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 to transplant seedlings: two different jobs share one phrase
"Transplant your seedlings" means either of two things and they are months apart. Potting up is indoors — a seedling leaves the cell it germinated in for a bigger pot, triggered by the plant. Planting out is the garden, triggered by the weather. Most pages answer one of them without saying which, which is why the advice you find never quite matches the tray in front of you. The new page separates them and then covers the one people delay. Maryland: "The ideal time to transplant young seedlings is when they are small and there is little danger of setback from root shock. This is usually about the time the first true leaves appear." Small is the qualification, not a description — the instinct is to wait until a seedling looks sturdy enough to handle, and that is backwards, because a bigger seedling has more root to disturb. It also carries the instruction that decides whether the plant survives the move: "Handle small seedlings by their leaves, not their delicate stems." A torn leaf is survivable. A crushed stem is not, and the stem is exactly what an adult hand reaches for. And the step almost nobody prints, from Utah State: unplug the heat pad once germination is done. Above about 60 to 65°F at night, spindly plants can result — so the thing that got them up is what is now making them stretch.
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The crop list and the crop page were never the same calculation, and our help page said they were
When you are adding a plant, the crop list is sorted so what you can plant this week comes first — and every crop has a Look button that opens a page whose first line answers the same sort of question. Our help page told you those two were the same calculation, "so the two cannot disagree". They are not, and they do. The list asks whether a crop will finish before your first frost, which is the same engine as the "what can I plant now" button directly above it. The crop page asks whether the sowing window is open. Both are honest answers and they are answers to different questions, which matters most in late summer: measured across one garden’s year, on the 10th of August the list offered 35 crops and the crop page called 9 sowing windows open — and the two sets had nothing at all in common. Every spring window had shut while plenty of fast crops still had time to finish. The help page now says which question each one answers, and says that if the two lines look like they disagree, that is what you are looking at. Nothing in the app changed — the behavior was already right and the explanation was wrong. There is now a test pinning it, so the day someone collapses the two engines into one, a check says so rather than a gardener.
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Ask which varieties would still ripen before your frost, and it counts
Someone asked in August whether there were faster tomato varieties that would ripen in their season. The app already worked out whether a plant in general could finish in time — and it used the fastest variety as its yardstick — but it never named one. So the question one step past "can I grow this" had nowhere to go. Now it counts the days between today and your first frost and lists the varieties that fit, fastest first, with how many of the full list that is. Fifty-eight days left and 8 of our 115 tomatoes make it. The part that took the care is a trap in the data. A variety’s day count starts from one of two places: sowing a seed, or setting a young plant out. Which one it is varies variety by variety, not just plant by plant, and a third of our plants carry both kinds among their own varieties. Ranking those together would sit a 50-day figure that starts at sowing beside a 50-day figure that starts several weeks later, and recommend the wrong one with complete confidence. So a plant measured both ways gives you two lists, never one, each saying what it counts from. Tomatoes are measured one way throughout, so that original question gets a single clean answer. One more thing worth saying out loud: a day count is a catalog figure for a good season, not a promise, and a cold month slows everything down.
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We check that every source we cite still opens. This week it caught us out
Every plant-problem description on this site names the university page it came from, and a script checks that those pages still open. It reported eight dead links and said, in so many words, that a citation which 404s is proof nobody opened it. So we found replacement sources elsewhere, read them, and rewrote six of our descriptions to match what the new pages said. Every one of the original pages was alive. The University of Minnesota had moved their whole gardening section to new addresses. The wasted afternoon was not the problem — rewriting a description to match a different source means dropping whatever that source does not happen to mention, and one of the things we dropped was true and useful. Minnesota says the downy mildew that hits the cucumber family comes in two forms: one that goes after cucumbers and melons, and another that goes after pumpkins and squash. That is worth knowing if you grow both. It is back. What changed today: sixteen source links now point where the pages actually live, including on four guides where you would have clicked through to a "page not found" — cabbage worms, leaf miners, tomato blight, and yellowing cucumber leaves. And the checker now looks for a moved page before it calls anything gone, so the next time this happens the fix is one line and nobody touches the words.
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A + button for writing things down
There is now a + in the middle of the bottom bar. Tap it, pick a plant, tap what happened — watered, fed, picked, saw a pest, or looked it over and all was fine. It saves on the tap and offers an undo, and there is a box for your own words if you want one. Nothing on this path uses AI, which matters more than it sounds: the free allowance counts from the day you sign up and does not refill, so with the chat as the only real way into the journal, free accounts would have stopped being able to record anything the day it ran out. Keeping your own records is not the paid part.
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A “days ago” that was counting hours
The app holds back a once-a-year job you have already done — pruning a tree twice in one spring is a real harm, not an untidy list. The rule was right and a unit defeated it: the value it checked was documented in days and calculated in hours, so it read as twenty-four times larger and a job done last week looked like a job done four months ago. Fixed. Worth saying plainly what it did and did not reach, because we measured rather than assumed: the ticket reported it on an apple, and an apple never takes this path — the app shows the bed-grouped version of that job instead, and that one has always cleared correctly. Across every perennial we hold, the affected path is reachable for three crops. Small blast radius, real rule, now guarded by a test that drives the actual screen rather than the arithmetic underneath it.
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A hardening day that says "tomorrow" now tells you what time
Late in the ramp there is a twelve-hour day outside, and if you open the app after breakfast it will not fit before dark — so the card said it was a morning job and left it there. The trouble is that tomorrow morning at the same time it said exactly the same thing, and the calendar kept moving underneath, so that day never actually got done. It now tells you the time: out by 8am and it fits. Same on the button. The app already had the arithmetic — it just was not saying the useful half.
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A tree you grew from a pip is not on a nursery tree’s clock
Nearly every fruit tree sold in a nursery is grafted, which is what makes it bear in two to four years. One you raised from a seed or a cutting is on its own roots and takes far longer — seven to ten for a citrus. Until you say, we assume you bought it, because most people did. That is the right guess and still a guess, and on a tree you grew yourself it is wrong by about six years. So the app now asks, once a tree has been in the ground a season, and answering moves every fruiting date to match. One thing was wrong in the other direction too, and it was the explanation rather than the dates: the line about your tree’s age was reading the nursery figure even after you had told us the tree was seed-grown, so a three-year-old could be told it was old enough to start directly above a stage list — worked out from the corrected figure — with no fruiting in it. One screen, two answers. There is one figure now and both parts read it.
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A bed dated for next Tuesday was told to feel the soil where you sowed
Adding a plant with a date ahead of today is meant to be a plan, not a plant — no watering checks, no growth clock, nothing that assumes there is anything in the ground yet. The task list respected that. The daily cards did not: a bed you had dated for next week still came back with "feel the soil where you sowed — water it if it is dry", about seed still in the packet. The rule behind it checked that a planting had a date at all, and never that the date had arrived. Fixed. One thing does still start before the day, and it is meant to: hardening off runs for the two weeks before a transplant, because that is when seedlings need to be going outside.
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A plan whose day came and went was quietly treated as done
You can add a plant with a date ahead of today — beans for next Saturday — and the app stays quiet until the day, then puts the job to plant it at the top of your list. That much already worked. What happened if Saturday passed and nobody ticked it: the job vanished and the app carried on as though the seeds were in the ground. Every date it gives you for that plant is counted from its planting day, so assuming wrong made the whole rest of its calendar wrong, quietly, with nothing to show it. It now asks the next morning — did the beans go in? — and "not yet" is a complete answer that changes nothing. It only asks about plants you dated ahead: a plant added with today’s date or any past day is a record of something that happened, and is left alone. That distinction needed a new fact on the planting, because every plant in the app is an unticked same-day add and a rule reading the date alone would have fired on all of them.
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We said a quote was a heading when it was a photo caption
Our aphids guide quotes the University of Minnesota saying "All aphids have tailpipes". Those are the right words — they are the caption printed under a photograph on that page. We had described them as a section heading, which they are not, and that is now corrected. While we were in there we checked every other quote on that page against its source by hand: all 21 are accurate. The reason we looked at all is worth saying too. Our own quote-checking tool had flagged nine of them as wrong, and it turned out the tool simply could not reach the page that day. The words had been right the whole time. That fault is fixed as well, so a busy web server can no longer look like a misquotation — and we very nearly edited correct writing to satisfy a tool that had not read anything.
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A five-year-old tree was being asked whether it had sprouted
That question is for seed. A tree you bought and set out was already alive when it arrived, so there is no sprouting to watch for. The app had the right rule the whole time — the line on the plant page that says "first sprouts in 5 to 10 days" has always refused a plant you set out rather than sowed — and the card on your daily list asking the same question simply never checked it. The card does wait until the earliest day a crop could possibly show, taken from that crop’s own sprouting window; the catch is that every perennial we hold has no sprouting window at all, and we deliberately do not silence the question for a crop with no window, because a missing figure is not evidence that a plant comes up instantly. Right for the early end, and it left no limit at all on exactly the plants that never sprout. Seeds are unaffected, including the awkward ones — garlic goes in around October and may genuinely not be up by January, and it is still asked. SUPERSEDED 23 August 2026: the garlic half of that last sentence is no longer true. We hold no sourced figure for when a garlic clove shows above ground, so we stopped asking a question we could never read the answer to — see the entry for that date.
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When to plant onions: as early as you can, and not earlier
Onions are the hardiest thing in a vegetable garden. Illinois Extension puts them in the top group: "Very hardy vegetables withstand freezing temperatures and hard frosts without injury." So the instinct is to plant them absurdly early — and Maryland gives the reason not to, which has nothing to do with cold damage: "Planting too early, with exposure to cold temperatures, can cause seed stalk development." Cold does not kill an onion. It makes it bolt, and a plant making a flower stalk is not filling a bulb. Meanwhile the other end of the window is a deadline you have no say in. Minnesota: storage onions are generally long-day types that require fourteen or more hours of daylight to form bulbs. Bulbing is triggered by day length, not by how long the plant has been growing — so the onion you dig is the size the plant had reached on the day the light hit its trigger, and a week planted late is a week you cannot make up afterwards. That is also why onions are not a succession crop: one trigger, one season, one harvest. The page does not publish a map of states to onion types, because day-length sensitivity is a property of the variety rather than the crop, and the seed packet is the one place that answer is reliably right.
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Bacterial spot on a peach and on a tomato are two different bacteria
The fourth disease name today that turned out to cover two organisms. Tomatoes and stone fruit both get something called bacterial spot and they are not the same thing, so they now have separate descriptions. On a tomato: small angular spots with straight edges and yellow haloes, and raised blister-like spots on green fruit that turn scabby. On a peach or apricot: water-soaked circles along the leaf midrib whose dead centers fall out and leave the leaf shot through with holes, and spots on the fruit that weep a bead of sap. One honest caveat we have written into the stone-fruit entry itself: the page we sourced it from is about almonds. It is the same bacterium and it names peach, but nobody we could find has published a description for apricot specifically, and we would rather say that than let you assume otherwise.
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Celery gets its own blights, instead of a tomato’s
Early blight and late blight are each two different diseases with the same name. We had the tomato-and-potato ones written up, and celery and celeriac were pointed at them — so a celery grower got a description of a disease their plant does not get, with a note admitting it. A warning is not a fix. Both now have their own entries, written from the University of California pages for those exact diseases, and the descriptions tell you how to tell the two apart on the plant: look hard at an older spot, and late blight is peppered with tiny dark dots while early blight has a gray fuzz and none. Lovage was pointed at them too and is now pointed at neither, because the source that names the celery diseases says plainly they only affect celery and celeriac. Lovage does get blights — its own sources say so — but nobody names which, so we would rather hold nothing than hand you the wrong one.
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The end of a garden round stopped calling itself a mode
When you finished working through the day's jobs, the last screen was headed "GARDEN MODE" — the only place that phrase appeared anywhere, and an odd thing to read at the moment you have just finished something. It now says "Done for now", and the close button, which screen readers used to announce as "Leave garden mode", says "Stop for now". Small, but it was the app talking about itself at the one moment it should have been talking about you.
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Frost alerts now arrive while it is still light
The frost alert went out at one fixed moment for the whole country. That moment was six in the evening on the west coast and nine on the east — and in September it is dark by nine, so most of the country got a warning they could only act on with a torch. It now goes by the clock on your own phone: around six in the evening, wherever you are, one alert per night. If your phone has never told us its time zone you get the old late one until it does.
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We called it a frost surface on the screen where you tell us where you live
Type in your address from outside the lower 48 and the app used to answer "our frost surface covers the lower 48 for now." Frost surface is our name for our own machinery — the gridded map the dates are read out of. It is a fine thing to call it in an engineering note and the wrong thing to say to somebody in the first minute of using a gardening app. It now says frost dates, which is what you came for. Checking the rest of that sentence turned up something worse: it promised we would "fall back to zone estimates", and we do not. Outside the lower 48 the address never saves, so the garden stays unpinned and every date comes from one fixed calendar — a typical zone 6b, the same one every unpinned garden gets, whether you garden in Fairbanks or San Juan. The message says that now, and the help page has a section explaining exactly what does and does not still work. The same read caught a straight untruth on that help page: it said you could enter your own frost dates if you had kept records. You cannot. There is no box for it anywhere in the app, and there never has been. That answer now says so and points at the setting that does exist — how much you want to gamble, which shifts every date earlier or later together.
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Fusarium yellows turned out to be two diseases as well
Same shape as the celery blights earlier today, caught before either description was written rather than after. Fusarium yellows on celery and on cabbage-family crops are two different fungi that do not cross, so they now have two entries. The celery one comes with the test that settles it: cut a stalk across and the rings inside are stained orange-brown, which is what tells it apart from aster yellows — the other thing that turns celery yellow, and one we already describe. Ask about yellowing celery and you get both, because you genuinely cannot tell them apart without cutting one open. The cabbage-family entry carries something useful too: the source says cauliflower, broccoli and brussels sprouts are not known to get it, so a yellowing brassica bed is not automatically all of it.
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Two screens disagreed about whether your pruning window was open
Open "What did I miss?" on New Year’s Day and a peach’s dormant prune sat under "Gone for this year — nothing you do now reopens it". It was open, and stayed open until late March, and the daily list said so on the same day about the same tree. The cause was two ways of writing down a window that crosses New Year. The part of the app that works out your jobs writes that window as running past day 365; the catch-up screen expects it written the other way round, and neither knew the other existed, so it asked whether 1 January falls between mid-November and late March, decided it does not, and filed a live job as gone. Fixed at the join. Checked across every once-a-year job we hold, on every day of the year: the two screens now agree everywhere. The worst affected before this was wrong on 128 days out of 365.
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Tiny holes in your leaves: a new page on when flea beetles matter and when they don’t
Flea beetles chew small round holes clean through a leaf, and every gardening site shows you the damage and then reaches for a spray. The thing none of them tells you is which case you are in. On a seedling that damage can kill the plant outright. On an established plant the identical holes are cosmetic and the plant grows through them. Same insect, opposite answers, and the difference is what the plant is doing rather than how many holes you can count. So the new page says how long the dangerous stretch actually lasts, using the growth-stage data we already hold for the 37 crops that get this pest. Arugula and radish are seedlings from day 7 to day 21 — fourteen days and they are through it. Cabbage runs day 8 to day 49. The median across the 27 crops we can put day numbers on is eighteen days. Count from the day you sowed, not from the day you noticed. Inside the window, cover it; outside it, leave it alone. Two things the page deliberately does not do. It does not name a spray or a rate, because flea beetles are a group of species with different hosts and different state guidance, and a product name from us would be a number we had not checked for where you live. And when it gets to what eats them, it says we have not sourced that and will not invent it — then gives the thing we can stand behind, which is that no predator arrives fast enough to save a seedling in a two-week window.
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Your harvests now add up
The summary above a plant’s history used to say how many times you had picked something. It now says what those pickings came to — 3 harvests, 4 lb. Two units stay two facts: four pounds and six fruit are shown as both, because adding them would mean guessing what one of your tomatoes weighs and then showing you the guess as a measurement. And if some of those harvests had no amount on them, it says “at least”. A total that quietly leaves out the ones you skipped is worse than no total, because nobody goes back and re-checks a number that looks finished.
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In the ground is not a pot
If you marked a plant as going straight in the ground, or into a raised bed, but the spot it sits in was named a pot or container, the app handed that plant the pot watering advice — check often, water little. That is written for a five-gallon pot drying from every side, and open ground holds moisture for a week. It came from reading “in the ground” as though you had said nothing, so the name of the spot filled a silence that was not there. What you pick now genuinely wins. Nothing to redo: the advice is worked out fresh each time you look, so it is already right.
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It stopped saying “Do the carrot have proper leaves yet?”
The app asks about your plants by name, and one of those questions had the grammar wrong: "Do the carrot have proper leaves yet?" It was not a typo in one place — the name is dropped into a fixed sentence, so every plant reaching that stage got it. Pluralising it would only move the problem to anyone with a single plant, so the question is rewritten to work either way: "Proper leaves on the carrot yet?" Checking the rest turned up the same fault pointing the other way — "Is the tomatoes filling out?" — which is fixed too.
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Aphids: the whole internet says kill them, and Minnesota says mostly do not
Search how to get rid of aphids and you get thirteen results telling you how — remove them this instant, eliminate them, nine natural options, once and for all. Not one of them prints the sentence University of Minnesota Extension actually publishes: "In most cases, aphids cause little to no damage to plants and can be ignored." Our new page leads with that. It holds because something is already eating them — lady beetles, lacewing larvae, syrphid fly larvae and parasitic wasps are named by all three extension services we used — and because aphids are weak insects that a good rainstorm knocks off, which is why a dry summer seems to bring them. The page also gives the identification everybody skips. Small green bugs describes fifty insects. Every aphid has two tiny tailpipes sticking out of its back end and nothing else on your plants does, which two universities state independently. When you do need to act, start with a hose, and Colorado State explains why that is not a token gesture: very few aphids knocked to the ground ever find their way back onto the plant. The honest limit gets its own heading rather than a footnote — aphids carry plant viruses, the aphid leaves and the virus does not, and that is why "ignore them" is a starting point rather than a rule, especially on seedlings and on anything you are growing to eat.
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Your week stops filing “no rush” jobs under today
Two changes to the same screen. Jobs marked no rush have their own section now instead of sitting in today’s list — on a twenty-five plant garden that is eighteen rows of forty-nine moved out from under a heading that said the opposite of what they were. Nothing is hidden: they keep a heading and a count, because a screen whose promise is showing you everything in one moment cannot answer a request to declutter by dropping a third of it. And Today now shows the weather: tonight’s low first, because that is the number that decides whether a tray comes in, then the next few days. That was the other half of a complaint about a card saying "hot weather in three days" on an app that had never shown a temperature anywhere. The card carries its number now and the line above lets you see the shape of the week it came from.
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"Nothing yet" is an answer, and now it is on the home screen too
When the app asked whether your seeds were up, the home screen gave you one button: "Yes, it is up". If you had gone out, looked at the row and seen bare soil, there was nothing there you could honestly press — so the only options were to say something untrue or to ignore it, and ignoring it brought the same question back the next day. Both answers are now on both screens. Saying "Nothing yet" is a real answer that gets recorded: the app stops asking, and speaks up again on its own if the seeds go past the point where that crop should have shown. Before this, saying no threw the answer away.
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Parsley gets its own leaf spot, instead of a tomato’s
The last of four plants that were being handed a description of a disease they do not get. Septoria leaf spot on a tomato and on parsley are two different fungi, and we only had the tomato one written up — so a parsley grower got "dark spots on the leaves", taken from a page about tomatoes. Parsley now has its own entry, written from the University of California page for that exact disease, and it describes what you would actually be looking at: small sunken tan-to-brown spots, often ringed in red-brown, going gray in the middle as they age and coming up peppered with tiny black dots. The stalks get them too. It also records something the source is careful about — that page covers cilantro as well, but the fungus only affects parsley, so we say so rather than letting the title imply more than the page does.
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Profile went quiet about limits instead of answering
Somebody asked how much of their allowance they had used and got a line describing what a free account "comes with" — a ceiling that had already been removed. We fixed the wrong number by hiding the line, which is better than stating something false and is still not an answer to the question. Profile now says the true thing: there is no limit at the moment, and we will say so there first if that ever changes. If the server reports a number for your account, that number is what you see instead — a fact about your account beats a general statement about the tier. The rule deciding all of this used to be a condition written inside the screen itself, where nothing could test it, and it had been wrong twice. It is one function now, with a test covering all four states.
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You could tell us the tree was grown from a seed, and nothing listened
A tree grown from a pip has no rootstock, so it has nothing to sucker — and "Remove suckers" should never have been on its list. You have been able to say so on the plant page for a while, and we said on the help page that saying so was enough. It was not. The answer was saved and then dropped three separate times on its way to the part of the app that decides what to show you: the rule that reads it was never given the crop it needed, the year-ahead list never asked the rule at all, and the object handed to the engine was rebuilt by hand without the answer on it. Each one alone was enough to keep the job on screen. Fixed and checked on the real page in both directions — pick "grown from seed / cutting" and the job goes, unpick it and it comes back. Anyone who already answered does not need to answer again. The question above those buttons also read "What size tree is it? (on the nursery label)", which is a strange thing to ask somebody holding a tree they grew from a seed; it now asks how the tree started.