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 week of weather at the top of Today was invisible in the light theme
Seven days of highs, lows, rain chances and day names, sitting at the top of the Today screen — and in the light theme they were cream text on a cream page. Two of them measured 1.00 to 1, which is the number you get when text is exactly the same color as what it is sitting on. The strip was built when the app had only a dark screen, and it was given the colors meant for a dark background. When the light theme arrived, the background changed underneath it and the lettering did not. Nothing was broken and nothing errored — the numbers were all there, correct and up to date, in a color you could not read. Fixed: the strip now takes its lettering from whichever theme you are in, and the highlighted day reads properly against its tint too. Eighteen separate pieces of text on that one screen were below the contrast standard; there are none now.
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We told paid accounts there was no limit, and there is one
Profile told anyone on an open plan “there is no limit on photos or questions at the moment — ask as much as you like.” There is a limit. A safety ceiling sits behind every account, including paid ones, so that a loop or a stolen session cannot run up an enormous bill in a night. It is set far above anything a month of gardening reaches, and almost nobody will ever meet it. But “no limit” is an absolute, and it was the one sentence in the app that our own meter contradicted on every single request. The screen now says the ceiling is there and what to do if you ever meet it: get in touch and we will sort it out. We have not added a warning or a number, because a wall you will never touch is not something to make you think about — it is only something we should not have promised was absent.
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A date we borrowed from the season can no longer tell you to pick something
Most crops have two ways of starting — seed straight into the bed, or raised indoors and set out later — and our records give some of their seasons from one of those days and some from the other. A plant only ever gives you one. **When the app could not work a date out from what you told it, it used the typical date for that crop in your area and then said it about your plant.** In late August the typical tomato season is wide open, so a tomato seed sown on Tuesday was told to harvest on Wednesday. Pepper, eggplant, tomatillo and ground cherry did the same thing.
**The rule now is one sentence: a season we borrowed cannot give you a job if it had already opened before your plant went in the ground.** No age limit, no threshold — the plant's own date against the season's own opening, and it needs nothing we do not already hold.
**The hard part was not stopping it, it was not stopping too much.** The obvious version — refuse anything we did not get from you — silences garlic, cereal rye, hairy vetch and horseradish for ever, because every date those four have comes from your frost dates and always will. That is not borrowing; the season genuinely is their clock. The next version, refusing every season-derived date, is worse in the other direction: it silences a tomato you sowed in May for the whole of September, which is exactly when you are picking from it. Both were built and measured before either was thrown away.
What shipped was swept across all 152 crops, both ways of starting, every planting day of the year. **Five fewer crops now say pick-it, cure-it or de-scape-it to a plant that went in yesterday** — and a plant put in at its normal time loses not one harvest, out of 207 crops and planting methods checked at every age to seven months. **The season is still shown, it just no longer masquerades as an instruction:** *tomatoes around here are usually picked from mid-July* is true and stays. *Pick your tomato* was not.
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A greenhouse is not something you plant in, so it is no longer one of the answers
When the app asks what a plant is planted in, it used to offer five answers: a seed tray, a pot, a raised bed, straight in the ground, or a greenhouse. **Four of those name what the roots are in. One names a roof.** If you grow a lemon in a pot under glass, you were being asked to pick which half of that to tell us — and picking the greenhouse threw away the pot, which is the half that decides how often you water it. The hint under that button admitted as much: *"Under cover, in the ground or in pots."* **It is now four answers, and nothing about your garden is lost.** A greenhouse has always been something a SPOT can be — you mark the bed as one, or simply call it "greenhouse" and the app reads it off the name — and that has not changed. So the lemon says both halves now: the spot is a greenhouse, the plant is in a pot, and the watering advice is the pot's. **Two things you may notice.** A plant under glass in a pot can now be told to come indoors on a cold night, which it could not before — the app thought "greenhouse" meant a building nobody can pick up. And a tomato planted into a greenhouse border is no longer put on a hardening-off run, which is right: you cannot carry a bed outside. A seedling in a tray or a pot in that same greenhouse keeps its run exactly as it was. **Nobody has to redo anything.** We checked every plant on every account before making the change, and not one of them had answered "a greenhouse" — so nothing was rewritten and nothing was lost.
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A tree that has been there for years can finally say so when you add it
The add screen asks when a plant went in, and **the longest answer it offered was "a couple of months ago".** For a bed of lettuce that is plenty. For the orange tree by the porch it is not an answer at all, so an established tree came in either as a two-month-old seedling or with no date on it, and both of those get planting-year advice every spring: stake it, water it every few days, strip the first fruit so the tree builds structure. Right in year one. Wrong every year after. **The list now runs past two months** — last year, 2 years ago, 3 years ago, and longer ago than that. Nothing behind it changed, and that is the point: the app has counted a plant's seasons for weeks, the plant page has shown the age, and the run-through has asked established plants which year they went in. **The one screen every plant enters through was the only one that could not say it.** You do not need to be exact. On a tree the year is the whole of it, and past its first season the app counts seasons rather than days — a few weeks either way changes nothing you will see. "Longer ago than that" records five, which is past the point where everything held back from a young plant has already been released. **One more thing you will notice:** where a plant's date is printed, it now carries the year when the year is not this one. *Planted Aug 23, 2023* rather than *planted Aug 23* — which, on a tree put in three years ago, read as this August.
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A way to tell us when you cannot get in — and four tabs that finally have pictures
If you were stuck on the way into GardenTrack, there was nothing you could do about it. The sign-in screen had six things on it — a box for your email, a button to send you a code, and the four tabs along the bottom — and not one of them was a way to reach us. Every route the app has is behind the door: the quick button opens the chat, and the chat needs the account you are trying to get. So the person we most need to hear from was the one person who could not speak to us, and a tester who could not get in looked exactly like one who had never been invited. There is now a link on that screen — Not working? Tell us — on the step that asks for your email and on the step that asks for the six-digit code, which is where a code that will not take, a code that never arrived and a mistyped address all end up. Say what happened and send it. No account, no code, nothing you have not already got. Your email is a second box underneath and it is optional, because somebody who has just failed to sign up twice should not have to hand over an address in order to say so. The other visible change is the bar along the bottom of every screen. The four shapes above Today, Garden, Talk and Profile were identical blank squares — the right size and the right place for icons, with no picture in any of them, which reads as four images that failed to load. They were never icons at all; each was a colored square marking which tab you were on, doing a job the word underneath already did. They are now a sun, a seedling, a speech bubble and a person, so you can go for the shape instead of reading eleven-pixel type every time you want to move. And the round microphone button, which was slightly see-through on the chat, Add a plant and hardening-off screens, is solid: text passing underneath it was coming out smudged rather than covered, which is worse, because your eye keeps trying to read it.
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Every finished plant said it ended on December 31
If you had ever recorded a plant as harvested out, pulled or dead, its page said it ended on 31 December — whatever day you actually said so, and whatever year. So did the Finished list in your garden. The date we stored was the day number within the year, 1 to 366, and the screen that drew it could only show days 1 to 365, so anything it did not understand came out as the last day it could name. It never looked broken, which is why it lasted. Two things follow from the fix. The date is now the day you gave, and it says the year when the year is not this one — so a perennial that finished two seasons ago reads "Jul 19, 2025" instead of silently reading as this summer. And every record you already had has been repaired: the first time you open the app it converts the old dates using the year the plant went in, and sends the corrected ones up so your other devices get them too. The same number was also behind a quieter problem. The app refuses to log something onto a plant you have finished, unless it happened before the end — remembering a watering from the week before you pulled it out is ordinary. That comparison was between two numbers that did not mean the same thing, so it refused everything, always. Backdating onto a finished plant works now.
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Is there still time to grow it? Answered on the crop page, with no question spent
Open any crop and there is now a second line under the planting verdict: "Sown today it would still finish before your first frost around 10 October" — or would not, or would give you a small one rather than none. It is your own frost date against that crop's own days to maturity, and it is the question people actually ask in August. The app has been able to answer it since the middle of the month. **The only way to reach the answer was to ask in chat** — so your phone worked it out, sent it off, and had it read back to you, which costs one of your questions and needs a connection. Now it is simply on the page: instant, offline, and it costs nothing. The two lines answer different questions and can honestly say different things. A radish's spring window closed in April and a radish sown today still finishes — you can sow it again later in the year. A sweet potato can have an open window and still be sixty days short of the ninety it needs, which is the case this was built for. And for crops you dig or cut rather than wait to ripen, "not enough time" is not the same as "nothing": what you eat keeps growing until the frost kills the top, so the line says a small crop rather than none.
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Most of the text in the app is a step bigger
Nik said the text was too small and that it never settled — your eye keeps re-adjusting. Measuring it found one cause rather than eleven: the app had two text sizes a pixel apart that were described as the same job, and the smaller of the two was labeled the one to reach for first. It ended up carrying 55% of every word the app says, at 12.8 pixels — a fifth smaller than the size your phone itself uses. There is now one size for anything you read. Nothing moved by more than about a pixel, but it moved on 549 pieces of text across every screen, and the sizes that are left are a short deliberate list rather than a pile of near misses. Small type is still used for things you glance at — a counter, a timestamp, a chip — and nowhere else.
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The photos that matched nothing now have somewhere to live
Send a picture of something that is not in your garden — a sunflower on a walk, a leaf you could not place — and until now it went nowhere you could find it again. Every list of photos in the app starts from a plant, except one: the row of recent shots on the Talk screen, which stops at twelve. So an unmatched picture was there for twelve photos and then gone. The file was never deleted; there was simply nothing left pointing at it. There is now a screen for them, on Profile under "Photos with no plant". It leads with what each one turned out to be — Sunflower, or Tomato · Cherokee Purple — Early blight — rather than a wall of thumbnails with dates on them. Your phone already has the wall of thumbnails and is better at it; what it cannot tell you is what the picture was of. A picture we never worked out says so in those words instead of being quietly left off. You can put any of them on a plant whenever you work it out. It becomes a real journal entry dated the day you took the picture, not the day you filed it, so it lands in the right place in that plant’s run of photos and follows you to a new phone. Two smaller things went with it. What the app told you a photo was is now kept on the photo — carefully, so a reading about the second of three pictures is written on the second one and not on all three. And a picture sent in a conversation that never became a journal entry now reaches a second device properly: before this, it arrived as a name inside a message and in no other place, which meant every screen that starts from your photos was blind to it.
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Profile is four sections now, not thirteen
Profile had thirteen headings in one long scroll, all at the same level, and every thing you could actually change was a line of underlined words inside a paragraph. It now has four groups — **Your garden**, **How the app talks to you**, **The app** and **Your account** — and the things you press look like buttons. Sign out is where every other app puts it: the very bottom. Two sections stopped existing rather than moving. The times you leave the house and get home were a section of their own, three cards away from hardening off, which is the only thing that uses them; they are inside it now. And the paragraph under Alerts said what the switch underneath it already said. A hundred words came off the screen along the way — the walkthrough card spent 49 of them listing what it does not delete, before anybody had a reason to think it might. The section headed **Danger zone** is now headed **Start over**: "zone" already means something specific four cards up, where you pick how cold your winter gets, and the button under it says what it does better than the heading did.
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Tap any day in the weather row and it opens hour by hour
The second half of the weather work. Tap a day and its hours open **underneath the row rather than on a screen of their own**, so the week stays in front of you and the same tap closes it.
**It leads with when.** A column of twenty-four temperatures is something your phone already does. What an hourly forecast can tell a gardener that a daily one cannot is the hour: *rain from 2pm* is what decides whether you water this morning, and *coldest at 5am, 29°* is what decides whether covering at nine in the evening is enough. On an ordinary day it says nothing and just shows the hours — a panel that always has an announcement is a panel you stop reading.
**It covers about six and a half days**, which is as far ahead as the weather service publishes by the hour, and it fetches only when you tap. Most mornings nobody opens it, and asking for it on every app open would spend your data on something you did not look at.
**Two things went wrong in testing that no amount of reading would have found.** The cache we built to keep this cheap never once worked: the service publishes its hourly list starting from the top of the previous hour, so our "is this still current" check threw away every copy and fetched again — the exact opposite of the point, with nothing on screen looking wrong. And the hours were labeled from the clock on your device rather than the clock in your garden, so Friday opened at "11pm" when tested from a different time zone. Both were found by opening the app and looking, and both now have a test that goes red if they come back.
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The app now has something to say in February, when your beds are empty
Open GardenTrack in the middle of February with nothing planted and it used to say *"Nothing planted yet"* and stop — **at the exact moment the gardening year starts.** Everything the app knew how to say hung off a plant that was already in the ground, and in late winter there is not one.
**Now it says what the season is asking for**, counted from your own last frost rather than a date off a national chart: *it's time to start thyme, celery and shallot indoors, plus 14 more* — and when a window is about to shut, it says that too. Move your last frost three weeks later and your tomatoes move three weeks with it.
**It shows on the two screens that would otherwise be blank** — an empty garden, and a morning where everything is already done — and it goes quiet the rest of the year. There is nothing to sow in August and we are not going to invent something to fill the space: it speaks on about a third of the days in the year and says nothing on the rest.
**Two of the three things this was meant to fix turned out to be working already**, which we only found by opening the app on a simulated 9 February rather than reading the code. A garden with a peach, an apple and a gooseberry in it already gets nine cards that morning, *Winter prune* among them, and hardening off already runs off a tray of seedlings. The gardens that got nothing were the empty one and the one holding last summer's finished annuals — so that is what changed, and the pruning is exactly as it was.
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The app stops asking whether your seeds are up once it can see that they are
It was asking "any sign of it yet?" on the same screen that told you to pick the crop — 388 of the 1,368 screens we generated, across 116 crops. Fifty-five crops were still asked three years after planting: every fruit tree, every berry, asparagus, rhubarb, garlic. Three separate parts of the app were each answering "should we still be asking", and they gave three different days. There is one answer now, and it runs on your plant’s own calendar rather than a day count: the question ends when the app tells you to pick something, when every window that plant has is behind it, or when the sprouting checkpoint itself runs out. Both of those numbers are now zero. A plant still inside its window is asked exactly as before, including one running late — that is when we know least about it.
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Four things on the setup screens, and a screen for when the app cannot open your records
The first screen of setup draws one ZIP code as a grid of a thousand little squares with one lit up, because that is how many of our 800-foot squares fit inside one. The two lines that say which is which used to sit underneath it — and on a shorter phone, an iPhone SE or an 8, they fell off the bottom of the card. So the picture that carries the whole argument for why this app is different arrived as a gray rectangle with an orange speck in it, which says the opposite of what it means. The labels now sit beside the picture, and the picture sizes itself to the phone, so both lines are on screen on every size we design for. On the same screen, "Why this?" used to open and then never close — the button was replaced by its own answer, leaving nothing to press. It stays put now and says "Hide that" while it is open. Choosing "Nothing yet — I am planning" on the third screen used to drop you on Today after the counter had promised 1/5, 2/5, 3/5: two more screens that never came. It now finishes on the last screen, the one that says your dates are set and what Today will do with them, and the progress bar shows the screen you skipped as an empty step. And setup is drawn over Today, so pressing Tab a few times used to walk you onto the screen underneath, ending on a link that leaves for the sign-in page — the keyboard now stays inside the card, as it does on every other panel the app draws over a screen. Separately: everything you record is written to your phone before anything else, and if the app cannot open that store there is nothing for any screen to show. It used to sit there with a working row of tabs above a blank page, forever, saying nothing. It now tells you what happened and what to do — usually close GardenTrack’s other tabs, which is what blocks it after an update — and if the other tab goes away on its own the app carries on without a reload.
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The first setup screen shows a neighborhood instead of a grid of squares
Setting up used to open with a grid of about a thousand small squares, one of them lit up, to make the point that your frost dates come from your own patch rather than your region. It made the opposite point to most people who saw it: a big gray area with a speck in it. It is now a view over a neighborhood with two pins in it — a garden down among the houses, and a spot on the higher ground behind — carrying two different last-frost dates, because that gap is the whole reason we ask where you garden. The picture is an illustration and the two dates on it are examples; the line underneath says so, and your own dates arrive on the next screen the moment you give it a location. On a smaller phone the picture now shrinks instead of pushing its own caption and the "Why this?" button off the bottom of the screen, which is what used to happen on anything shorter than a large handset.
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The job now says which plant it is about
Two watering jobs on the same list used to open with the same seven words — "Feel the soil where you sowed" — and the only thing telling them apart was a bed name in the smallest text on the screen, which the row was cutting off anyway. We measured it: the words every row shared were the biggest thing on it, and the words that made a row yours were the smallest. The job says the plant now. "Feel the soil where you sowed the carrot." "Feel the soil in the tomato pot." Where one job covers two crops in one bed it names both, and past two it names two and counts the rest, because watering a whole bed is still one trip. The other half of the same complaint was on a plant’s own page, where the watering question ran to ninety-seven words — how far to push a finger in, what the top half inch of soil is doing, why a hard jet of water moves seed about, how often to look — delivered in full every two or three days from May to September. None of it was cut. The page shows the job and the two answers, Still damp and Watered it, and the rest is one tap away under "How to check". The first time you grow a crop you want the lesson. The fortieth time you want the two buttons.
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Five notes on a plant page that light mode could not show you
If you use the app in light mode, five of the notes on a plant were painted in colors meant for the dark screen — cream text on a cream page. Two of them were literally the same color as the paper behind them, so they were not faint, they were invisible. They are the ones that matter most when something is not going to plan: whether your seed should have come up by now, why a young tree is not fruiting yet, how you will know the crop is ready, whether a plant will survive your winter, and the two or three weeks in a season when missing a watering costs the harvest. All five now read properly on both screens, and the ones carrying news — a seed that is late, a tree past its window, a plant that will not make it through winter — are printed in full-strength ink rather than a quieter gray.
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The stage on your plant page stops pretending somebody looked
A kale sown 30 days ago said "worth a look — it may not be up" near the top of its page, "seedling · vegetative" eleven lines down, and a flat "Seedling" on the Garden list. Three claims about one plant, and they could not all be true. The stage is worked out from your sowing date and your frost dates — a good guess, not a sighting — so while we are still asking whether something came up, it reads "Probably a seedling — nobody has said it came up yet", and the Garden row uses the same words. Tell us it is up and the hedge goes. A plant you bought and set out is never hedged. And you get one stage rather than two: windows genuinely overlap, but "seedling · vegetative" reads as a mistake, so we name the later one.
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The small things you tap are now big enough to tap
We measured every control on sixteen screens. Fifteen of them were smaller than a thumb, and one was on every single screen: "Back it up", the line at the bottom that saves your garden to an account, was fifty-four pixels wide and thirteen tall — under a third of the smallest thing anything should ask you to hit. It is a full-sized target now, and so are the other fourteen: the way back off a plant, a bed and the hardening panel; both ways out of the page you land on when a link is dead; the way off a crop page; the link to the rest of your week; the bed names you tap to rename them; the Today / This week switch at the top of the home screen; and both Water buttons. Behind the confirm screens, the buttons that delete a plant or restart your garden were four pixels short as well, and are not any more. **None of them look different.** They were the right size on paper the whole time — the app has published one number for how big a control must be since its first screen — and each of these had a size typed in beside it instead, which quietly wins over the rule. The check that runs before anything ships now reads those typed-in sizes too, so the next one cannot get past it. One more thing on that same line: if you followed "Back it up" to the sign-in screen, the bottom of that screen told you to go and back up — pointing at the page you were standing on. The count is still there. The offer is not, because by then you have taken it.
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The weather is a week now, not a footnote — with icons drawn in our own hand
The weather on your home screen was one gray line: tonight's low and the next three highs, set in the smallest type on the screen. **We were already caching seven days** — each with a high, a low, a chance of rain and the forecaster's own description — and showing one field of the four.
**Now it is seven columns.** An icon, the high, that night's low, and the chance of rain where it is worth a glance. Rain chance is the addition that matters most: it is the number that decides whether you water, and we were showing none of it. **The hottest day of the week is tinted**, so the day something bolts is findable without reading seven numbers, and **a night at or below freezing goes purple** — the same 32°F your frost dates are worked out from.
**The icons are ours, and they are not clip art.** Eight of them — sun, part cloud, cloud, two kinds of rain, a storm, snow, fog — drawn by the same machinery that draws the low-poly vegetables: one violet light falling from the upper left, three tones of one color, and the nightshade glint on the lower right that every icon in this app carries. The sun is the same gold as the pepper, on purpose.
**They took three goes and every fault was invisible in the code.** The first pass rendered as a mountain range, the second as a row of houses, and the fog as a menu button. Nothing automated caught any of it, because nothing automated can — the only test that works is looking at the picture at the size it actually ships at.
**Two deliberate absences.** There is no wind icon: we harvested 51 real forecast descriptions from sixteen cities and wind never once arrives as a condition of its own, only appended to another one — so an icon for it could never appear, and a picture nothing can draw looks like coverage without being it. And there is no humidity, pressure or sunrise, because your phone does all of that better and a row that repeats your phone has not earned the space.
**It still goes silent on a stale forecast**, as it always has. Weather from a day that has already happened is worse than none, and a frost that has been and gone is the worst of all.
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Your trees get a ring, because their year comes back round
The season chart draws every crop you sowed this year as a bar running from your last frost to your first one. That is the right shape for a tomato — one life, from a seed, that either finishes before the cold or does not. It is the wrong shape for an apple. On that line, December and January sit at opposite ends of the screen, and they are the same winter. A prune in the last week of December fell off one edge and reappeared at the other. That is not a small inaccuracy — it is the chart saying something false about time. So your trees, bushes and canes now get a ring instead. Twelve months round the outside, today as a hand, and the colors are what most of your perennials are doing at that point in the year: resting through the winter, getting going in spring, cropping through the summer. One ring for the whole garden rather than one per tree — ten trees would be ten dials, which is a dashboard rather than an answer. The dots around the rim are the once-a-year jobs, one per month. A month with several in it draws one bigger dot with the number on it, which is what keeps a winter full of pruning readable when you have a dozen fruit trees. Tap one and you get the list — what the job is, which plant, and the date — and each row opens that plant. It is not a score. There is nothing to fill in, no percentage and no streak. A wheel has no finish line, which is exactly why we picked one.
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Two lines on one screen wrote the date two different ways
Open a crop you had run out of time to sow and the page said "The spring window closed around 4 April." — and on the line directly underneath, "Based on your last frost around May 4." Same screen, same kind of thing, two different orders. There were three ways of writing a date in the app. Two were written out by hand and had quietly disagreed since the day they were written. The third — seventeen places, and by far the most common — asked your browser which order it preferred. That is the reason this lasted as long as it did: on a British phone all three lined up and the page looked perfectly consistent, so whether the bug existed depended on who was looking at it. There is now one way, and it is the American order everywhere: April 4, not 4 April. If your phone is set to a British or European locale you will see more dates change than most people do — they were the ones following your browser before. Nothing about what the dates MEAN has changed, and no date moved. One other thing did get better on the way: a day counted backwards past the first of January used to print as "Jan 1" in a couple of places instead of the November day it actually was.
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Two of the same plant in one bed are told apart now
Two radishes in one bed, sown three days apart, came out on your daily list as "Radish, Broccoli and Radish" — which reads less like you have two sowings and more like the app listed something twice by mistake. Your week named none of them, and the two plant pages were word for word identical, so opening one to find out which it was landed you somewhere indistinguishable from the other. Each now carries the shortest thing that tells them apart: the kind you planted, the day you sowed it, whether it is up, or how many there are — all things you could check standing in front of the bed, which is why it is never "Radish (1)" and "Radish (2)". Nothing is added where nothing is needed, and the seedbed job is still one trip rather than one per seed.
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You can take back something you logged by mistake
Until today, correcting the journal lasted about as long as it took to answer the next card. The run deck offered an undo on the thing you had just done — and that was the whole of it. Anything older belonged, the app said, in the plant’s own history. The history could add a tag to an entry and nothing else. So a watering you logged twice, or one you put on the wrong plant, was in your record for good the moment you moved on. Now every entry on a plant or a bed can be taken back. The quiet link under an entry reads Mark or remove, and under the seven tags there is "This never happened — remove it". It asks first and it names what is going: Remove "Watered" from 3 days ago? Two things it tells you before you tap. A photo on that entry stays on the plant, because a picture of your plant is still a picture of your plant. And removing the entry that says a plant died does not bring the plant back — that is a different control, "Actually it is still going", on the plant’s own page, and the app points you at it rather than letting you find out afterwards. Removing is for something that never happened. If it did happen it stays, even if it went badly — a failure is the entry you are most likely to want next year.
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Your whole journal in one place, and it knows what each entry is about
Until today there was nowhere in the app that showed everything you had written. A plant’s page showed that plant, a bed showed that bed, and a question like "what did I write about aphids last year" could only be answered by opening plants one at a time. The entry count on your Garden screen — "3 spots · 214 logged" — is now a link, and behind it is every entry from every plant and every season, newest first. You can search it by what you wrote or by a plant’s name. And you can filter it by what entries are about: pests, watering, feeding, harvest, soil, pruning, weather and a few more, plus three about the entry itself — whether it was a diagnosis, a suggestion, or a question you never got an answer to. Nothing has to be tagged for that to work. The app works out the subject as you write, from the kind of entry it is and from the words in anything you type — so a plain note reading "sprayed neem for the aphids" turns up under both Pests and Treatment without you doing anything. Every entry you had already written was worked out too, the first time you open the app, so your existing journal is searchable rather than only what you write from here on. Two things worth saying plainly. None of this touches your AI allowance — it happens on your own device with no network and no model, because searching your own journal is not going to be something that stops working when a free allowance runs out. And the assistant does not read these subjects yet: they are stored and they back up, ready for it, but asking it about your notes works the way it did before.
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Five small things on screens you use every day
None of these changed what the app does. All five changed whether you could tell. The empty week said the same thing four times over — a line at the top, a paragraph in the middle explaining what the screen would look like once it had something in it, and a note at the bottom repeating the first line. Forty-two words to say "add a plant and this fills up". It now says that, with the button underneath. The winter-hardiness picker showed thirteen bare numbers and never printed the words "hardiness zone" anywhere near them, so unless you already knew what they were you were picking one out of thirteen on a hunch — and nothing said which end was cold. It now names itself, says 1 is the coldest and 13 the mildest, and tells you where to find yours if you do not know: the back of most seed packets, or search your ZIP code. On Add a plant, the arrow that everyone reads as "this opens something" was on the button that CHOOSES a crop, while the one that actually opens the crop’s page was a small word beside it; the arrow moved. The "What can I plant right now?" button was drawn with a dashed outline, which in every app you have used means empty slot, drop a file here, nothing yet — it is a real question with a real answer, so it now looks like one. And the message box on Talk was twelve pixels too narrow for its own prompt, so "Ask about your garden…" broke onto two lines; the prompt is shorter and the send button beside it is now a full-sized target rather than one six pixels short.
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A note now says whether something was done, spotted, or only suggested
A beta tester read a note the chat had just written to his orange tree and made two points, both right. The note said "nitrogen or micronutrient (iron/manganese) - yellow mottling between veins on lower leaves — from what you told the chat". First: it never says whether that was something we spotted, something we advised him to fix, or something he had already done. A season later, that difference is the entire reason for having written it down. Notes now open with which it is — Diagnosis, Suggested, Normal for now, or Looked healthy. Second: the record should not talk about the app. Which screen a fact arrived on is our plumbing; the note is about the plant. Whether a note came from you or from the app is still kept and now shows as a small label beside the entry instead of trailing off the end of the sentence. Two more things landed with it. Advice that tells you to do something can now offer to become a task, rather than only being offered when you ask for a reminder — his words were that a fertilizer suggestion "probably should have been a task suggestion". And perennial herbs like lavender were still coming back with no harvest timing, because the app was insisting on knowing how they were started before it would count from the day they went in. It knows the day. That is all the arithmetic needed.
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Photograph a seedling and the app stops asking whether it came up
When GardenTrack is not sure a sowing has come up, it puts a short question on your Today list rather than guessing. A beta tester had one open for his wax beans, photographed the pot, and got an exact answer back: the one on the left has its first true leaf open, the one on the right is just breaking the surface, still wearing its seed coat. The app had answered its own question and did not notice — the question was still sitting there afterwards. His point was the right one: he should not have to give the same information twice, once to the camera and once to a task list. The cause was smaller than it looked. The photo reading was recorded correctly, against the right plant. It recorded first true leaf, and the open question was waiting to hear about first seed leaves, and nothing in the app joined the two — even though a plant with a true leaf has certainly come up. Later signs now prove the earlier ones. Photographing a seedling settles whether it sprouted; a photo of fruit turning color settles that it flowered and set. Only where it is certain, though. A plant can grow all season and never flower, so being knee-high proves nothing about flowers and the app will still ask. And it does not quietly rewrite your records: only what the photo actually said is stored, and the rest is worked out at the moment it is read, so a year from now you can still tell what was seen from what was concluded.
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A plant you have not planted yet no longer gets jobs
You can add a plant with a date in the future — it lets you lay out a season before you dig anything. What should happen then is nothing, because there is no plant. What actually happened was three cards: a garlic dated three months out was asked "any sign of the garlic yet?" about a seed still in its packet, and handed a job to harvest it and a job to cure it. The uncomfortable part is that the app already knew. Underneath, the part that works out what a plant is doing had correctly decided this one did not exist yet, and said so in seven separate places. The screen had simply never read any of it. Now it does. A planting dated in the future shows nothing until its day comes, and on that day you get the one job that matters: plant it. Three things still show on purpose. Hardening off, because that whole routine happens in the two weeks before a seedling goes in the ground — the obvious version of this fix would have deleted it. Anything we are missing about the plan, like where it will go or what date, because those are answerable from the sofa whether or not the plant exists. And a sowing you have planned still counts when we decide whether to suggest sowing more of the same crop. The fix itself was to change which list the screen reads by default, so that the fifteenth card we write next month gets this right without anybody remembering to make it.