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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Your week has a door back to Today, and a quiet week no longer hides your week
The two-part Today / This week switch at the top of Your week is gone. In its place is the same door every plant, growing space and garden zone already carries — a pill that says Today and takes you there. A switch like that says "two views of the thing you are looking at", so using it to leave the page read as changing a setting rather than going somewhere. The bigger fix is on Today. The way through to your week used to be a line that appeared only when something was still due this week, so a week with nothing left on it had no route to that page at all — you could not get to it to see that it was clear. The door is always there now; only the count on it changes, and with nothing due it simply reads Your week. A garden with nothing planted in it still has no week door, on purpose: there is no week yet to walk into.
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Every place the app names something, it now says what kind of thing it is
The pills at the top of a plant, a growing space or a garden zone read the kind and then the name — GARDEN ZONE | Back yard, GROWING SPACE | Tomato bed — and each one opens it. So you can walk from a plant to the space it is in, to the garden zone that holds that space, to your garden, without going back to the Garden screen. Only three words are ever used: garden zone, growing space, plant. Not bed, not spot, not area. The line under a plant’s name used to repeat its growing space without saying what that was — the thing that made it ambiguous in the first place. It does not repeat it any more: the labeled pill is directly above it, so that line is now only about the plant itself. And the Garden screen’s heading says GROWING SPACE above the space you have selected, which the strip of cards below it did not make obvious. Two sentences also stopped saying "the The front porch" for anyone whose garden zone is named with a "the" already.
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A pot can say what it is part of, from its own page
If you have several pots gathered on a porch or a patio, you could already group them from the Garden screen. But standing on one pot’s own page, thinking “this belongs with the others”, there was nowhere to say so. Under Details there is now a “Part of” line. Tap the place it belongs to and it joins; tap it again and it comes back out. If you have not made a place for them yet, the line offers to take you where you make one. This is worth doing because saying once that the porch is under cover means every pot on it knows, and the watering jobs and Rafe both read that same answer. A pot you pull out into the rain can still say so for itself, and its own answer wins. You will not see the line when there is nothing to group.
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When Rafe tells you nothing is wrong, you can now write that down
Ask why your coneflowers have gone brown and crispy on top and Rafe tells you they are seed heads and the plant is doing what it should. Until now that answer left no trace, so the same worry next August met an app with no memory of ever having answered it — and being told nothing is wrong is about half of every real answer. A “Write it down” button now appears under an answer that rules something out, with the thing you were worried about on it in the answer’s own words. Tapping it puts a dated line in that plant’s story; nothing is written unless you tap. Only reassurance works this way. A pest, a disease or a shortage still has to be something Rafe noticed and said so.
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A plant, a growing space and a garden zone each carry their own actions now — and Details is a tab you can read
Open any of the three and there is a button of three dots at the right-hand end of the gray line naming what kind of page it is. It holds what you can do to that record: a plant offers Edit details, Move to another growing space, Say it is done and Delete this plant; a growing space offers Edit details, Move to another garden zone — or Put it in a garden zone when it is not in one — and Delete; a garden zone offers Edit details and Take this garden zone apart, which it had no way to do from its own page until now. A garden zone is offered no move, because it does not sit inside anything. Under the photo there are two tabs, Overview and Details. Details reads the record back as a list — what you call it, what it is part of, what kind, how big, how much sun, and Not set where you have not said — with one Edit button that turns the list into the boxes and chips, and Done when you are finished. Before today every one of those fields sat behind a gray row at the bottom of the page. It was one tap away and nobody could find it. Nothing in the three-dot menu makes anything new: the + in the bottom bar is still where a plant, a space or a zone gets added. And nothing in it takes a shortcut. Say it is done opens the card that asks whether it was harvested out, died or was pulled, because those are three different facts about a season. Delete still counts the plants and journal entries that would go with it and names them before it asks. Arranging the plants on a bed is deliberately not in the menu — that button belongs on the drawing it works on, where it has been since 8 September, and it is still there.
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Add a plant to the space you are standing in, and move one out of it into a pot of its own
+ Add a plant now sits at the head of the list of what is in a growing space, rather than under it. Under the list it moved further down the page every time you added something — about two and a half screens down on a space with four plants in it. Above the list it stays put: the same place whether the space holds one plant or twenty-four. And it carries the space with it. Tapping it opens the add screen with Where is it? already filled in and a line saying which growing space you came from. That link existed before today and went to a blank screen, so "here" meant naming the bed again from a list. On a plant, the three-dot menu now offers Move to another growing space. It takes you to the Where row with the growing spaces laid out, and Somewhere new lets you name a pot that does not exist yet — the pot is made as part of the move. It is a move, not a copy. The plant keeps its record, its photos and its whole journal, no second plant appears, and anything you left behind stays where it was. This is what an orange tree and a lavender sharing one growing space needed: they are two pots, and until now there was no way to say so without going to Talk.
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Ask about a whole part of your garden
Plants, growing spaces and jobs each had an “Ask about this” button. A garden zone — the level above your beds, the backyard that holds the orchard and the raised bed — was the last thing with its own page and no way to ask about it. It has one now. Open the zone and tap Ask about this part of the garden, and you land in the chat with it named above the box, switchable off if you meant something else. Rafe is told what is in that zone: each growing space, how many plants are in each, and what they are — not every plant in detail, because a zone can hold six beds and the detail is one tap further in. Nothing is sent until you send it, and the top of the chat shows the zone you came from so one tap takes you back.
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A growing space can be linked to a garden zone from its own page, in plain sight
A garden zone is a part of your garden — your back yard, your front porch — and grouping your spaces into one means you say a thing once and every space in it knows. Saying that the porch is under cover is the clearest example: rain then stops counting as a watering for every pot on it. You have been able to attach a growing space to a zone from that space’s own page for a week. The trouble was where it lived: folded away under Details at the bottom, which is a click nobody knew to make. Now, if a space is not in a zone yet and you have more than one space, its page offers Link to a garden zone under the photo. Tap a zone to join it, or make one if you do not have any. Nothing about your garden changed — the control simply came out of the drawer.
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Come home with seven trees, photograph seven labels
Adding several bought plants meant typing the same four things over and over. Now you photograph each plant’s printed nursery label and the app reads the crop, the variety and the rootstock off it. One label at a time, in front of the plant, and each one appears in a list as it is read — so stopping after four is a finished job rather than an abandoned one. Then you see every row before anything is saved: the crop, the variety exactly as the tag printed it, and a Keep or Dropped control on each. Nothing reaches your garden until you tap Add. A wrong variety would move every harvest date that plant ever has, so it reads what is printed and never guesses one from the look of the plant. A label that will not read says so and costs you nothing else — the other plants in the run are unaffected. They all go to one place for now, and you can move any of them afterwards.
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Setup is six screens now, and every one of them is about your garden
The very first thing setup used to ask was what you want from your garden — food, to stop losing plants, to get better at it, or somewhere that looks good. It came before we had even asked where you garden. A stranger wants their plant before their philosophy, so it has moved off the path. You answer it on your Profile under “What GardenTrack knows”, or the first time you open Talk, and it is the same question with the same four answers. Setup now opens on where you garden and runs to picking your plan: six screens, about two minutes. During setup the plant screen offers the food list, since we have not asked yet — search the box for anything else, the whole plant database is behind it.
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The button in the middle of the bar is a + now, and it makes things as well as logging them
It used to say + Log, which named one of the things it does — so everything else it could do was invisible. You could always add a plant, a growing space or a garden zone; those doors were just scattered around the app, and you had to know where they were. Tap the + and the three of them are the first thing on the screen: a plant, a growing space, a garden zone. Everything you could log before — a walk, watering, feeding, picking, a pest, a look-over, a note — is exactly where it was, underneath. Nothing was taken away and nothing new was invented. The point is that you should not have to go to Talk, or go hunting, to make something in your own garden.
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The cards that teach a feature now name it — and one of them was underselling us
The eight cards the app shows unprompted used to lead with a benefit: "Give your plants somewhere to live", "Say it once for the whole porch". They now lead with the name of the thing — Growing Spaces, Garden Zone, Garden Walk, Heat & Frost Notifications — and the selling moved into the sentence underneath, where it belongs. The reason is simple: if a card teaches you a feature and never names it, you cannot go looking for it afterwards. Three of them now show the steps as steps, numbered, instead of describing a process in a paragraph. The walk is: walk your garden, photograph each plant, get your plan. Two of the cards were also saying things that were not quite true. The alerts card promised frost warnings and tray reminders and said "those two things only, nothing else, ever" — but hot-spell alerts have reached your phone since 20 August, so the card was underselling a real alert and quietly disagreeing with our own help pages. It now names frost, heat and the hardening-off tray. And the walk report card said "once a week the app reads your garden back to you", which sounds like a timer. It is not: nothing happens until you walk your garden and send the photos. The card says so now.
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The garden screen now shows which growing spaces belong together
Your beds, pots and rows sit in a strip you swipe across the top of the garden screen. Until now that strip was one flat run, and your garden zones — the back yard, the front porch — only appeared as a list at the very bottom of the page, nowhere near the things they group. The strip is now grouped, with the zone’s name over its own spaces: FRONT PORCH above the two pots that are on it. Nothing about your garden changed — the app has always known which space is in which zone. It just was not showing you.
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Moving a plant: the list of places is grouped and searchable, and the space you moved it out of forgets it
A garden with a lot of growing spaces used to hand you every one of them as a flat row of buttons. Now, once you have seven or more, your garden zones come as a grid of pictures — each tile showing the latest photo taken in that zone — with a search box above. Tap a zone and its growing spaces appear under the grid. The grid reflows to however many zones you have, one zone takes the full width, a zone with no photo yet still gets a tile with its name on it, and spaces that are not in a zone have a tile of their own. Fewer than seven spaces, or no zones at all, and it is exactly the row of buttons it always was — a small garden pays nothing for this. Searching gives you a plain list of what matched. The growing spaces under a zone are cards with pictures too — each one’s own latest photo, or the art of whatever mostly grows in it, with the kind of space and how many plants are in it. And the same picker is now on the Add a plant screen, so choosing where a new plant goes and moving an existing one ask the same question the same way. Sometimes one space is marked suggested. That only happens when something already growing in it has a real, cited effect on your plant — basil beside tomatoes, say — and the reason is printed under the name. A space holding something your plant does badly next to says that instead, and is never suggested. Chart folklore is never used for either. Most of the time nothing is marked at all. The bigger change is underneath. When you move a plant here you are correcting the app, not digging a plant up — so as far as your record is concerned it was never in the old bed. It no longer appears in that bed’s What grew here, and it no longer counts against planting the same family there again. Before today it did: a typo about which pot a lemon was in could have kept citrus out of a bed for years. Actually transplanting a plant is a different act and still works the old way — the bed remembers, and your journal gets an entry saying it moved. Your journal is left alone either way: an entry saying you watered the front porch is true about the porch, whichever plant was standing on it.
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The sun and the moon on Today are plain discs now
The sky on Today is drawn fresh for your own coordinates: the sun where it really is, the moon in the phase that is actually up tonight, and the weather your garden is getting. But the sun and the moon themselves were built from a stack of horizontal stripes, left over from an earlier look the rest of the app had moved on from. They are plain discs now, with the same soft glow the setup screens have been using since the 7th. Nothing else about the drawing changed, and neither did the numbers behind it: the sun still sits where it truly is, and a crescent is still a crescent.
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Every day in the week strip shows a low, not just the frost days
The strip of days across Today showed one temperature: the high, or on a frost day the low. Cold matters long before a frost, though. Seed will not germinate in soil that is too cold, peppers sulk below about 55°F, and a cold night sets back anything you are hardening off. Each day now shows both. The number that matters that day is the large one, with the other underneath — the high on an ordinary day, and the low on a frost day, where the snowflake beside it says why. And when you tap a day, the weather detail names the National Weather Service. It always credited them under the forecaster’s own paragraph, but that paragraph is dropped on days when it only repeats the figures already on screen, and the credit went with it. It stays now.
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The ✕ that takes a photo back off a question is a fingertip wide now, and looks exactly the same
When you attach a photo to a question there is a small ✕ in its corner to take it back off. It was twenty pixels across. Our floor for anything you tap is forty-four, about a fingertip. It had been on a list of known exceptions since August, with a note beside it saying the fix was still owed — and that note was the only thing holding the exception up. Nobody had checked whether the fix ever happened, because nothing could.
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List two plants in one message and both of them land
“I put six tomatoes and three peppers in the back bed on Saturday” used to add the peppers and not the tomatoes, under an answer saying it had recorded both. It was always the first thing you listed that went missing. Before Rafe writes anything he has to quote your own words back unbroken, which is what stops him writing down things you never said — and in a list, the bed and the date come at the end and belong to every item, so only the last one you named had an unbroken quote. Two entries from one sentence can now share its ending. Everything else is unchanged: a word Rafe added, a word he skipped, or your words in a different order are all still refused.
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Water a whole garden zone in one tap, and every space in it gets its own entry
Open a garden zone and there is a Water button under the growing spaces it holds. Choose a splash, a normal watering or a deep soak, and every space in that zone gets it. Each space gets its own entry rather than one entry for the zone, because you water a porch by watering the pots on it — and the pots are what your garden's memory is about. Open any one afterwards and the watering is there, on the space and now on every plant standing in it too, which it was not before. If you skipped a pot, tap it to drop it before you confirm, and nothing is written for it. We do not work out which spaces were due: the app does not yet know when a plant next needs water, and marking one done anyway would put a watering in your journal that never happened. The card explaining garden zones said on 8 September that the app could not water a zone as one. It can now, and it says so. Warning about a whole zone as one is still not built, and the card still does not claim it.
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Rafe can now undo a garden zone he got wrong
Rafe could make garden zones and growing spaces, and could never move or unmake either. So when he put something in the wrong place, his only way to fix it was to build another one beside it — which is how one gardener ended up with two zones, two growing spaces with the same name, and a tree in the wrong one. He can now put a growing space in a different garden zone, and remove a garden zone that has nothing in it. Say it plainly — “keep the backyard as the zone and just make the growing space the orchard, I don’t need a backyard orchard zone” — and he does both in one go. He will only remove a zone that is empty. A garden zone is a name over a group of growing spaces, so removing an empty one takes nothing away; if spaces are still in it, he moves those out first, one at a time so you can see where each one went. He never removes a growing space and never removes a plant.
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The first time you open the chat, Rafe reads your garden back to you
Finish setting up and the chat used to open on a friendly blank. It now opens on what Rafe already knows: your frost dates and where they came from, the plant you added and the spot it is in, and what you said you most want from your garden. Then one question — when did that plant go in? Setup does not ask it, and it is the single date everything else is counted from. If you already gave us the date, there is no question at all. It will not invent a job for you: a wrong first task on day one is worse than no task. And every line comes from something you entered, so it cannot get your garden wrong — if a line looks wrong, the record behind it is, and fixing that fixes the message.
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Your own photo of a plant is what you see in the lists now, not a drawing of the crop
On the Garden screen and on a growing space’s own page, each plant’s row carries your latest photograph of that plant. The crop’s drawing is the fallback, for a plant you have not photographed yet — it used to be all you ever saw, even on a plant you had photographed a dozen times. It is the newest photo by the day it was taken rather than the order it happens to arrive in, so restoring your garden on a new phone shows the same picture. The camera on the right of each row is unchanged, and one tap there is what makes the picture appear. This is the same rule the rest of the app already followed: a plant’s page opens on your last look at it, a garden zone is a tile with its photograph, a growing space is a card with its own. The lists were the last place still showing a generic drawing.
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A journal door narrows every distance, and its count stays put when you zoom
The chips under the journal’s memory card — Photos, Harvests, Problems, Milestones — now narrow the Days list as well as the Weeks and Months views, and the number on each chip is the whole record’s, so it no longer read one thing over Weeks and zero over Days. A month with one photo says “1 photo”, not “1 photos”. And the amber the app uses for small text — the “← My garden” link, the counts under the title, the label on the suggestion card — is one step deeper, so it clears the readability bar on the lighter bands of the sky.
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The garden-zone card waits until you have two growing spaces, and says only what a zone really does
The card at the bottom of the Garden screen that explains garden zones used to appear the moment you had one growing space, offering to group a garden with one pot in it. It now waits until there are two. It also used to say the app could water, warn about and report on a whole zone as one. It cannot water or warn a zone yet, so the card now says what a zone does today: say once that the porch is under cover and every pot on it knows, a walk goes zone by zone, and each zone gets a page of its own. Since 9 September you can water a whole garden zone in one tap, so the watering half of that is no longer true. Warning about a zone as one still is.
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The “Add to the chat” menu now covers what is under it
Tapping + in a chat in Talk opens a small menu — camera, photos, a plant, a growing space. After dark that menu was almost clear, so the message box and the row of buttons along the bottom of the screen showed straight through it and the whole thing read as two screens at once. It is solid now, in daylight and after dark, and so are the two other panels that slide up from the bottom of the screen: the one that asks how much you picked, and the one that asks when you are usually in the garden.
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Ask to remind you and you get a job to tap, not a diary entry
“Remind me to net the cherries in June and prune the apples in December” used to get you “Done, you’ll get reminders in June and December” — and two notes on your trees dated that day. Rafe has no way to put a job on your list by himself, so he was using the only tool he had that writes anything. Now a job you want doing later comes back as a card you tap, with your own words on it and the month you said. Tapping it is what makes it real, so nothing lands on your list until you say so. And if Rafe ever tells you a reminder is set when none is, the app now says so underneath, and tells you where your words actually went.
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A screen with nothing on it yet always explains itself, and cannot be dismissed
The cards that teach you a feature at the moment it becomes useful can be put off, and after a second “Not now” they stop for good. That is right for a nudge and wrong for a screen that has nothing else on it. When your garden has no growing space yet, the card explaining what a growing space is and how to make one is that screen’s own empty state. It is always there, it cannot be put off, and it is no longer counted against the one-new-card-a-day rule, so it can never be crowded out by something else you were shown that morning. And the week screen, before you have walked your garden, now offers the walk. It was offering a button to the page you were already reading.
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An evening date is your evening
If you photographed a plant at 8pm, the app could tell you the next day's date back.
Our servers keep time in UTC, and 8pm on Tuesday in California is already Wednesday morning there. When the app said a date back to you, it was reading the server's calendar instead of yours.
**It only went wrong in the evening** — which is when a lot of people are out in the garden. Earlier in the day the two agree, so nothing looked wrong.
Every date is now worked out on your calendar. The same fix went to the date a plant finished: pull something out on Tuesday evening and it says Tuesday.
Nothing you recorded was ever wrong — only what we said back to you.
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The button that arranges a bed now sits on the bed drawing, and a plant bigger than its pot can no longer get stuck or vanish
The button that lets you drag plants around a growing space’s drawing was called Edit and sat at the top of the page, where it looked as if it edited the whole space. It is now called Arrange plants and sits on the drawing’s top-right corner, and it only appears when there is something to move. A plant whose spacing is wider than the pot it stands in — a fruit tree in a five-gallon pot — used to get pinned in place when you dragged it, and could end up drawn off the edge of the tile where you could not see it. It now stays inside the pot wherever you drag it, snaps to the middle when you drop it near the middle, and any plant the app had already lost off the edge is drawn back inside in the lighter “not placed yet” ring for you to place again. The lists of warnings and companion notes under a drawing now show five rows and fold the rest, instead of running for pages on a crowded bed.
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Describe your plants once and Rafe updates them — no more being asked the same question four times
Tell Rafe “my front porch has two plants in it, the orange tree and the lavender, each in its own pot — the apricot is in the ground, planted in April” and all three records change. Before today he looked your plants up to get their exact names, used those names, and the app refused every change, because its rule was that Rafe may only touch a plant you named in your own words. Then he tried again, and you saw the same question four times with nothing written. Now your words or the plant’s exact name both count, as long as you named that plant in your message — and if you have two oranges, “the orange tree” still makes him ask rather than guess. A question is only drawn once; anything Rafe has already looked up in a turn is not looked up again; and tapping a plant under a change he could not make now makes that change, instead of writing an empty note.