What shipped
Newest first. Short entries — what you can now do, and whether it fully works yet. The longer stories about how any of it went live on the blog, and the how-does-this-work pages are in help.
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Every date was a day out for most of the year
We found a bug while building something else: the app worked out what day of the year it was by subtracting two timestamps, which is correct in winter and wrong for the whole of daylight saving. Local midnight in August sits an hour closer to New Year than local midnight in January, so August 5th came out as day 216 instead of 217. Every stage window, every days-until-harvest and every frost countdown was shifted by a day from March to November. The same eight-line calculation had been copied into eight files, and one of them had already found the bug and worked around it locally — the other seven kept it. There is one copy now, it does its arithmetic in UTC, and the build refuses a ninth.
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Photo answers now follow the same rules as the chat
The chat and the photo screen had grown separate rulebooks, and the photo one was three rules behind — each of them added after you hit the problem in chat. Photo answers will now never contradict you about a plant you are standing in front of, never say they have saved or logged anything they have not, and never talk about how the app works instead of about your plant. There is one rulebook now, so anything either side learns applies to both.
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The tomato hornworm you should leave alone
New guide on hornworms, and it opens with the thing most people get backwards. If the fat green caterpillar on your tomato is covered in little white grains that look like rice, do not squash it. Those are wasp cocoons. That caterpillar is already finished, and it is busy producing the wasps that will go hunt the ones you have not found. Extension services say it outright: leave the parasitized ones where they are. The rest of the guide is about finding the ones that are not — which you do by looking for droppings rather than for the caterpillar, because a four-inch caterpillar the exact color of a tomato leaf is genuinely hard to see. Green droppings mean it is still up there right now. There is also an honest note on sprays: the two that work only really work on caterpillars much smaller than the one you are staring at, so your hand is usually the better tool.
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When we can’t find a number, the page says so
Every plant page has gaps. Ours used to look exactly like everybody else’s gaps — a row that simply isn’t there, and no way to tell whether anyone ever looked. We had the answer the whole time: 136 plants carry a written record of a figure we went hunting for and no university publishes. It was sitting in our notes where only we could see it. Now 135 plant pages say it out loud: “No published figure for the temperature that would kill it. We looked — where a number is missing here it is missing from the research, not skipped.” It is a small line. It is also the difference between a page that is quiet because nobody checked and a page that is quiet because there is nothing to find.
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A guide to yellow tomato leaves that starts somewhere useful
Yellow leaves are the most searched tomato problem there is, and the yellow itself is the one clue that cannot help you — all five common causes turn leaves yellow. So this guide is built around what is next to the yellow instead. Rings inside a brown spot mean early blight. Small spots with a pale middle and a dark rim mean Septoria. A yellow wedge narrowing in from the edge of the leaf points to a wilt in the plant's plumbing, which no spray will reach. Nothing on the leaf at all, evenly pale at the bottom of the plant, and it is usually just hungry. There is a seven-step check you can do on one plant in five minutes, a drawing of the two spot types side by side, and every description is quoted from a university extension source. One more thing we put in on purpose: a lot of advice online says yellow bottom leaves are simply old age. We went looking for an extension source that says so about tomatoes and could not find one, so the page says that plainly instead of picking a side quietly.
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You can tell it you looked
The app could record that you found a pest, or a disease. It had no way at all to record the thing that actually happens most days — you went out, you looked, and everything was fine. So a plant’s history could only ever read as a list of problems, and the app could not answer “when did I last actually look at this?” Now it can. There is a “Looked it over — all fine” button on every plant, and the plant page tells you when you last did it. The part worth knowing: it expires. Fine on the 5th says nothing about the 20th — aphids turn up in three days — so after a week it stops counting as current, and after two the page says “worth another look.” An app that took one tap as forever would quietly stop watching a plant that later got sick, and you would never know it had.
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Your conversations and reminders now back up too
Everything else in the app has been backed up to your account since the beginning. The chat and the reminders were built last and never got wired in, so they lived on one phone and nowhere else — lose it, and every answer you had been given went with it. Both now travel with the rest of your garden: the questions, the answers, what each photo was read as, and which jobs you asked for. Sign in on a new phone and the conversation you had in July is still there, with the pictures that went with it.
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A guide on why your tomato flowers keep falling off
The hot-spell warning in the app is one sentence, on purpose. Everything that would not fit is now a guide: the exact temperatures for tomatoes, peppers, beans, squash and greens; why heat ruins the pollen; how long the heat has to hold before it costs you anything, which turns out to be about two days and the night between; and what is worth doing about it. Also what is not — blossom-set spray is sold for exactly this problem and NC State says plainly that it does not work in heat. Every number in it comes from a US extension service, listed at the bottom. The app now links to it from the warning itself.
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A photo question now goes to a stronger model
Asked what kind of apple a tree was, with a photo of five ripe apples on the branch, the chat said it was a tomato — and stuck to it. The cause was not what it had been told but which model was doing the looking: typed questions and photo questions were both going to the fast cheap one, which is good at reading your garden records and not good enough at identifying a plant from a picture. Photo questions now go to the stronger model. It gets the apple right, says which family it looks like without overselling it, and notices the tree is not in your garden yet.
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A photo that fails to send now tries again by itself
Sending a picture partway through a conversation could fail and stay failed — the message said "No signal just now" to somebody looking at full bars, and pressing Try again hit the same wall. An upload from a phone is long enough to catch a wifi-to-mobile handover or a radio going to sleep, which arrives as a bare failure with no reason on it. The app now has three goes of its own, seconds apart, before it says anything. If it truly cannot, it names the actual reason rather than blaming your signal.
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A photo that would not upload was our crash wearing a network error’s clothes
Uploading a 181 KB photo on full wifi failed twice with "the photo would not go up, though you are online". The photo was never the problem. Our server was throwing, and a thrown request came back without the headers a browser needs before it will show the response to the page — so the phone saw the same error it would see with no signal at all. Every response now carries them, so a fault at our end says so, in those words, with the actual reason. Buttons under an answer also stop appearing when the answer was only half sure.
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A photo you are asking about jumps the queue
Photos used to ride the general background upload — fine for a picture you took an hour ago and filed against a bed, wrong for one you are standing there waiting on. It ran oldest first, and it stopped dead at the first photo having trouble, so an unrelated one could hold up yours indefinitely. Ask a question about a picture now and that picture goes up on its own, immediately, ahead of everything. And if it genuinely will not upload, the message says why instead of telling you forever that it has not finished.
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Adding a plant now asks how many, and says whether it fits Partly live
The add screen never asked how many you were planting — which is why almost nothing in your garden has a count against it, and why a bed could only ask rather than answer. It asks now, while you are holding the plants. And once you have picked a crop and a bed, it tells you if what you are adding will not fit: "Back bed has room for about 7 more, and you are adding 12." It stays quiet when there is room, it never blocks the save, and a raised bed is read as the close-planting case it is — a 4x8 bed holds about fourteen tomatoes, not the one that open-ground row spacing would suggest.
Not yet: Only speaks up for beds you have given a size to, and only when the plants already in them have counts. Plants added before today have none, because the app never asked.
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Talk is a conversation now, and it knows what day it is
The Talk tab is a chat, in the shape you already know from every other chat app — past conversations in the menu top left, message bar at the bottom, camera in the bar. What is different is what it opens knowing: today's date, your frost dates, every plant you have with the day it went in, and the last dozen things you did out there. So "will the tomatoes ripen before frost?" comes back with your frost date and your planting date, not a paragraph about tomatoes. Ask it something it has no note about and it tells you that instead.
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Attaching a photo to a question actually attaches it
Shipped broken this morning and fixed the same day. Tapping the camera in the chat saved your photo and then never told the screen about it — so nothing appeared, and with no text typed the send button stayed grayed out. One fault, and it looked like two: the picture would not attach and the message would not send. Both work now. While we were in there, a failed message stopped claiming you have no signal when your phone says you are online — it names what actually went wrong, and only offers Try again when trying again could help.
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Bed sizes stopped disappearing, and rows get a shape check
A bug first: the measurements you gave your beds were being wiped every time the app synced. They had never had anywhere to live on the server, and each sync rebuilt the bed from what the server did know — which was not the size. Nothing looked broken; the bed just quietly went back to not knowing whether there was room in it. Fixed, and the measurements now have a home. On top of that, tell the app how far apart your rows are and it will warn you before you plant something that does not suit them: squash wants about six feet between rows, so in foot-wide rows one plant covers six of them. A plot can have room to spare and still be the wrong shape.
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Beets warn about bolting now — and chard turned out not to need it
Going to fill a gap we had written down — kale and chard bolt in the heat and the app did not know it — the sources said otherwise. Minnesota Extension on chard: it "will not bolt due to heat or day length". Chard bolts from COLD, which is a different warning in a different season, so the vaguer answer it was already giving was the right one. Beets was a real gap and is fixed: Penn State names beets outright, so a beet in a hot spell now says the leaves will turn bitter and the root will stop sizing. Kale has no source either way and keeps the careful answer. The heat guide picked up the caveat that goes with all of this — bolting is set off by day length as well as heat, so a long-day June can bolt a lettuce that never saw 80°F.
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Buttons under the answer, instead of the app talking about itself
It used to say things like "I can put together a card for you to check over", which means nothing to anyone who does not work on it. Now it just answers, and the next steps appear as buttons underneath: add this apple to my garden, check it for pests and disease, remind me in two weeks. The pest one comes with the exact photos to take. And it stops hedging — it names the varieties a fruit could be and what would tell them apart, and it says what is wrong with a leaf instead of changing the subject.
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Every fruit crop now says how much winter cold it needs
Fruit trees and bushes will not flower properly until they have had enough cold, and if you plant one that wants more than your winter gives, it sulks and barely fruits. All 26 fruit crops now carry that number, up from four. They are ranges on purpose — a peach can want anywhere from 200 to over 1,000 hours depending on which one you bought. Blueberry is the big one: we had it at 800–1,000, which is only true of northern highbush, so anyone in the South with a rabbiteye was being told it needs twice the cold it does. It reads 150–1,000 now and says the type decides it. Citrus is on the list too, at almost none, which is exactly why it fruits where a peach will not. Strawberry and blackberry also gained a straight answer on whether one plant will fruit alone.
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Correction: the heat warning was reading half the weather
The version posted earlier today watched daytime highs only, and warned whenever any two days in the forecast were hot. Both halves were wrong. Clemson says nighttime temperatures above 70°F "and or" daytime above 85°F will make a plant drop its flowers — the warm nights matter as much, and Alabama Extension says for some varieties the nights alone are enough. And the window is about fifty hours, so it has to be two days RUNNING: hot Monday, mild midweek, hot Thursday is not a heatwave. It now reads both the highs and the lows, only fires on a real run, and tells you which of the two is the problem. The wording is plainer too.
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Every instruction now says what to actually do
Putting the numbers on the jobs showed up how many of them still left you guessing. "Sow seeds on the surface, not covered" says what not to do and never says what to do. Asparagus said "pick when the stems have reached picking size", which is pick it when it is ready to pick. Salvia asked for a depth of 0.0625 inches. All of it is rewritten: depths read like a seed packet, a depth too small to aim at tells you what to do with your hands instead, and asparagus now says a spear is ready at about the length of your hand and as thick as a pencil. And every one of the thirty jobs the app can give you now explains itself behind one tap: what thinning is and why it feels wasteful, what curing means and how you know it is done, why mulch must be kept back off the stem, which way up a garlic clove goes.
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Every plant now shows the rest of its year
A plant page told you what was true today and nothing else — one job, one line about what to look for. All the rest was already worked out and thrown away. It now lists what is coming in order: the stages with the dates they start and end, the once-a-year jobs, and anything you asked to be reminded of, yours first. A tomato shows the date you can expect to be picking. An apple tree runs on past dormancy to next March. Nothing new was sourced for this — it was all already there.
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It can put a job on your list for two weeks from now Partly live
"Check the underside of a leaf in two weeks and we will know whether it is mites or rust" is a good answer and a useless one, because two weeks from now never arrives. Now it offers the job — you pick the day, tap once, and it shows up on Today when it is due. It comes with how to do it, which is the part that matters: a reminder saying "photograph the leaf" gets you another picture of a whole tree, one saying "hold it flat, underside up, in shade, fill the frame" gets you an answer.
Not yet: Reminders live on the phone you set them on for now — they do not yet back up to your account the way the rest of your garden does. The card says so.
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It stopped offering to look for a pest it had just identified
Photograph an apple with a grub in it and the chat names the culprit — and then offered a button reading "Check it for pests and disease", which is asking you to go and find out something it just told you. It now offers "Log codling moth on your apple tree": one tap, no form, straight into that plant's story. The closer-look button still appears when it can only say something is wrong without naming it, which is the case where looking actually helps.
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It stopped saying it had done things it cannot do
Asked to add an apple tree to a garden, the chat answered "Got it, I've added an apple tree." It had not, and it cannot — it only talks. That is a worse kind of wrong than a bad answer, because there is nothing on screen to catch: you walk away believing your garden has a tree in it the app has never heard of. It now says plainly that it has no buttons and tells you where yours are. Giving it real hands is the next job; until then it will not pretend.
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It will not tell you how a plant looks unless it can see it
Asked how the peppers were doing, it used to answer from the watering entries — which say somebody watered them, not that they are thriving. It says the honest thing now: what you did and when, and that it would need a photo to say more. Same for a question sent with a picture that has not finished uploading. It refuses and offers a Try again, rather than answering "what is wrong with this?" about a plant it never saw.
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Pick the variety from a list, and tell us when yours is missing
Adding a plant from a chat used to leave the variety as an empty box you could type anything into — and anything we did not recognize was quietly dropped after you saved. It is a list now, of the varieties we actually hold for that crop, with whichever one the app guessed from your photo already selected. If yours is genuinely not there, one link lets you type it, and we log it so we can go and add it. That last part matters most when the app itself names a variety we are missing: it means our list is behind what people are growing.
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Rows in the ground get their own answer
A raised bed runs out of area. A row plot runs out of length — three rows twenty feet long is sixty feet of row, and the gap between the rows was decided the day you laid them out. The app has asked in-ground plots how many rows they have and how long since the day it had plots, and used it for nothing. It answers now, in feet of row. The distinction is not cosmetic: sixty feet of row holds about 360 carrots, and the same plot measured as sixty square feet would have told you 2,160.
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Send up to four photos in one question
One picture was a real limit, because the app's own best advice keeps being "now show me the underside of a leaf". Mites and rust look similar from above and obvious from below; a tree that needs pruning needs the whole shape, not one branch. You can attach four now and they are read as one set rather than four separate questions. They are numbered, so you can say "the second one" and it knows which you mean — and it will tell you when one of them settles something the others could not.
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Sow a short row every two weeks — and the reminder in week two
Everyone is told to sow lettuce a short row at a time instead of all at once. Nobody is reminded two weeks later, which is why most gardens still get one glut. Forty-seven crops in the app carry their own sowing interval and it now asks you, on the day, with the crop already filled in when you tap through. The harder half is stopping: it works out whether another sowing can still finish before your frost, says "Last sowing of the year" on the one that can, and then goes quiet rather than talking you into wasting seed in October.