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 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.
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An overdue tray now takes over the screen
Open the app with seedlings still outside past their time and you get the whole screen, not a card in a list: how long they have been out, whether that is long enough to matter, and three ways to answer — bringing them in now, they came in right on time, or pick the time you actually did it. The app also asks whether you want a reminder at the moment you put a tray outside, which is when the question makes sense.
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Hardening off knows how cold your plant can take Partly live
The ramp is now ten days rather than seven, erring long on purpose — a day too many costs nothing and a day too few costs the tray. We went looking for a different-length week per crop and the research said there isn’t one — three extension services describe the same ramp for everything. What actually differs is the temperature floor, which is the better answer, because the app knows tonight’s forecast. Tomatoes and basil should not sit out below 50°F; broccoli and cabbage take 40°F. When the forecast breaks a plant’s floor, the app now says keep them in instead of offering to put them out. Celery and celeriac are a special case: chilling them is what makes them bolt, so they are hardened by easing back on water.
Not yet: Coverage was 14 of 38 when this shipped. It reached 38 of 38 the next day — see the 1 August entry.
How hardening off worksThe numbers, with every sourceWhy the research said the opposite
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Notifications that say something
Alerts now lead with the plant and the action — "Bring the Sungold in", "29°F tonight" — because that line has to work on a locked screen where the rest gets cut off. Underneath are the facts that decide what you do: how late, when they went out in your local time, what happens if you leave it. They never name the app or announce that they are a notification; your phone already prints both directly above.
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One trip outside, not five
Bringing seedlings in is a walk to the step, and the app was asking you to make it once per plant. If several are outside and one is already late, anything else due within two hours now comes in on the same card — it names the ones that are not late yet and says how long they had left, so you can leave them if you would rather. More than two hours apart and they stay separate, because at that point the extra time outside is real.
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Photos Partly live
You can now photograph a plant, and the picture becomes a journal entry with the date on it. It saves to your phone before it touches the network, so it works standing in a bed with no signal and uploads later on its own. Photos of the same plant line up oldest to newest with the plant’s age under each, which turns a handful of pictures into a record of the season. A pest check that finds something now asks for a photo instead of quietly moving on.
Not yet: Nothing looks at the photo yet — no identification, no diagnosis. That is a much bigger build and it needs the pictures to exist first, which is what this is.
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Snooze reminders now actually arrive
Snoozing the bring-them-in screen used to set a timer inside the app, which meant closing the app killed it — the reminder only turned up when you next opened GardenTrack, which is not a reminder. Snoozes are now held on our server, which stays awake when your phone does not. The check behind it also went from hourly to every five minutes, so the first alert is timely; repeats are limited to one every half hour. And the test alert in Profile now sends after a twenty-second countdown, so you can close the app and see whether it really reaches you.
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Snooze the overdue screen, and a nudge to turn alerts on
The "bring them in" screen now has a way past it: 5, 10 or 30 minutes, an hour, or type your own. The app goes back to normal and the screen returns when the time is up — and if alerts are on, so does a notification. There is still no permanent dismiss, because a tray that is outside is outside. Turning alerts on has also become a step in the setup checklist on Today rather than something you had to find in Profile.
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The hardening week now has an ending
Finish the seven days and the app says so: the plant is hardened off and ready for the ground, with one tap to record the day you plant it. It did not do this before — the last step is a night outdoors, so there was no bring-in to log, and the app would eventually ask whether the tray had come back in from a night it had itself told you to leave it out for. A week of doing everything right ended on a confused question. Recording the planting day also sharpens every date the app gives you for that plant afterwards, because they are all counted from it.
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Plant histories that know what mattered Partly live
Every entry is now sorted by what kind of thing it was, whether it went well or badly, and how much it mattered — so a season of watering no longer buries the day your first tomato came in. A "worth remembering" filter shows just those. You can mark an entry yourself as a win, a setback, a loss or a lesson, and your word beats the app’s. A bed also shows everything that happened to every plant in it, which it did not before: it only listed things done to the whole bed, so most beds looked empty.
Not yet: This is the groundwork for a season retrospective, not the retrospective. There is no year-in-review screen yet — we built the record first so that when there is one, it has something honest to read.
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Trays, and a question the app will keep asking
You can now say where each plant physically is — a seed tray, a pot, a raised bed, straight in the ground, or under cover. It is the single biggest input into how often the app tells you to water, and it used to be inferred from the kind of bed a plant belonged to, which says nothing about a tray on a windowsill. Naming a tray is optional and buys one specific thing: everything on it gets brought in together during hardening off, because it physically does. Plants with no answer get a standing reminder that does not retire after onboarding.
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Two fixes from a morning of real use
Bringing your plants in used to leave “1 thing to do” on the Today screen — an acknowledgement card was being counted as a task, so the number lied and tapping through found nothing. That card is gone and the information moved to the hardening status line. Separately, if the server had already sent you a notification while the app was closed, opening the app would send a second one for the same tray. The phone-side reminder now stays quiet whenever the server can reach you.
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What can I plant right now? Partly live
Adding a plant now offers a list worked out from your frost dates and today’s date: what finishes with room to spare, what only just makes it, and what cannot finish this season, each with the number of days. Perennials and crops whose planting window has not opened are kept separate, because those are answers to a different question.
Not yet: Five crops, cucumber among them, get "we cannot say" because our data holds no planting offset the engine can use. Garlic is filed with the perennials and shown as "next year" when the real answer is a date in October.
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You can see whether alerts actually work Partly live
Profile now says whether this phone is registered for alerts, and lets you send yourself a test. Being reachable needs three separate things to be true — permission in your browser, an account, and your phone having reached our server — and until now all three failing looked identical, which is to say nothing happening at all.
Not yet: We are telling you how to check because we could not check ourselves: no alert has yet been confirmed arriving on a real phone. The test button is how that gets proven.
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Frost alerts Partly live
The app now checks tonight’s forecast against every plant you are growing and warns you about the ones frost will end. Hardy crops stay silent deliberately — a light frost improves kale, and warning you about that is how you learn to ignore the warning that matters. The forecast comes from the National Weather Service, looked up for your own grid square.
Not yet: The warning shows in the app. Reaching a phone with the app closed needs push notifications, which are switched on but not yet proven end to end on a real device.
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Hardening off, as a week Partly live
Moving seedlings outdoors is now a seven-day flow rather than a single button. Each day tells you how long to put the plant out and where, records the time you did it, and gives you a countdown to bringing it back in. Several plants share one card even when they are on different days of their own schedule. Tapping twice in an afternoon is still one day.
Not yet: The bring-in reminder works while the app is open or in the background. A reminder that reaches a closed phone needs push, which is not proven yet.
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One thing at a time
The Today screen no longer prints every task and all its reasoning on one page. It shows a count and the first thing, and tapping it opens a focused mode: one card, one decision, big type you can read at arm’s length in the sun. The screen stays awake while you are in it. The reasoning is still there, one tap away, for anyone who wants it.
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Watering advice that fits the plant
The app used to give one soil test for every situation, and it was the established-plant test — push a finger in to the first knuckle. Under a seed sown four days ago that measures soil the seed will not reach for two weeks. There are now six: a seedbed, a tray indoors, a plant just moved out, a pot, a mulched bed, and open ground. Each has its own depth, and its own answer for damp and for dry.
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The whole plant database, free
All 148 crops are live, with a page each and 1,325 variety pages beneath them. Sowing depths, spacings, days to maturity, growth stages and harvest cues — sourced from extension services and cited on the page. No signup, no paywall.
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Frost dates for your exact spot
The frost lookup now computes your dates for your own roughly 800-foot square of ground, elevation-corrected, from 26 years of daily temperature records — instead of handing you the nearest weather station’s. It shows the 10%, 50% and 90% odds, because an average is not a promise.