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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The keep-a-note button shows you the note first
The button under a chat answer used to say "Keep this on your Sungold," which did not say what it would do. It now says Save as a note on your Sungold. Tap it and the note opens in place — the exact words that will land on the plant, in a box you can edit — with Save and Cancel. A height read off a photo also used to come back with false precision, like "11.8 inches" for a plant eyeballed as about a foot. Every height on the plant’s page now reads in whole inches.
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The thinking line shows before any step does
The line above Rafe’s answer used to stay blank until his first step landed — and a step he only takes after writing his reply could pop in above an answer that was already finished. Now the moment you send, it says what is true straight away: “Looking at your Cara Cara…” when you’ve attached a plant, a bed or a zone, or “Thinking…” when you haven’t. It becomes its real steps as they happen, and a step taken after its words have started never shows above them. We also cut “It used what you had written down” from under its answers — one more list nobody asked to read.
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The Garden tab reads like a catalog of your garden
Open the Garden tab and every garden zone is a heading with its growing spaces under it. Each bed and pot is a picture card with one line saying what it needs; tap a card and its plants open under it, one bed at a time. Tap a zone's name to open the zone and edit it, or tap its arrow to fold it away, and your phone remembers which are folded. Above the zones, This week counts what wants water, what is ready to pick, what has a job, and how many days to your first frost. Tap a count and the page shows only those plants. Three buttons sit in one compact row with the search: plants, spaces, and the map of your whole garden. Tap plants and every plant is a picture tile, three across, under a line naming its place that stays at the top as you scroll; a This week count narrows the grid to just those plants. The magnifier searches your garden and sorts what it finds into plants, spaces and zones; tap a space or a zone and its own page opens.
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Tell Rafe where things go, in one message
Say it the way you would to a friend — a pot to the porch, the orchard into the backyard, the empty bed gone — all in one message, in your own words. Rafe lays the whole change out as a list you can read, and one tap does all of it. And if you only ask what is where, you get the answer, not a plan.
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The app opens faster after an update
Every time we shipped an update, the app quietly downloaded all of its pictures and plant data again in the background, even though almost none of it had changed. On a phone that could make the first minute after an update feel slow. Now it keeps what it already has and fetches only what is new.
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Rafe knows which pot you mean
When a pot is named after the plant in it, asking Rafe to move the pot used to get a "which one?" back — the pot or the plant. Now the place you name decides: a zone means the pot, a bed means the plant. And when Rafe does have to ask, a plant in the list says where it lives instead of "empty".
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A plant can go right to the edge of the bed drawing
When you arrange plants on a growing space’s drawing, a plant used to stop its own radius short of every edge, and a little short of that again — so nothing could sit in a corner or hang over the side. Now a plant’s center can go to within two inches of the edge — in a pot as in a bed — and its circle hangs over, the way a tree’s canopy hangs over the path. Drop it nearer the edge than the nearest square foot and it lands on that two-inch line.
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Your garden, drawn: zones on the garden, growing spaces on each zone
Two new maps on the Garden screen, drawn the way a bed already draws its plants. Open a zone and a map sits above its list of spaces: the zone is the ground, each bed, plot or pot is drawn on it at its own size, and the bottom edge is the front. Above the list of zones, the whole garden has the same map with its zones on it. Tap a thing to open it; tap Arrange and drag each to where it really is. A thing you have not placed yet is drawn dashed where it might be. Under each map, say how big the place is — five sizes for the garden from Mini (500 sq ft) to XL (½ acre), five smaller ones for a zone, or your own width and length in feet — and the map is drawn to that.
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A growing space in the ground can have a width and a length
Until today an in-the-ground space could only be described by its rows — how many, how long, how far apart — which left an orchard or a patch with no rows at all without a size the app could use. Now every in-the-ground space asks how big it is, in feet, the same way a raised bed does, with the rows question under it for the plots that have them. Give it a width and a length and the drawing on its page is drawn to that shape, and the room answer is in square feet. A plot with rows is still measured in feet of row, whatever its width and length; give it both and the drawing shows the ground at its true size with the rows laid inside it.
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The walk help page now says what the letter shows
A small documentation update to match yesterday’s walk-letter fixes: the help page for walking your garden now says that each row shows the stop’s own picture — the plant’s photo where the walk took one, its crop’s picture where it did not — and that past five rows in a section, the rest sit behind one "Show more" line rather than a wall of rows. Nothing in the app changed today; the words describing it just caught up.
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A garden zone’s own page has its map, and a place made smaller loses nothing
Two fixes from the first afternoon with the new maps. A garden zone’s own page now shows the same map the Garden screen shows inside a zone — under What is in it, above the row of beds — so wherever you reach a zone, its growing spaces are drawn where they stand. And if you make your garden or a zone smaller after placing things on it, nothing disappears: anything whose spot now falls outside the smaller rectangle is drawn dashed again, inside, where it might be. Drag it back to where it is; its old spot is kept, so making the place bigger again puts it back.
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Three cards at the top of the Garden screen, and each one is a list
The Garden screen used to open with a small line of counts — plants, spots, entries logged — that could run out of room beside the walk button and cut every word short. Those counts are three cards now: how many plants, growing spaces and garden zones you have. Tap one and the screen becomes that list — every plant with the zone and space it is in, every growing space with its zone, or your zones to tap into, which is how the screen opened before. Any plant or space is one tap from the top now, where a space took two and a plant took three. The screen reopens on whichever card you tapped last, on that phone.
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A blocked step in Rafe’s plan is one tap to answer
When Rafe’s plan runs into two things sharing a name, or a move with no zone said, it used to just say so in words — you had to retype the whole request to answer it. Now the card offers the actual choices as buttons: two beds called the orchard show up as the orchard — apricot and the orchard — empty, and a move with no zone said offers your own zone names. Tap the one you mean and that line moves straight into the plan, named for real — nothing retyped, nothing sent back to Rafe to re-read. Do it turns on the moment nothing is left blocked.
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A picture of a plant is the plant's picture, wherever it was taken
Photograph a plant on a Walk and it now attaches the moment you take it: name the plant as the stop and the picture is on its page; stop at a pot or bed with exactly one plant in it and the picture is on its page too, because a pot with one orange IS the orange. It becomes that plant's most recent photo, and it writes one line in the journal, dated when you took it — a walk photo did not do either before today. Stop at a bed with several plants and the picture is the bed's own, never guessed onto one of them.
The same rule now runs everywhere a photo arrives with nobody typing which plant: sorting a pile of new photos into plants, and attaching a growing space — not just a plant — from the chat's own picker.
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The plan fills a spot again when the plant in it comes out
A spot that comes free part-way through the season is planned for again — a second planting. A plant on record as pulled, dead or harvested out opens its spot that day, and the plan puts the next crop in on it: “after Bush Bean (out Sep 22).” An annual still standing with no end recorded is expected out at its own last stage from the day it went in — the same day its bar on the Calendar runs to — or at the frost that ends it, and the follow-on is planned for that day: “after Bush Bean (done about Sep 17).” Past that day with nothing recorded, the row says “which should be done by now” — pull it, and the spot is yours. Rafe reads the same words back when you ask about your plan. Nothing is written to the plant’s own record, and a perennial is never guessed out.
Also: a bed’s room now reads in its own unit — “room for about 32 sq ft” — on the Calendar’s week grid, in What still fits and when Rafe answers “is there room in Bed 2?”. It used to say “room for about 512 more,” which was true of garlic at three inches apart and useful to nobody. A pot still says how many more.
Two more things in the Garden Planner. Each row now says where in the bed it would stand — “front row, left end,” “back row, across,” “the middle” — the spot the garden page’s own placer would give it, and Plan it puts it exactly there. And the plan reaches first for the crops most people grow — tomatoes, peppers, corn, spinach, kale, okra, watermelon, pumpkins and the rest of the usual garden — among everything that can still finish in the window, instead of whatever the frost margin happened to rank first.
And **Favorites**: tap the star on any crop’s page — or on any of its varieties, listed on the page now — and it goes on your Favorites list in the menu, to use again or look at later. Starring plants nothing. The plan puts your starred crops in first, and a starred variety goes onto the planting when you tap Plan it.
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Watering is a tank now, not a calendar
Every plant carries a water tank. Watering fills it — a splash tops it up, a soak fills it and a little over — and rain fills it where rain actually lands. It drains by where the plant stands and what the week is doing: a pot dries from every side and a mulched bed holds for days; a 94° day drains twice as fast as an ordinary summer day and a 55° day half as fast; shade slows it; a small herb pot goes faster than a big planter; plastic holds and terracotta wicks; rosemary drains slower than lettuce. The card shows the gauge and says why.
A place is on your list when its tank will run out within the next two days, which for most places is most days not at all. A porch of pots is one line, with the driest plant first and the ones that can wait saying for how long, and one tap waters the lot. A basil bought in July is no longer left silent in September because its crop moved past the stage that carried a watering rule. Watering the porch from the porch page now counts for every pot on it, and telling Rafe you watered counts too.
Tap Still damp when the app thought a pot was nearly empty and it learns: it looks back at the weather since that pot was last watered and slows that place down a little, and says so. And at most one notification a day, at seven in the morning, only for a place whose tank has run out — “Water Front porch. Empty — 3 days since water and 94° again today. Basil goes first.”
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Anyone can sign up now — you no longer need an invite
Until today, making a GardenTrack account needed an invite code. **It does not any more.** Put your email in, type the six-digit code we send, and the account is yours, on GardenTrack Free. Paid plans open Jan 5, 2027.
If you were sent a beta invitation, nothing about it has changed. Tap **I’m a beta user** under the two plans, enter your code, and you are in exactly as before — nothing charged, no card asked for.
Your Profile now names your plan, and says whether it is the weekly or the annual one.
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It rained — and a place is on your list two days before its tank runs out
Three things from the first evening on a phone. Rain now fills the tank in proportion: an inch is a full top-up, half an inch is half a tank, a trace is nothing — so a tank at 20% that gets half an inch reads 70%, which is what a gardener would say.
The app’s rain is what the forecast said would fall, kept day by day; it is not a measurement, so a shower the forecast missed can leave a tank dry on the screen when your soil says otherwise. Every water card, and the plant’s own page, now has a third answer beside Still damp and Watered: It rained. It is written down as a full watering for every place rain reaches — and for the place you tapped it on, whatever its roof — it counts on every phone and for the morning line, and it goes in the journal as rain, so you are not saying you watered when the sky did. Each one keeps what the forecast had said for that day, so over a season the app can tell how often the forecast under-calls your garden. Telling Rafe it rained does the same.
And the list works to a window, not a level. A place is on it when its tank will run out within the next two days — today plus two — and the card says when: “empties in 2 days; water within 2 days”. A tank that is merely not full is never a job, and the morning line speaks only for a tank that is empty. The tank itself is drawn on each plant’s page — green with days in hand, amber inside the window, rust when it empties today — and on the Garden screen too, under every plant, with each bed’s tile saying its driest tank and a Driest first order for walking out with the can. A pot with three bean plants in it now reads “Wax Bean ×3” on the card, so the count and the names agree.
And a place can now say what its soil is — potting mix, sandy, loam or clay, one chip on its own page — and the tank drains by it: sandy in about half the time, clay and potting mix holding longer. Unsaid, the app uses a middle value and never guesses.
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Photograph your nursery haul
Bring home six trees and their tags, shoot all twelve photos, and the reviewed list is ready faster now — reading runs three photos at a time instead of one after another.
Got a name wrong? Tap it. That opens the same plant search the Garden Planner uses, so you can set the crop and variety yourself rather than living with a guess. And every card now shows why it thinks what it thinks — a quiet badge when a plant is a guess or stands alone, nothing at all when a tag made it sure.
Tap "Make" and you land back on your garden with the new plants marked for this visit, and an Undo waiting at the top in case the whole haul needs a second look.
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Photos to plants pairs by the order you shot them, and reads the tag
Shoot a nursery tag, then its tree, then the next tag, then its tree — that order is now the strongest signal there is. The two pair up before we even guess from the picture, which is the fix for a labeled apricot coming back as an apple: the tag wins.
The tag itself is read into four things now, not one blob of text: the crop, the variety, a size class and who grew it. A tag reading Mormon Apricot, semi dwarf becomes a plant named Mormon Apricot, with semi-dwarf saved as its rootstock and the grower kept in its first note.
Fixing a pairing is tap, tap, then a Same plant button you can actually see, not a drag the screen never explained. Past eight plants the cards become a list, one row each, so a big pile stays scannable. And picking where they are growing is a real chooser now — your own beds and pots, grouped by zone, so two spots both called "the orchard" show up as two different buttons.
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Tap a line in your walk letter, see the photo behind it
Every line in your walk’s letter now opens onto its own page: today’s photo of that stop beside the one from your last look at it, same spot. Tap the pair and a divider lets you wipe between the two instead of flicking your eyes back and forth. Swipe, or use the arrow keys, to move through the rest of the walk in the letter’s own order — what needs you first — and the last card brings you back. A stop with nothing to compare against says so plainly rather than guessing at a pair.
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Tell Rafe how your garden is laid out
Say it all in one message — “make a front porch zone, move my orange and lavender pots into it, and put the orchard bed and the bean pot in the backyard” — and Rafe reads your garden as it stands and comes back with Here is the plan: every zone he would make, every move, every rename, every removal, spelled out in full. Anything he could not work out — most often two things sharing a name — is listed under Before I can do this, asking which one you mean.
Tap Do it and every step runs in order, right there on your phone, with no connection needed. Each line comes back marked done or not, and Undo all puts every row back exactly as it was, for as long as you stay on that reply.
Before today, several changes in one message meant several separate steps, taken one at a time — and a zone or a bed you had just asked for was not always found by the step right after it. Now it is one plan, read once, done once.
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The bed drawing shows each plant’s real footprint, and can lay them out for you
Every plant in a bed now draws two circles: itself, and a faint ring the size of its own spacing claim. Two rings that touch turn red right on the drawing, before you read a word about it — and the warning below now names both plants, “Apricot is 6 ft from Redhaven Peach; it wants 18 ft,” instead of naming a crop. A drop now snaps to the nearest square foot, so a plant lands the same way every time you place it. And a new Space them for me button lays out everything not yet placed at the room each one really needs, in one tap — and says so plainly when some do not fit, rather than crowding them in and staying quiet.
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The Calendar and the Garden Planner, walked end to end
A review of both, on a real-shaped garden and on an empty one, at phone width. What changed:
On the Calendar, a day in the month now lists every job due that day — the same rows the Tasks chip shows — so today never says “nothing yet” over five waterings. The Tasks list keeps Today for what today asks for and puts the jobs whose window is simply open under their own Any day heading. Each task is two lines on a phone: the job and when, then its crop and bed. The Year chip on a garden with nothing that comes back says so, and the Calendar lost a subtitle that only repeated the chips.
In the Garden Planner, the rows you just planted stay on screen with a tick until you undo or ask for more, instead of a fresh plan of the leftovers appearing in their place. Each row says how many — Garlic ×12. A bed with a plant nobody counted says “Say how many are in it — open Tomato ›” rather than “Full until frost”, the same words What still fits uses. Two rows of chips became two links: Plan next year › beside the frost line, and See it as a chart › under the price; the chart then gets most of the screen.
Second pass, the plan itself: it spreads now — tomatoes in one bed, peppers in the next, corn after that — instead of the same two crops in every bed. A pot is counted in its own gallons: one tomato in a 5-gallon pot, twenty radishes, never two tomatoes or forty. And the first job reads as one sentence: “First: sow radish in Porch pot — today (Thursday).”
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The growing-space drawing keeps its true shape, and a tap shows who it is
A bed drawn wide now draws wide — a 20 × 4 ft bed reads 5:1, not squared toward a stamp. Drag a plant to where it stands and it stays there, even on a quick drop; reload the page and it is still where you left it. Tap a plant and the strip above it now leads with that plant’s own last photo — the crop’s icon when it has none yet — and its name, so three peaches that look alike in the drawing are three plants you can tell apart before you tap Open or Remove. And a spacing warning now reads the way you would say it — “18 ft,” not “216 in” — and finishes its sentence: “it would cover 4 of them,” naming the rows.
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The Garden tab nests your zones, spaces and plants
Tap the Garden tab and you will see your garden zones first — the back yard, the front porch — each as its own row. Its name, how many growing spaces and plants are in it, and its driest tank if something in there wants water. Tap a zone and its spaces open right in place: a plain list, and an empty one is just a short row now, not a tall empty card.
Before today every growing space sat in one long strip, with a zone’s name floating above it like a caption. Two pots on the same porch could look like one thing. So could two beds that happen to share a name in different parts of your garden. Now the zone is the row, and its spaces are what is inside it. A space with no zone yet gets its own “Not in a zone yet” list, at the end.
Driest first still works — it just sorts a zone’s own spaces now, by whichever one needs water soonest. Your plant’s own tank and its camera button have not moved: still right there on that plant’s own page, one tap in.
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The letter shows its rows and their pictures
Two small fixes to the walk letter shipped today. What needs you and what moved on now show their rows right away, never behind a tap — past five stops, one "Show more" line brings the rest. And a plant with something to say now shows its own photo, or its crop’s picture when there is not one yet, instead of an empty circle. The read-back story also stopped saying "this night" — a late walk now reads "tonight," the way you’d actually say it.
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The Calendar’s week grid gets the whole screen
The Calendar’s four views are now four small pictures under the title — a grid of weeks, a page of a wall calendar, a ticked list, and a wheel — instead of the words Week, Month and Tasks. The first is the week grid you plan on; the last is the Year Wheel for your trees, bushes and canes, which has a view to itself now rather than sitting under the grid.
On the week grid, a button at the right of the grid’s head gives it the whole screen: the title and the chips go away, and the bars run from under the app’s top bar to the bottom of the phone, with the week dates pinned at the top as you scroll down through your beds. Tap the empty corner where the names meet the dates and the name column folds to a strip just wide enough for each plant’s own photo and its … menu — twice the grid on a phone, and you still see who’s who. Both choices are remembered.
Also fixed: bars no longer show through the names and the dates as you scroll, and a garden with no zones no longer opens on a “No zone” heading over everything.
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Picking where to walk now looks like your garden
The list you pick your walk from used to be plain rows with an empty circle on each. It is now the same rows the Garden screen uses: every bed, pot and patch drawn small with its first few plants on it — a pot as a rounded pill, an empty spot dashed — the name beside it, and how many plants are in it underneath. Tap a spot and an amber number lands on the row: that is your walking order, and tapping again takes it back out. Open a spot with the arrow and its plants appear as their own rows, each with its picture. The panel that names where you are standing during the walk matches too.
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Walk your garden with last time’s photo in hand
The pick screen now offers two ways to start. Walk everywhere is every place with something growing, in the order you set it. Just the ones that need a look is shorter, and only shows up when it actually saves you a stop — a place whose tank has run low or dry, or one last week’s letter flagged. Every row also carries a ring in the letter’s own color when there is a verdict to show, and the last picture of that spot as a small photo rather than the usual crop icons.
At each stop, before you shoot, we show you last time’s photo — full width, with the date in the corner and a line saying when it was: “Last time, Thursday — line up the same view.” First time at a spot, it says so plainly instead. A bar across the top fills in as you go, one segment a stop, so you always know how far round you are.
Photos you take land in a strip above the button as you take them, newest first, each with its own state — the button itself changes from “Take a picture here” to “Another angle” once one is on the board. Skip a stop with no photo and the segment shows hollow, with a line saying so: the letter will mark it as not read. And one that failed to upload gets its own “Try again,” right there on the card, rather than waiting for the whole walk to be retried.
The finish screen now lists every stop and moves on its own as the letter comes together — waiting, then reading, then read, or could not tell, or nobody looked, stop by stop — with a button straight through to it the moment it is ready. And a walk the phone had already started — closed mid-capture, reopened later — picks up exactly where you left it, not back at the start.