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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A growing space and a garden zone open on your last photo of them, every page says what it is, and editing a bed is one clear button
The photo card that opened a plant’s page this morning is now on the growing space and the garden zone too: your latest picture of that place, dated, or — with none yet — a frame with a camera that says so; tap the camera and the picture is filed to that space. Above every name, small capitals say GARDEN ZONE, GROWING SPACE or PLANT, and the bar at the top says the same word when you scroll, so you always know which level you are on. And a growing space has an Edit button in its header. Nothing on the drawing moves until you tap it, so a thumb cannot shift a plant by accident; inside it you drag plants where they stand and tap an edge for north, then Done.
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A bed is drawn plant by plant, every plant is drawn, and Edit means drag
Six tomatoes are six circles now, each the size its spacing needs, and a row of carrots or radishes is one bar — no more one circle with “×6” under it. Every plant in a bed is drawn even when the app has not placed it yet: those show in a lighter, dashed ring where they might be, and dragging one is what places it. A bed fuller than its spacing allows is drawn closer together and says so. Tap Edit on a growing space and the drawing is the editor, every time: drag each plant to where it really stands, tap an edge for north, tap Done. The left-and-right arrows that reordered the plant list are gone.
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Tap a plant on the bed drawing for what you can do: open it, add another beside it, or record its end
On a growing space’s drawing, press and hold a plant and a small strip appears at it with Open, +1 and Remove. While arranging plants, a plain tap opens the same strip and a drag still moves the plant. +1 adds another of the same plant beside it, planted the same day, and the strip stays open so three beans in a pot are three taps. A plant saved as a count, Wax Bean ×3, also offers Make 3 plants, which turns it into three plants each with its own page. Remove asks the same three things the plant’s own page asks, harvested out, it died, or pulled it out, and every ending shows a line under the drawing with Undo for a few seconds. One more thing on the way: the drawing’s tap targets are bigger than the smallest seedlings now, so a finger lands.
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Tell it a month and it keeps the month
Say you planted something "in April" and the app used to throw it away. It wanted an exact day, and without one it recorded nothing at all — so the thing you had just told it was gone, and it asked you again later.
Now it keeps it. It picks a real day inside April and works out which one from **your own last frost date**: if your frost falls in April, the plant goes in the day after it, because nobody plants into a frost. If your frost is earlier or later than the month you named, it takes the middle of the month.
**Your word wins over the frost.** If you say April and your frost is in May, it does not move your plant to May. You were there.
⚠ **The date shows as "roughly" everywhere it appears** — on the plant, in the chat, in a photo diagnosis — because the month was yours and the day was ours. Tell it the real day whenever you like and the "roughly" goes away.
A season is still too wide. Say "in the spring" and it will ask which month.
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The app now tells you about a feature at the moment it becomes useful, one card at a time
Instead of explaining itself up front, the app waits for something to become true for your garden and says one thing, once, on the screen where it lives. A second pot brings a card about grouping pots into a garden zone. A first photo says your journal has started. A cold night in the forecast offers frost alerts. Three plants in two spots offer a walk. A feature that shipped since you set up gets one card the first time you open the screen it lives on. Each card says what you can do now, links to the help page, and has one way in; tap Not now and it waits two weeks, and after a second Not now it stops for good. There is never more than one on a screen, never one above the day’s jobs, never more than one new card a day, and none of them ever becomes a notification. The card that explained garden zones used to appear the moment you had one pot; it now appears at the second.
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Rafe keeps the day you said you planted, and puts the plant in the bed you named
Tell Rafe “I put six tomatoes and three peppers in the back bed on Saturday” and all three facts now survive: six and three, the back bed, and Saturday. The planting date used to go missing on some of those sentences, which matters more than it sounds — every reminder, every stage and every “N days ago” in the app is counted from it. Rafe also recognizes a bed from the words you use for it rather than its exact name, so “the back bed” finds the bed called Back bed instead of asking you which one you meant. And when you describe several beds and the place they sit in, the beds are no longer lost because you mentioned them before the place.
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The link from the website opened a blank screen if your phone had no signal, for a few hours this morning
Earlier today we shut the app behind an account. In doing it we also made two pages wait to find out whether you were signed in before drawing anything — including the page your plant picks land on when you tap Add to my garden while reading the website. That page has never needed to know whether you have an account. It is the one screen whose whole job is to work before you have one. But on a phone with no signal the answer never arrives, so it sat there blank instead of showing your plants. Fixed the same day. Pages that do not need an account now draw straight away, signal or no signal, and the rest of the app still waits for a real answer rather than guessing. Nothing was lost: your picks travel inside the link itself, so opening it again brings them all back.
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The number shown before a garden walk was quoting under what the walk actually costs
While you pick your route, the walk screen says roughly what it will cost. That number was too low. A four-photograph walk was estimated at six credits and charged eight, and the estimate got further under the charge the bigger the walk was. The estimate is the thing that was wrong. Nothing about what a walk costs has changed, and nothing you were charged was wrong — you were being told less than the truth before you agreed to it, which is the wrong way round for a number whose whole job is to let you decide. It now quotes the dearer of the two ways we can read a walk, so a walk costs the same as the number you were shown or less, and never more. Larger walks are read a cheaper way, which is why most will come in under the estimate. What is taken off afterwards is still the measured cost of the looks themselves, not the estimate.
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The garden walk looks properly now — after you finish, with everything it knows about each spot Partly live
Until today each walk photo got a quick glance on its own. Now the walk is read as a whole once you tap through the last stop: every stop’s pictures together, compared with the last picture of that same spot, with the plant’s own journal, what the calendar expected this week, tonight’s weather and your frost dates in front of it. Then a report is written and saved to the walk — what needs you, what moved on, what we could not tell, what is coming — and we let you know it is ready, usually within the hour. The ten-picture limit is gone. Take two or three per bed if a bed has several kinds of plants in it; while you pick your route the screen says roughly what the walk will cost in credits. What a photo says on the walk screen is that it is saved and backed up, nothing more — the looking happens once the walk is in.
Not yet: The walk does not yet suggest which spots to visit this week, and the report is plainly drawn for now.
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Three beans in a pot are three beans, and a plant recorded outside its pot is put back in it
Some crops are things you can point at — a tomato, a pepper, a bean — and six of them are six plants, each with its own name, its own journal and its own place. Others are sown by the handful, like carrots and radishes, and nobody counts those, so the app keeps them as one sowing with a number on it. A bush bean is normally the second kind, because in a bed it is a row. In a pot it is not: you do not sow a row in a pot, you put three beans in it and you know there are three. So the same crop is now read differently depending on what it is standing in, and three beans in a pot become three beans — each one its own plant, in the pot, with its own spot. Pots you already filled are sorted out the first time you open them, keeping the entry you already made. There is no way to put them back together again, so if you do sow something in a pot by the handful, leave the number off. Separately: this morning’s note said a plant the app had lost off the edge of its pot would be drawn back inside for you to place again. You no longer have to. Opening the growing space now moves any plant whose recorded spot is not on that bed back onto the bed, on its own, and keeps the old spot as history rather than erasing it. Nothing you placed by hand is touched.
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The line saying what Rafe changed is a list now, and it says what is different
When Rafe writes something into your garden, the note under his answer used to run everything together in one sentence — and a correction to one of your plants came out as the word “noted”, which tells you nothing about what changed. Now each thing gets its own line, with its own name first and what is now true of it beside it. A new growing space says it is new, so anything put into it on the next line reads plainly. A correction says which part changed: the kind it is, its name, how much sun it gets. Undo is where it was, at the end of the list, and a little quieter.
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Rafe can fix a plant you already added
Until today he could add plants and beds and could not change one — asked to update a tree, he said so honestly and sent you to the plant's own page. Now you can tell him: it is in the ground rather than a pot, it is a semi-dwarf, the raised bed is really 4 by 8. He offers the change and you accept it. He only touches what you actually said — anything he worked out himself stays a suggestion — and the correction goes into that plant's own story, dated, so nothing changes quietly.
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Rafe can move a plant to another bed, and will not say he moved one when he did not
Tell Rafe a plant is somewhere other than where the record has it and he moves the plant. Until now he could not: he would change what the roots are in, which is not the same as which bed a plant stands in, and answer as though the plant had moved. A move is now a real move — the plant leaves the old space, its place in that bed’s drawing closes, and its own story gets a line saying it moved and where to. You approve the change first, as with any correction. And a place is not a bed: say “the backyard” when no bed of yours is in it and Rafe asks which space you mean instead of guessing.
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Rafe no longer argues with himself about treatments
Since 5 August Rafe has been allowed to name what actually works on a pest or a disease — sprays included, by the active ingredient, with the fixes that need no spray first and a reminder to check the label lists your crop. One older line in his instructions still told him the opposite, so an answer about a treatment could hedge between the two. That line is gone, and the help page that still described the old rule now describes the real one.
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Rafe reads the help page before telling you how the app works
Ask something about the app itself — whether it works without signal, where your photos are kept, what is new — and he now opens the help page for that question and answers from what is written there, with a link. Before, he carried a summary of every help page with every message and, on most messages, a handful of help answers picked by matching words, which were usually the wrong ones. The pages about the things Rafe works inside — asking, photos, writing things down, your lists, your beds, your dates — stay with him at all times; the rest he opens when you ask. Every chat message is now about an eighth cheaper to run, and "what’s new in the app?" gets a real answer.
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A plant’s page opens on your last photo of it, every door to a bed looks like one, and the walk shows you where to stand with a camera
Open a plant and the top of its page is now your latest photograph of that plant, dated, the way the journal opens on your own picture; tap it to see it full size. The small pill naming its growing space carries a chevron now, and under the bed drawing there is an “Open Bed 1 · plot the bed” button; the Garden screen has an “Open Bed 1” button under each bed’s name — the bed page was always there, but nothing said so. On a garden walk, the bed drawing under each stop shows a camera where you stand, with a dotted line to the plant you are facing, instead of a thin line and a small arrow. And the “Will it live through your winter?” card no longer draws its heading on top of its own words. Later the same day: the goal choices on your account page had lost their fill outside setup, which made their small print unreadable at night; they are back on the app’s own panels.
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A plant’s story in chapters, and the season read back as one page
A plant’s page now opens on its chapters — sown, came up, planted out, first flowers, first harvest, biggest picking — each with its day count and the photo from that week, under one line that says how it ran against a typical plant of its kind: came up two days late, flowered about on time, first picked five days late. The full day-by-day list is one tap below, unchanged. And your journal has a new door, This season: the first harvest and how it ran against last year, the biggest picking, the days you wrote something, the photos, the moments, and anything lost. A first season says nothing about last year, because nothing honest can be said yet.
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A question worth a look today, and the weather on every entry
Your journal now offers one question a day from what the app already knows — check for sprouts, any flowers yet — with the same answers as your daily list, so a yes writes the same observation either way, and Not today puts it away until tomorrow. And every entry you write is stamped with the day’s high, low and rain from the forecast the app holds for your garden, the way a field notebook carries the weather at the top of the page. Rafe reads it too, so a watering on a 96° day and one on a 70° day are different facts to him as well as to you. A day the app did not hold gets nothing rather than a guess.
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Compare two photos of a plant
On a plant’s page, under its photos, tap Compare two photos, pick an older one and a newer one, and Rafe says what is visibly different in plain words — taller, more leaves, flowers open, fruit set, damage. He never says what is wrong; that is the Talk screen’s job. When the two cannot honestly be compared he says so, which is a complete answer. It only runs when you ask, uses one photo question each time, and keeps nothing unless you tap Keep as a note.
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The bed drawing puts each plant where it stands, spaced the way its crop needs
The bed’s drawing now places each plant from the front-left corner of the bed at the spacing its crop needs — tomatoes farther apart than lettuces — and the bottom edge of the drawing is the front, where you stand. Plants you added before were placed the first time the bed was drawn, in the order you had set. A bed you have not measured is placed as if it were four feet by eight; measure it under Details and the spacing is worked out on the real bed. On a garden walk, each stop now shows the same drawing small, with the plant you are photographing ringed and a pointer for where to stand. Dragging a dot to correct a spot is next.
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Every plant says where it is, and who is beside it
A plant’s page now opens with where it is — its growing space, and its garden zone if you have one — as a label you can tap to go up. Under its name, the other plants in the same space sit in the order they stand, one tap sideways. Above the bottom buttons, a previous-and-next bar walks you plant by plant and bed by bed, and says so before it crosses into a different part of the garden. The plant’s details fold behind one row, so the long list of kinds no longer fills the page, and a growing space’s every-entry list folds the same way with a door into the journal already searching for that space.
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Every bed is drawn to scale, you can drag a plant to where it really stands, and the drawing shows what helps what
A growing space is drawn as a bed the shape of yours, front at the bottom, with each plant a circle the size its spacing needs and a row crop as a bar. When you add a plant, the app places it by its spacing and shows you where it will go before you add it, with one line saying why. Tap Plot the bed and you can drag any plant to where it really stands; the app never moves it again. Tap an edge to say which side faces north, and taller plants go that way. Between two plants that touch, a green line means a companion pairing with real evidence behind it, a red line a pairing that hurts, and a faint dotted line a traditional pairing shown as a hint. A small orange badge marks a plant whose spot breaks a rule the app is sure of, with the reason written under the drawing. And a fold called What grew here draws each past season in that bed. The same drawing is on the plant’s page, on the garden walk, and in the add screen, so they can never disagree.
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Setup is seven quick things now, and it shows you what it knows before it asks you for anything
The first time you open the app it says exactly what it wants: seven quick things, about two minutes. Where you garden, with addresses that fill in as you type. Your frost dates, handed straight back with the same figure five miles north, south, east and west of you. Whether anything is growing yet or you are only planning — either answer is fine, it just changes the next question. Your first plant, and what kind of spot it lives in: a raised bed, a pot, or the ground, drawn rather than described, and you can name it later. Then a screen that shows what the app now knows: your dates and where they came from, your plant, its spot, and its whole season drawn against your frost dates with today marked on it. It never predicts a job for a plant it met a minute ago. What it draws is that plant’s usual season where you garden, and it says so; tell it the planting date on the plant’s own page and the dates become yours. The question about what you want from your garden moved off the path. It is on your Profile now, and Rafe asks it first when you talk. The last screen asks which plan would suit you, and only then are you asked to create an account. Nothing is charged in the beta and no card is asked for. The standalone Where you garden page got the same address box, so the question looks the same wherever it is asked.
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Setup looks like the rest of the app now, asks what you want first, and says less
The seven setup screens sit on the home screen’s own drawn sky, and it walks through the day as you go: sunrise at the first question, full day in the middle, golden hour and sunset when the app shows what it knows, dusk when you pick a plan, and stars when you make your account. The same glass cards and the same amber button as the home screen. The first screen opens on a painted garden, and the three kinds of spot are paintings too. The first question is what you want from your garden: food, to stop losing plants, to get better at it, or a place that looks good. One tap, and it shapes which plants are offered, which job comes first, and what Rafe says when you meet him. The question about whether anything is growing yet is a button under the plant list rather than a screen of its own, so the count is still seven. And it says less. Your growing days are one big number with the two frost dates and where they came from as a label under it. The season drawing is labeled Typical season instead of being explained. The plan screen shows Annual and Weekly, and nothing else. (Pricing has since changed. See /pricing.)
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The bed, drawn, with its plants in it
A growing space’s page now draws the bed — its own proportions when you have given it a size, round for a pot — with each plant as a dot carrying its crop’s picture and its count. Tap a dot and you are on that plant. A plant’s own page shows the same drawing small, with itself ringed. When this shipped the dots sat in the order you walk the bed; placing each plant where it stands landed later the same day — see *The bed drawing puts each plant where it stands* — and the caption under the drawing says which of the two you are looking at.
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The “Find my frost dates” button you could barely read
On the screen where you set your garden’s location, the button that looks up your frost dates was near-black text on a dark green fill. Technically it was there. Practically you could not read it, and it is one of the first screens a new account sees. It is white on green now.
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The five buttons you use, and one line above them
The journal has the fifth button along the bottom now, and your account moved to the leaf at the top right of every screen. Above the buttons, one line says the thing that matters now — a frost warning for your plants, how many jobs are left today, your garden walk being due — and there is no line when there is nothing to say. Tap it and you are on the thing. The menu is a plain list of short names now; the line saying what each screen is for appears while you search, which is when it helps.
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A garden zone shows what is in it first, and the small things line up
A garden zone’s page now opens on what is in it, each growing space drawn small as a door, with the rain question next and its name behind a Details row. On a plant’s page the ring marking it in the bed drawing shows properly, the previous-and-next bar clears the microphone button, and the note about crossing into another part of the garden stands on its own. A crowded bed sizes its dots to fit, and a raised bed on the Garden screen no longer draws as a pot.
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What Rafe sees in a photo is now a chapter in the plant’s story
When Rafe reads a photograph and you confirm what he saw — first seed leaves, first blooms, tiny fruit forming, color turning — that moment now appears in the plant’s chapters, in your journal’s fold, on the memory card when it has a picture, and on the season page. Until today those readings sat in a separate list and the journal never read them. A reading within three days of something you logged yourself is folded into your own entry rather than shown twice.
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Rafe can find a note that names no plant
Some entries do not belong to any one plant — you write something about the garden as a whole, or the app cannot work out which plant you meant, and the note is filed loose. Your journal screen always showed those. Rafe could not reach them at all: not by searching, and not among the recent entries he is shown when you start a conversation. So the general observation — the kind you most want back in January — was the one kind he could not find. Fixed everywhere he reads. Nothing changed about how you write them and nothing needs redoing.