out as early as they might. The middle of each is the honest answer, and for a tomato that is 60 days indoors rather than 49. Two plants were coming out as zero days indoors, sweet pea and bok choy, which put the day they were sown and the day they went out on the same date. Of the 79 plants that use this figure, 52 move by two weeks or more. A longer indoor stretch means a plant reads as older, so it came with a second change: we will not tell you to pick something before it has been in your garden long enough to have anything on it. Without that, three flowers you pick — calendula, chamomile and nasturtium — would have asked to be harvested the day after planting, every day of the year. Nothing about a plant you sowed straight into the ground has changed.
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Tap a day on your week strip and you get the wind and the full forecast
Tapping a day already showed you the hours ahead, and now it also shows the wind — speed and direction — and the National Weather Service’s own paragraph for that day, in their words rather than ours. All three of those were already arriving in the same response we were fetching for the temperatures, and we were throwing them away. Nothing new is being requested, so it costs your phone nothing extra. One thing we are deliberately not doing with it: wind never puts a risk mark on a day. A mark means a plant you own is in trouble, and we can only say that where a university has published a temperature for that crop. Nobody publishes a wind speed at which a bean gives up, so a wind alert would be a number we made up — and a guess should not raise an alarm. It is the weather, reported.
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Two lines on the garden walk that now share no words
A garden walk marks each photo with what happened to it, and the two that matter used to read "Looked at — nothing to flag" and "Kept, not looked at". They both contained the phrase "looked at", which meant the entire difference between "your plant is fine" and "nobody checked this one" rested on the word not — three unstressed letters in the middle of a line you are scanning past. On the free plan you get one walk, so misreading that is not recoverable: you cannot go round again to find out. They are now "Nothing wrong with it" and "Nobody looked at this one" — no shared words, they differ on the first word rather than the fourth, and the second one names who did not do the looking instead of hiding it in a negative. We also fixed something that shipped the same afternoon: if our server was unreachable, the screen still said "we will look at every one and write down what we see" — a promise we could not keep, made to somebody about to spend their only walk on it. It now says we cannot reach our end and that the photos are saved until we can.
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Some plants are sold under two names, and we only answered to one of them
Our apricot record is "Chinese (Mormon) Apricot" because it is genuinely called both. If you typed the name off your nursery tag as "Mormon", we looked for the whole thing, did not find it, and told you we do not have that variety. We had it. Sixteen of our varieties are stored with a second name in brackets like that — Evans (Bali) Cherry, Holy Basil (Tulsi) — and either name now finds the plant. The size class on a tag was already being read: a label like "Mormon semi dwarf" is two facts, the variety and what it is grafted onto, and semi-dwarf against standard changes how big the tree gets and how far apart to plant it, so we keep it separately rather than treating it as part of the name. One thing that has not changed and will not: if the name you type is not one we hold, we say so rather than picking the closest-looking variety. A near-miss would silently change every date we work out for that plant, and a missing variety is a much better wrong answer than the wrong one.
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Walk your garden and have us look at it
There is a new door on your garden screen: walk round, photograph up to ten things, and tap which plant each one is. Every picture gets looked at as you go, and whatever we notice is written into that plant's record — so a walk you took on a Sunday afternoon is still there in October when you are trying to remember when the beans started podding. Nothing to read at the time. It just takes notes while you look. Three things worth knowing. It tells you how many photos will fit BEFORE it opens the camera rather than after the fifth one, because running out halfway through would spoil the walk rather than shorten it. It works with no signal — the photos are saved on your phone and we look at them when you are back in range, and a phone that dies mid-walk picks up the same walk rather than starting a new one. And it says which pictures were looked at and which were only kept, in different words: "nothing to flag" means we checked and your plant is fine, "kept, not looked at" means nobody checked. Those are not the same news, and a record that ran them together would send you back out to re-photograph something we have already seen is fine. On the free plan a walk is a one-time thing, and it does not come out of your photo allowance.
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We started counting, and we wrote down exactly what we count
GardenTrack now keeps a note of four things: how many people open the app, how many start setting up a garden, how many finish, and how many make an account. A single one of those records is a random number, which of the four happened, and when. No name, no email, no location, no plants, no photos, nothing about your phone. The random number is one we invent on your device the first time you open the app — it is not worked out from anything about you, which is what makes it a random number rather than a fingerprint. It stops the moment you make an account, because by then it has done its job and we would rather that not rest on us promising not to look. There is no analytics company involved, no script from anywhere else, and no pixel; we count it in a request the app already makes. Our privacy page used to say we ran no analytics at all. That was true when it was written and it is not true now, so the page has changed in the same breath as the code rather than quietly afterwards — and it now names what we count instead of leaving you to guess what "no analytics" covers. Why at all: until today, somebody who opened GardenTrack, looked at the setup questions and left again was completely invisible to us, and that is the person we most need to hear from.
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Pick the thing you can see, and read what causes it
Every plant page now has a quiet line under the name — Something looks wrong? — and it opens a list of what people actually see on that crop. Not latin names: holes chewed in the leaves, a dark sunken patch on the fruit, wilts in the afternoon and recovers overnight. Pick one and you get what causes it in the words of the university or extension service that wrote it up, with their name on it and a link so you can read the rest. It costs nothing and uses none of your AI questions, because it is a lookup rather than a conversation — you can open it as often as you like. If we hold nothing written up for that crop it says so instead of guessing, and shows the problems common to most plants. On a long list — a broccoli has twenty-eight entries — a box above it narrows things down: type leaves and only the leaf ones stay. One thing it does not do yet, and the help page says so too: it does not separate an illness from an ordinary growing problem. Blossom end rot on a pepper is about watering rather than infection, and today the guide describes it out of a disease write-up. What you read is still true about the spot on your fruit and still the source's own words, but the framing can make a fixable thing sound frightening. We are correcting the records underneath it.
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When it is not an illness, the guide says so first
Blossom end rot is the clearest case. A dark, sunken, leathery patch on the bottom of a pepper looks alarming, and nothing has infected the plant at all — it is the plant reacting to how evenly it has been watered. So the symptom guide now says that before it says anything else: not an illness, this is it reacting to how it has been grown, which means it is yours to change. Twenty-nine entries across the guide are growing problems rather than illnesses, and each one carries that line now. That is three of them — blossom end rot, sunscald and leaf roll — counted once for every plant and symptom they turn up under, which is how many times you could actually meet one. Until today they were all filed as diseases, so the guide described a watering problem out of a disease write-up — every word of it true about the spot on your fruit, and the framing wrong in the one way that matters, because it sends you looking for a spray you do not need. One thing it deliberately does not do: a cause we hold no write-up for says nothing at all. It is not called a disease and it is not called a growing problem, because an unknown shown as an illness is exactly how a plant doing something perfectly normal gets reported as sick.
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When we cannot tell you it is ready, we ask you instead
Some plants have no maturity figure worth trusting — a strawberry crown and a raspberry cane are the two you are most likely to own. Plant one partway through its picking season and the app used to say nothing at all, because it could not honestly say it was ready. Now it asks: "Any strawberry starting to turn color?" Say yes and the picking job appears. It only asks where an answer would actually change something, and it stays quiet about plants we do have a real number for — a young apple is not a question, it is a fact we already hold.
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A new help page for the plants that did not start here as a seed
Somebody asked the chat when their plants would be ready, and the chat had nothing written up for a plant grown from a cutting or bought already established. It said so rather than guessing, which is right, and this is the page it was missing. The problem underneath it is that every "days to maturity" number ever published counts from the day a seed went in the ground — so for a plant you bought in a pot, the number is answering a question you did not ask. The page says what to tell us instead. For a tree or bush there is now a box for how old it was when you planted it, and a guess is fine; without it we read your planting date as the tree's whole life and give a six-foot tree a first-year tree's care every spring. For an annual bought as a starter we use the crop's day count measured from setting a plant out, where we hold one. Where we only hold a count measured from seed we use the longer number on purpose, so the app runs late rather than early — telling you something is ready when it is not costs you the fruit, and telling you to wait costs you a few days of looking. The page also says the thing that beats all of it: once a plant is flowering, what happens next is the same few weeks whether it came from a seed, a cutting or a garden center.
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An onion you planted ten days ago was being told to harvest itself
Most of a plant’s dates are counted from the day its seed was sown. If you bought a start, you never sowed it — the only date you can give us is the day it went in the ground. For five crops we had nothing to count back from, so the app fell back to a national calendar: a date about a typical plant somewhere in America, shown as a fact about yours. An onion set out ten days ago came back as bulbing, ready to harvest and ready to cure, and the daily list told you to go and harvest it. Now we count backwards instead. We know how long an onion spends indoors before planting out — eight weeks, a sourced number in our plant records — so eight weeks back from your planting day is the day it was sown, and every date built on sowing belongs to your plant again. Onions, cucumbers, okra, pumpkins and summer squash all gained this. Fennel, kale and Brussels sprouts still cannot, because we do not hold the number for them yet — they keep showing the typical calendar and saying so, because inventing the number would put a made-up date on your own plant.