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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Take a photo and ask what is wrong with it Partly live
Point the camera at a plant that looks off and GardenTrack answers — using that plant’s own history, not just the picture. It says what it sees, how sure it is, and which of your notes it used, with their dates. It answers in a few seconds. If you happen to be somewhere with no signal it takes the question anyway and sends it when you are back in range. The photo also fills in what you could not reasonably tell us — how big the pot is, whether there is mulch on it, how tall the plant is, where it is sitting. That last one decides how often it needs water. You get one sentence and one button, and nothing is saved to a plant until you say so.
Not yet: Fifteen answers in your first week, then three a month. A refusal costs you nothing, and it refuses often on purpose: it will not name a product or a dose, and it will not guess when something was planted or how old a tree is — a wrong planting date spoils every date after it. Answers are kept in your account. Asking free-text questions works, but a back-and-forth conversation does not exist yet.
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The bed asks for the counts it is missing
Plants you added before the app started asking how many have no count against them, so a bed holding any of them could only say it did not know. It used to tell you to go and open each plant and set a number — which is a dead end wearing a sentence. Now the bed asks you where the question comes up: it names one plant, offers a row of numbers, and moves to the next as soon as you tap one. Five plants is five taps, and then it starts answering instead of asking.
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The chat can hand you a plant to save Partly live
Ask it to add the tree you just photographed and a card appears under the answer with the details filled in — what kind of plant, what to call it, where it is, and the variety if it has a guess. Edit anything wrong and tap save. Nothing reaches your garden until you do, and that is deliberate: this morning it told a gardener it had added his apple tree when it had done nothing, and there was no way to tell from the screen. A card cannot fail that way.
Not yet: Adding a plant is the only thing it can offer so far. It cannot set a reminder or log a job yet, and it will say so rather than pretend. It never fills in a planting date — nothing in a photo knows when a tree went in the ground.
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The one tree where "take the stake out" is bad advice
Everyone is told to stake a young tree for a few years and then remove the stake. For a dwarf apple that is wrong, and following it can cost you the tree: dwarf roots stay small and brittle, the tree fruits while it is still young, and it leans and then goes over under a crop years after you stopped watching. Tell the app your apple is a dwarf and it now says so. How permanent depends on the exact rootstock, and the app says that too rather than pretending otherwise — if your label does not name one, leaving the stake in costs nothing.
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The second photo in a conversation now gets seen
Send one picture and ask about it and all was well. Send another a few messages later and the answer came back "I don't see an image come through on my end." The picture was being pinned to the top of the conversation instead of to the message you attached it to — invisible with one photo, because the picture and the question end up side by side anyway, and broken from the second one on. Photos now travel with the message they belong to.
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Two silent ways a sowing fails, and the app now warns about both
Some seed will not sprout unless daylight reaches it — lettuce, basil, dill, most of the herbs. Bury it and nothing comes up: no seedling, no rotten seed, nothing on the surface to explain it. Four crops are the opposite and must be covered properly. Twenty crops now say which they are, and the rest say nothing because most seed genuinely does not care. Our records hold twenty-nine — the other nine are either general knowledge, or a value somebody on our side worked out rather than read in a source, and "this will never come up" is not a thing to say from either. Eight of the twenty are confirmed by two extension services. The other half is temperature. "Wait until the soil has reached 60°F" was a number with no way to check it, so it now tells you how: a thermometer 2 inches down, same time on three mornings running, go by the average. And 21 crops that had no temperature line at all now get one, from the range they germinate best in.
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When a photo will not send, the message now says which photo
A failed upload said "though you are online (TypeError)" — the name of a category, with the useful half thrown away on the way to the screen. It now prints the whole reason, and adds the size and type of the picture that would not go, plus whether shrinking it worked. A photo that fails while others succeed is almost always about that photo, and those are the facts nobody can recover afterwards.
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Which jobs you can still catch, and which are gone for a year
Come back from a week away and most garden apps show you one undifferentiated list. Open Talk and tap "What did I miss?" and this one sorts your trees' and bushes' once-a-year work into three: do these now, gone for this year, and plenty of time. The middle group is the point — a missed watering is forgotten by Thursday, but the window to spray a bare peach only exists while it is bare, and the next one is twelve months out. It will not tell you off for a window that closed before you added the plant. No record is not the same as not done.
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Why your tomatoes drop their flowers in a hot week
Above about 85°F a tomato aborts its flowers rather than setting fruit. It is not a disease and it is not something you did, but if nobody tells you that, you spend two weeks hunting for a problem that is not there — or pull a plant that would have come back. Forty crops carry their own heat point and the app has had your forecast all along; the two are joined now. It tells you before the hot spell, names which of your plants will feel it, and says what the heat does to each: lettuce runs to seed, a tomato sheds flowers.
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You can now check our work, including the mistakes we found in it
There are two new pages about where our numbers come from. One shows the method: how a value gets onto a plant page, what re-checks it afterwards, and what those checks turned up — 186 problems in 11,692 values, broken down by what went wrong. Most were a citation that did not back up the number. Some were genuinely wrong, and the page names them, including a grape we had marked as fruiting on its own when it needs a partner. The other page lists every source and what we are allowed to do with it, including the datasets we turned down. Both also say what we do not have: only 16 of our 38 core fields are filled for all 151 crops, and toxicity is the thinnest of the lot.
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Your apple stops saying "somewhere between 6 and 25 feet" Partly live
A fruit tree is grafted, and the rootstock rather than the variety decides how big it gets — a dwarf apple finishes around six feet across and a standard around twenty-five. Both are "apple" in a catalog, which is why the spacing read as a four-fold range that helped nobody. Tell the app which size tree you bought, once, on the plant itself, and it gives you the single number. It is asked per tree because two apples in one garden are routinely different, and left unanswered you keep the wide range — which is us saying we do not know rather than guessing the middle.
Not yet: Four crops carry the per-rootstock breakdown so far: apple, pear, peach and mandarin. The other grafted crops still show their whole range.
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Your bed can now tell you whether there is room Partly live
The app has asked raised beds for their width and length since the day beds existed, shown you the square footage, and never done anything with it. Now the bed says whether there is space left — "room for more, about 18 of 32 square feet still free" — worked out from what is actually planted in it and how much room each of those crops needs. It only warns that a bed is over-full when it would be over-full even at the tightest sensible spacing, because a warning that goes off when you are fine is one you stop reading. If a plant in the bed has no number against it, the app tells you that and asks, rather than quietly counting it as nothing.
Not yet: Only for beds, pots and greenhouses you have given a size to. In-ground plots described as rows are not covered yet, and every plant in the bed needs a count before the answer appears.
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"A couple of months ago" now lands in the right year
Tell the app a plant went in a couple of months ago and it works out the real date — including when that falls in the year before. Added in January, a plant put in the ground the previous November used to be filed as 1 January of the new year. Two things went wrong from there: the plant page showed the wrong date, and the app counted it as planted this season when it was already into its second. That gap is the one that matters for trees and bushes, where a first year and a second year get different jobs. Also on that screen: add your very first plant and the big button now takes you to Today, instead of straight back into an empty form.
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A pencil button on every screen Partly live
Found something wrong? Tap the small pencil near the bottom right, say what it is, send. One plain text box — say three things at once if you found three things, which is usually what happens. The box focuses the moment it opens so your keyboard microphone is one tap away, because talking is faster than typing with muddy hands. The app quietly attaches which screen you were on, which plant you were looking at and the version, so you never have to describe any of that. It saves on your phone first and sends itself when you have signal.
Not yet: You cannot see your own notes back yet, and you cannot attach a photo to one.
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A tree you planted years ago stops being treated like a new one
Tell the app which year a plant went in and it now uses it. Before this, an established tree got its planting-year advice every single spring — stake it, water it every few days, strip the first fruit so it builds structure. Right in year one, wrong in every year after, and nothing on screen said which year it was talking about. The year was already stored and shown on the plant page; nothing had ever read it into a date.
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Every job now tells you the number Partly live
"Thin seedlings" was never the whole instruction. The part you actually needed — how far apart — was in the plant record and never made it to the screen. Now it does, and so does the rest: how deep to sow, how much water a week, what pests to look for on that crop, and how to tell a thing is ripe. On the nine leafy crops whose spacing range spans four-fold or more, the job says what the two ends mean instead of handing you a span — three inches for leaves you cut small and often, twelve for full plants.
Not yet: Per crop, not per variety, and not per your bed. Beets, dill and peas have no watering rate because no source we hold states one, so those jobs still say just "Water".
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Feeding dates for your trees — the month, deliberately not the amount Partly live
Your fruit trees now tell you when to feed them, alongside when to prune. Nineteen of the 26 woody fruit crops carry a sourced feeding date; cherry, apricot, peach and orange had none at all until today. What you will not get is a quantity, and that is a decision. How much depends on your soil and the size of the plant, and UC IPM is blunt about which way it goes wrong: too much nitrogen means softer fruit, poorer color, worse keeping and more pests, and on citrus a late feed roughens the rind. So the app names the month and says plainly that it will not print a rate it cannot stand behind.
Not yet: Seven crops still have no feeding date — currant, goji, grape, honeyberry, kiwi, mulberry and raspberry — because no source we fetched covers those groups. Still no spray jobs of any kind.
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It now tells you how to know when something is ready
The app talked all season and went quiet at the one moment the year pays off — which is also the moment most likely to be got wrong. Now, once a plant is within two weeks of its harvest window, it says what to look for in that plant’s own terms: a bean pod that snaps instead of bending, onion tops that flop over on their own, oregano buds that are fat but still closed. 143 of our 151 crops carry one, and it stays quiet until the window is close, because the same sentence in May is trivia.
Not yet: Eight crops have no cue recorded and say nothing rather than guessing.
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It now tells you if your tree cannot fruit on its own Partly live
Seven of our fruit crops cannot set fruit from their own pollen — apple, pear, sweet cherry, kiwi, honeyberry, mulberry, persimmon. Plant one alone and it blossoms every spring and drops the lot, for years, with nothing to tell you why. The app now counts what is actually in your garden and says so. Two of the same variety still count as alone, because they cannot pollinate each other. And every tree now shows how many seasons it has been in against how long that crop takes to fruit, so a young pear reads as "nothing wrong yet" rather than leaving you guessing.
Not yet: It flags and explains, it never rules — a neighbor’s tree will pollinate yours and we cannot see it. It does use the variety you named where we hold one, which is 749 of them, so a lone Golden Delicious or Stella is correctly left alone, and Mutsu, Jonagold, Stayman and Winesap are caught: those four need a partner AND cannot be one, so two of them together look like a pair and set nothing.
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Late-summer planting answers got more honest
Ask "what can I plant right now?" in August and the answer used to be too generous. A seed packet’s day count assumes spring — lengthening days, warming soil — and counting those same days forward from August produces a number that adds up and does not grow. So we now add two weeks to every crop planted after midsummer, and another two for anything a frost kills outright, following Nebraska Extension’s fall planting guidance. On 3 August in Denver a tomato moved from "16 days to spare" to "not this year". The list also stopped dumping eighty crops at you and shows the best few first.
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One spray window, and the app asks before it shows it to you Partly live
Peach leaf curl can only be treated while the tree is bare — after the leaves drop, before the buds swell. Miss it and there is nothing useful to do until the following winter, because treating in leaf does not work. That deadline is now in your tree list. What is NOT in it is a product or an amount: what goes on food you are going to eat is your decision, so the app gives you the timing and stops. And because it is your decision, it asks first — one question on that job, the week it matters. Say no and spray jobs never come back.
Not yet: This is the only spray in the app. Nothing for scale, mites, apple scab or fire blight — those need monitoring and judgment about whether you have the problem, and adding them badly would be worse than leaving them out. The app also cannot yet tell whether you HAVE leaf curl; that is the top case for the photo diagnosis being built.
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The camera opens from inside the app
Tapping "Take a photo" on a plant now opens the camera instead of the camera roll. Picking a picture you already took is still there, one line underneath. Standing in front of the plant is the common case and it was the one that needed two extra taps.
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The pollination check, hardened
A pass over the fruiting checks against real gardens found three wrong answers and fixed them. A tree that DIED still counted as your pollination partner, which is the exact failure the check exists to prevent. Kiwi and mulberry were told to plant another variety when what they need is a male plant — two female kiwi vines will never fruit, so the generic advice was not just incomplete, it was wrong. And two sour cherries were inheriting the sweet-cherry answer and being told to buy a second tree; sour cherries are self-fruitful. The warning also now names the four apples to rule out as a partner.
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The weeks where water actually decides the crop
Every plant needs water, which is not useful to be told. What is useful: the two or three stretches in a season where going short costs you the harvest itself and watering afterwards cannot undo it. Beans at flowering and again as the pods fill. Garlic while the bulb swells. Lettuce at germination and when the head forms. Open a plant while it is in one of those and the app says so. The rest of the time it stays quiet — an app that tells you to water something every day has told you nothing.
Not yet: Four crops have no stages recorded, and one — endive — has a stage its own record cannot date, so it stays silent rather than guessing.
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Two season charts, because a tomato and an apple tree are not racing the same thing Partly live
The band at the top of Today has split in two. One for the crops you started this season, which either finish before your frost or do not. One for the plants that come back every year, which are not racing anything and should stop being told they are. Fruit trees no longer get an arrow saying they run past your first frost, and no longer turn up in the "will not ripen outdoors" warning. The chart also stopped quietly drawing only five plants and hiding the rest, and the line explaining absent plants now gives the real reason instead of the same wrong one for every case.
Not yet: Written before the jobs existed: established plants now carry a pruning list under that chart. Feeding and spraying are still absent.
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Your fruit trees have a to-do list now — and cherries are not pruned in winter Partly live
Under the second chart on Today there is a new list: every once-a-year job your established trees and bushes need, soonest first, with the month it falls. Twenty-two woody fruit crops carry a sourced pruning window, and the timing is per crop rather than one rule for all of them. Apples and pears are pruned bare in late winter. Citrus only in spring — summer cuts sunburn the bare wood, fall cuts push soft growth into a frost. And cherries and apricots are pruned in warm dry weather after they flower, never in winter, because a winter cut lets canker in and the limb above it can die the next summer. We had that last one wrong: both crops used to say late winter, and no source ever backed it.
Not yet: Pruning only. There is no feeding schedule and no spray jobs at all — both need their own sourced pass, and a chemical recommendation is not something to estimate. Bramble pruning stays deliberately vague: which raspberry canes to cut depends on a fact our data does not yet record reliably, and getting it wrong costs a whole crop.
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Your variety now sets your dates, not just your crop
Tell the app you planted Sungold and it dates Sungold: 57 days, not the 52-to-90 range our tomato record carries for tomatoes in general. 1,615 varieties have a sourced figure we can use this way, and the spread inside a single crop runs to a month — Melody broccoli and Purple Sprouting broccoli share one record and are most of a year apart. Where a variety counts its days from a different starting point than our crop calendar does, we leave the crop range alone rather than convert it, because a converted guess reads as precision.
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Blog summaries that fit a search result
A search engine cuts a page summary off at around 155 to 160 characters. Every post on our blog carried one two or three times that long, so the back half never reached anybody — and that same summary is the text on the cards at /blog/. All ten are rewritten to fit, with the number or the finding moved to the front where it survives the cut. Nothing inside the posts changed.
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Every crop that hardens off now has a temperature
Yesterday 14 of the 38 crops had a sourced cold floor and the app said so for the other 24. Now all 38 do. Two numbers cover most of it: anything tender and warm-season — including the flowers, so zinnia, cosmos, marigold and petunia — stays in below 50°F, and everything hardy, which is the brassicas plus the cool-season flowers plus the perennial herbs, stays in below 40°F. If you grow herbs from seed, note the second one: thyme and sage overwinter outdoors here, but a first-year seedling is not the plant that hardiness zone is describing. And artichoke turned out to be the opposite of every other crop — it needs 250 to 500 hours below 50°F or it never makes a bud, so the app now tells you the cold nights are working for you.
How hardening off worksThe numbers, with every sourceWhy it took two sentences, not 24 numbers
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A help section
Every part of the app now gets its own page: what it does, what it does not do yet, and the questions people actually ask. Each one carries the date the feature shipped and the date we last checked the page was still true. Where something is half-built we say which half — you should never find out from a support page that a feature works when it does not.