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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Two numbers on the seed-starting guide were arguing with its own table
The guide on when to start seeds indoors is rewritten, and checking it turned up two places where the writing and the chart underneath it disagreed. The notes said celery, onions and artichokes all want eight to twelve weeks indoors; the chart gives onions a flat eight. And the section on melons said two to four weeks indoors while the chart gives melons two to six. Neither would have lost you a plant, but a page that contradicts its own table is a page you stop trusting, so both now match. Everything else that changed is how it reads: contractions, shorter sentences where a sentence wanted to be short, and the frost-date caveat put back in plain words — a last frost date is an average, not a promise. Every temperature, every week count and all eleven university sources are exactly where they were, and we re-checked that every one of those links still opens. There is also a new check behind the scenes that reads the old version of a page against the new one and reports anything that quietly went missing in a rewrite — a number, a source, or a caveat. It found the melon problem.
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We said seven steps. It was ten.
A correction on the hardening-off write-up. The post said the flow was seven steps. The flow that actually shipped is ten, and seven was wrong in the first place — we went back to the universities and got three answers, every one of them longer than ours. Michigan State says start seven to ten days before your frost-free date. Minnesota and Utah State both say about two weeks. Seven days is the short end of the range and we had been printing it as the range. The post now says ten and says why it changed. We also took back a complaint we had made about our own work: we called the one-size schedule a shortcut we owed you a fix for, then went looking for the per-crop version and found there is not one. Those same three universities describe the same routine for a cabbage and a pepper. What genuinely differs between crops is how much cold each will take, and the app already knows that per plant. Two more guides got the same treatment: garlic and the frost-tolerant vegetable list are both rewritten to sound like a person rather than a manual, with every temperature and source left exactly where it was. Sources on the fact-heavy guides have also moved: instead of a university name sitting in the middle of every sentence, there is now a small number you can tap, and the full list sits at the bottom. Same sources, same checkability, far less clutter in the reading. And the garlic planting diagram got fixed: the depth label was sitting on top of the clove and the spacing arrow was dark green on dark soil, so two of the four measurements were genuinely hard to read.
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What planting zone am I in, and what the number is actually for
New guide, and it starts by sending you somewhere else. If you want your hardiness zone, the USDA map gives it to you in one click from your ZIP code, and we are not going to pretend we can do that better. What we can add is what the number decides once you have it. A zone answers exactly one question: will this plant live through my winter, outdoors, in the ground. So the page carries 53 perennial crops from our own database with the zone range each one survives, sorted by the cold end, because that is the end that decides whether the plant lives. It also explains something almost nobody prints: the two numbers in a range like 3 to 8 are not the same kind of measurement. The low one is a wall — below it the plant dies. The high one is a judgment about performing well, and it is not about heat at all. A blueberry above zone 8 is not scorched, it is under-chilled. One more thing worth knowing: the USDA redrew the map in 2023 and about half the country moved to the next warmer half zone, so a number you learned before then may have changed. The USDA is careful to say that shift is mostly down to using a more recent stretch of data rather than a measurement of warming, and we say the same.
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Your zone cannot tell you when to plant, and we measured by how much
New guide: when to plant tomatoes in your zone. The short version is that your zone will not tell you, and it was never built to. A hardiness zone is one measurement — your average coldest winter night — and it exists to answer whether a perennial survives here. A tomato does not have to survive your winter. It has to survive the last freeze of spring, and a zone does not measure that at all. So two gardens can share a zone number and be a month apart on the day it is safe to plant out. To put a number on it we took every US weather station with a full record, 6,704 of them after dropping the ones that do not freeze most years, and looked at how far apart the stations inside a single state actually are. In the middle state it is 25 days. In California it is 111. In North Dakota, which is flat and uniformly cold, it is 12. The guide has all 47 states we could measure. We did not do this by hardiness zone and the page says so: zone is based on winter minimums, this dataset holds freeze dates, and working a zone out from latitude would have meant inventing the exact number the page is about. One correction we made to ourselves along the way: an earlier draft credited Clemson with saying transplants go out one to two weeks after the last frost. Clemson does not say that. What the sources actually say is Minnesota’s version — transplant after all danger of frost has passed and the soil has warmed — and that is what the page says now.
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A blank on a plant page now means we looked and came up empty
Mulberry used to show a chill-hour number. It has been taken down, because it was our guess rather than anybody’s published figure. Currant, elderberry, goji and honeyberry never had one and still do not — we checked every chilling table we know of and each plant’s own pages, and nobody publishes a species figure for them. What changed is that those blanks are now recorded as searched rather than just empty, with the date and the sources read. It is a small thing on the page and a large one behind it: we can finally tell the difference between a fact nobody has published and a fact nobody has gotten around to looking up.
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The cold night that costs you fruit without killing anything
A new card for the nights that are not frosts. Peppers and tomatoes need warm nights to set fruit — below about 55°F the flowers drop instead, the plants are completely fine, and they start setting again once the nights come up. So the card says to leave them alone rather than feed or spray anything. Bok choy gets the opposite advice, because cold nights make it run to seed and it will be done: pick what is worth picking. When both are in the garden the one you can act on today leads. The card opens by saying what it is not — nothing here is cold enough to kill anything.
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A refused change now gets another try tomorrow
When our server turns a change down, the app used to believe that answer forever — which is wrong, because we deploy several times a day and yesterday’s refusal often stops being true. One gardener’s apple tree was turned away as belonging to a different bed by a server that could not save beds at all; after we fixed it, the tree still sat there, because nothing was ever going to ask again. A refused change is now retried once a day on its own, so a fix on our end reaches your garden without you having to find a button.
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A seed-starting guide that actually tells you the date
Every guide about starting seeds says the same thing — start six to eight weeks before your last frost — and then does not tell you when your last frost is, which is the only part you did not already know. The new guide gives that date for 28 cities, does the tomato arithmetic for each one, and lists how many weeks to count back for 19 crops, each from a university extension service. It also names the two cities where the honest answer is that there is no last frost date at all, because a freeze does not happen there in half of years.
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A tree planted yesterday is no longer told to harvest
Every apple in every garden was "ripening" in August, including one that went in the day before, and the job list said to harvest it. Fruiting stages repeat every year on purpose — that is what makes a perennial calendar work — but nothing ever asked how old the tree was. We already held the answer: how many years each crop takes before it bears. Stages about fruit you can pick are now withheld until the tree is old enough, and they say why rather than vanishing. Flowering stays: a young tree does blossom before it can carry a crop, and stripping that fruit so it builds structure is real advice.
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Answers appear as they are written
Asking about a photo used to mean about ten seconds of "Thinking…" and then a wall of text all at once. The words now arrive as they are written — first ones on screen in well under a second. We measured before building it: a typed question was already coming back in under three seconds and did not need this, but photo questions go to a stronger, slower model and that is where the wait was. Buttons still appear at the end, because they depend on the whole answer, and offering to act on something half-said would be wrong.
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Ask what to do this week and it reads your actual list
It is the first thing anyone asks and it was the worst-answered question in the app. The chat knew your plants, your dates and what you had logged, and had to work out a job list from them — while your Today screen, two taps away, was already showing the real one. So the two could disagree, and they did. The chat now reads the same list Today does, including the reminders you set yourself, which come first because you asked for those by name. One list, so the answer and the screen cannot contradict each other.
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Yellow cucumber leaves, and the shape that gives it away
Cucumbers hand you something tomatoes do not: a diagnosis you can make from across the garden. The disease that ends most cucumber seasons cannot spread past a leaf vein, so the yellow patches it makes have straight sides and the leaf ends up looking tiled. Round, soft-edged yellow is something else. There is a photo on the page that makes it obvious in one look. Two more things worth knowing are in there. If your plant wilts every afternoon and stands back up by morning, that is a specific disease with a name and no cure, and the evening-then-morning check costs you nothing. And the extension list of nine causes for a yellow cucumber leaf does not include being hungry — so feeding it, which is the usual advice, is working from the wrong list. We also print the part nobody sells: for the main disease here, there is no effective spray available to a home gardener at all.
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Every job you finish now says what it was
Stake a tomato from the daily list and its story recorded the bare word "Note" with nothing after it — no way, a month later, to tell what you had done. Fifteen jobs did this, including the winter prune, which happens once a year and is therefore exactly the entry you would go looking for. Every one of them now records what it was. Sowing and the three tree prunes also file under the right heading rather than the catch-all, without one prune ticking off another — a summer prune and a winter prune are different jobs.
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Frost warnings now know what season it is
We hold the exact temperature that hurts each plant, but a number on its own is not much use. 28°F on an apple tree is about the open blossoms in April; the same tree in January does not care. So every one of those temperatures now says which part of the plant it describes and when — open flowers, new spring growth, a crop still in the ground, or a shrub in the middle of winter — and your warning waits for the season it belongs to. Plant pages say it plainly too: “Open blossoms killed at 24°F” instead of the same two words on every plant. Where a source says a plant is still fine down to some temperature, we no longer print that as damage. New numbers this week for strawberries, raspberries, grapes, pears, plums and apricots, and a first warning for tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, melons and squash on a 33°F night — the night you can still do something about it.
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The plant-problem guides now read like a person wrote them
A house-keeping fix worth admitting to. The four new plant-problem guides went out written in a stiff register — about eleven thousand words without a single contraction, every "it is" and "do not" spelled out. Every fact in them was right and every source quote was exact, but they read like a manual rather than like someone telling you what he knows, which is not how this site is supposed to sound. They have been rewritten into plain speech. Nothing factual changed, and no quoted line from a university source was touched — the rewrite deliberately skipped every quotation so nobody ends up misquoted in the name of style. The yellow-leaves guide has had a full rewrite on top of that — it now opens the way the problem actually turns up, which is you standing there with the hose running wondering whether a couple of yellow leaves are the start of something. A full audit of all twenty published guides and posts then caught three broken sentences the rewrite itself had introduced, which have been fixed and guarded against.
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Hot nights are the half that costs you the fruit
A tomato that flowers beautifully and sets nothing has usually been beaten by the nights, not the days — the plant never cools off, and the pollen goes sterile. We already watched for that, but the night temperatures lived in a short list buried in the app, which meant most plants had no night figure and nothing was there to point it out. They sit with the rest of the plant facts now, each one tied to the university page it came from. Squash, pumpkins, melons and watermelon picked up a daytime figure they never had, from the same sentence. And both numbers finally show on the plant pages: “Suffers in days above 85°F”, “Suffers in nights above 70°F”. One number came out — tomatillo’s — because no source we could find ever published it, and a number nobody published is not one we will show you.
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We measured how wrong "your nearest weather station" is
Every frost date site answers the same way: it finds the weather station closest to you and gives you that station's dates. It is a reasonable thing to do, and nobody has ever said how much it costs you. So we measured it, using the same NOAA file everyone else uses. Across 6,191 pairs of stations, a station and its closest neighbor disagree about the last spring frost by five days in the middle of the pack — and 13 in every 100 stations sitting within ten miles of each other disagree by two weeks or more. Being closer barely helps. The worst pair in the country is the rim of the Grand Canyon against its floor: seven miles apart, and 114 days apart on when frost lets go. It is not only mountains, either. Two stations in the same town in Oregon, three miles apart, are seven weeks apart. We published the whole thing — the method, the raw numbers, and the places where the old way still beats ours.
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It asks how much, and it asks after
Log a harvest and the app now asks how many — with the amounts you actually pick already on buttons, sized to the crop, so a tomato offers 1 to 25 fruit and a watering offers half a gallon to ten. The order matters more than the question: the harvest is saved the instant you tap, and the amount is asked afterwards, so skipping it costs you nothing at all. We added it because a journal that knows you picked tomatoes on August 5th and nothing else cannot tell you next year whether this was a good one — and an amount is the sort of thing that can only be written down while you are standing there holding it.
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It can write down that nothing is wrong
We ran fourteen real photos from a garden through the app and found something we did not expect: about half of every answer was some version of "this is normal." Spent flower heads. New growth coming in pale. Corn that is small because it is under a tree. Every one of those produced a sentence and nothing else — the most common true answer in the app left no trace. Now it offers to note it on the plant. Next August, when the same brown flower heads look alarming again, "spent blooms, not a disease" is already there.
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It no longer tells you to dig up a plant you have already planted
Add a tomato you bought, put it in a bed, and the app would put it on a ten-day hardening-off run — "put it out for 1 to 2 hours, back in by 4:40" — which means digging it up and carrying it indoors. Then it would tell you to plant out the plant it had just watched you plant. Both came from the same gap: the app knew where your plant was standing and never checked before offering a job about moving it. Now it does, so those four jobs only appear for something that is genuinely not in its final place yet. Seed sown straight into the ground is never asked to harden off either.
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It stopped telling you to plant things you already planted
Sow some zinnia seed, open the app three days later, and one of the jobs waiting for you was “sow zinnia seed.” Same shape as being told to plant out a tomato on a card that says JUST PLANTED OUT right above it. The app knew perfectly well when you did it — that date is the only reason it can work out what stage the plant is in at all. It just never noticed that a stage beginning at sowing cannot also ask you to sow. Thirty-five of those, across the catalog, and they are gone. The fix reads it off the plant record rather than a list we maintain, so crops we add later are covered without anyone remembering.
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It tells you how to treat it now
Ask what is eating your apples and you used to get the identification and nothing you could act on, because we refused to discuss treatments at all. That was too blunt. Answers now include the fix — cultural first, because it is usually free and usually works, and sprays when a spray is the answer, named by what is in them rather than by brand. A button under the answer asks for the detail: which ingredient, how often, when in the season, what not to spray it onto, and to check the label lists your crop. The caveats come with the answer rather than as small print underneath it.
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It will not tell you it is fine when it is not
Ask about a plant the app is already warning you about, and the chat now knows that. It will not agree that it is nothing to worry about — not even when you ask it that way, and people do, because "that is just old leaves, right?" is how anyone would ask. Instead it names the two or three things it could be and the one detail that tells them apart. We built more than this at first, then measured it against doing nothing and deleted most of it: the answers were already right without it. What is left is the part that stops two halves of the app telling you different things about the same plant.
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“Nothing is wrong” is an answer too
We ran fourteen photos of a real garden through the app and about half the honest answers were some version of “that is normal.” Spent blooms. New growth coming in pale. A seed head. A plant that is small because it is under a tree. And the app had no way to say any of it — it could raise an alarm or it could stay quiet, and staying quiet leaves you still thinking your plant is dying. So there is a new card, and it is not a cheerful all-clear. It names the thing you are looking at, says why it belongs at this exact point in the plant’s year, and tells you where the same sign WOULD be worth a look. Yellow leaves at the bottom of a sweet potato that is ready to dig are the plant emptying out its oldest leaves and putting what it gets back into the crop. That is the bit that matters: not “it is fine” but WHY it is fine, because once you know what the plant is doing you can see the same thing next week and stay calm without us. The same leaves while it was still growing would be worth a look — and the card says that too, since reassurance you cannot check is just someone telling you not to worry.
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The plant-problem guides got their artwork and their tables fixed
Three things the founder spotted on the new guides, now sorted. The four plant-problem guides had no artwork, so they showed as blank green cards on the section page — they now each have their own picture, drawn in the house style and showing the actual thing the guide is about: a leaf half turned yellow, a hornworm carrying wasp cocoons, an egg cluster tucked in a leaf vein, and the tiled yellow patches that mean downy mildew. The same picture now runs as the banner at the top of each guide. And the comparison tables were badly squashed: the first column was being forced onto one line, so a full sentence stretched it to three quarters of the table and crushed the two answer columns into a narrow ribbon that wrapped every cell onto eight lines. Those tables now share the width properly.
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Sometimes “that’s normal” means go dig it up
We shipped a card this morning that names the scary-looking things a plant does when it is actually fine. It was wrong about half of them. Yellow bottom leaves on an asparagus bed heading into winter really are nothing to do. The same yellow leaves on garlic are the bulb telling you it is finished — and our card was saying “nothing to do” while the app’s own to-do list said “harvest garlic.” Same plant, same screen, two answers. Garlic left past that point splits its wrapper and stores badly, so that is a real loss and not just an awkward sentence. On the 28 plant-and-stage combinations where the sign is the harvest signal, the card now says Ready and gives you the deadline. Same detection, opposite advice. What we had confused was “expected” with “fine” — a plant can be doing exactly what it is supposed to and still be waiting on you.
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Squash bugs, and why spraying the ones you can see does not work
New guide, and the point of it is timing rather than products. You notice squash bugs when the big dark adults show up in groups on the plant, and that is exactly the stage that shrugs off a spray — extension services are clear that the young ones are far easier to kill than the adults. So the guide is arranged the way the insect actually works. The fight is the eggs: little copper-colored clusters tucked into the V where two veins meet on the underside of a leaf. Crush one with your thumb and you have removed a whole generation. They hatch in about ten days, which means a weekly look at leaf undersides cannot miss a batch. There is also a free trick worth more than any bottle: lay a board on the soil next to the plant, and collect the bugs that gather underneath it overnight.
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The app now tells you when a change could not be backed up
A change the server refused used to sit in the queue being counted as "waiting to back up" — and re-sent forever, because nothing marked it as settled. Refused changes are now counted separately and named on your Profile: what it was, why it was turned down, in plain words, with a button to try again. Everything is still saved on your phone either way. Saying something is waiting when it will never happen is the one thing a backup message must not do.
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The cold that costs you a crop without killing it
Frost gets all the attention because you can see what it did. The cold that actually costs most people a harvest is gentler than that: nights in the high 40s and low 50s, nothing dies, and the plant just quietly gives you nothing. Peppers drop every flower below 50-ish nights and set no fruit. Bok choy and kohlrabi that catch a week of cold nights run to seed and are finished. We had no way to say either of those. Now five crops carry the temperature, and — this is the part that matters — what it actually costs you. Because the advice is opposite: the pepper is fine and starts setting again the moment nights warm, so the answer is do nothing and stop worrying. The bok choy is over, so the answer is pick it today. Same weather, same-looking number, two different things to do.
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The label warning no longer depends on the answer remembering it
When an answer suggests something to spray, it has to tell you to check the label lists the plant you are treating — the same ingredient is sold in versions that are not for food. We measured how often that actually happened and it was about two times in three, which is fine for a nicety and not for this. So the app writes it now, not the answer. Tap "how do I treat this" and the warning is always there, every time, in the same words. On an ordinary answer that happens to mention a spray it is still best-effort, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.