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Garden assistant

The garden assistant is a chat you can have with your own garden. Ask it anything in plain language, and it answers from your actual records, not generic advice. It can also draft tasks and harvests for you to confirm, diagnose a sick plant, and answer general gardening questions. It is the conversational side of Evengrow, alongside Capture note.

Opening the assistant

Tap the floating assistant button (the spark icon) in the bottom-right corner. It appears on every screen once your account has assistant access (an active trial or a paid tier). If your trial has ended, the button goes away until you upgrade. See Access and cost below.

  • Inside a garden, the assistant is scoped to that garden and already knows the page or record you are looking at.
  • From the global “All gardens” view, it works out which garden you mean from what you ask. If it cannot tell, it asks you to pick. If your question is general (not about a specific garden), it just answers.

The window floats over the app and does not lock the screen, so you can keep working while you chat. Tap the X or press Escape to close it.

What it knows

The assistant is grounded in your garden’s live data:

  • Your beds and spaces, active plantings, and what is growing where
  • Tasks that are overdue or coming up
  • Recent harvests and observations
  • Your weather forecast and USDA zone

Every answer separates the two kinds of statement so you always know which is which:

  • From your garden: facts pulled from your records (what is planted, what is overdue, when something is due to be ready).
  • General guidance: well-established horticultural knowledge and zone-based advice, clearly flagged as general.

If your records do not contain what is needed to answer, the assistant says so plainly instead of inventing a fact.

What you can ask

  • “What is overdue?”
  • “When will the kale be ready?”
  • “What should I plant next in the front bed?”
  • “How did my tomatoes do this year?”
  • General questions like “when do I start pepper seeds indoors?” or “what does powdery mildew look like?”

Tip: Tap the microphone to dictate instead of typing. Dictation uses your device’s voice recognition where it is available.

Drafting tasks and harvests

When you describe something to do or something you picked, the assistant can draft it for you. A confirm card appears with the suggested task or harvest. Review it and tap Add task or Log harvest to create the real record, or Dismiss to skip it. Nothing is created until you confirm.

Drafting is available to owners and companions. If you have read-only (observer) access to a garden, you can still chat and ask questions, but you cannot create records.

Plant diagnosis (Expert)

Ask about a sick or struggling plant and the assistant returns a ranked list of likely causes, each with a confidence level and the reasoning behind it, plus a short list of this-week actions. You can turn any action into a task with a single tap. Diagnosis is an Expert-tier feature; on other tiers the assistant still answers the question in plain text.

Response preferences

You can tune how the AI talks to you, on three independent dials:

  • Response length: Terse (short, just the answer), Standard (the default), or Detailed (the reasoning plus any caveats).
  • Experience level: Beginner (defines terms and gives step-by-step guidance), Intermediate (the default), or Expert (skips the basics and gets to the point).
  • Gardening goal: what you’re gardening for — Learn the craft, Grow organic, Maximize harvest, Make it beautiful, or a Balanced mix (the default). You’re asked this once when you set up your first garden, and you can change it anytime.

Set them under Preferences > AI responses, or on a garden’s Settings > AI page. They follow you across all of your gardens, so in a shared garden the AI can hand-hold one person and stay brief for another, each correctly. The default (Standard + Intermediate + Balanced) is the same voice the assistant has always had, so leaving them alone changes nothing.

Length and experience shape the season advisor’s explanations and the reasons attached to proposed tasks, not just the chat. Your goal goes further: it also nudges which tasks the weekly proposer prioritizes (for example, succession sowings and feeding if you’re after maximum harvest) and which cultivars rise to the top when you search for a variety to plant. In a shared garden, the proposer follows the garden owner’s goal.

Conversations

Your chats are saved as threads so you can scroll back and pick up where you left off.

  • Tap the chat-history icon (top left of the window) to see your past conversations.
  • Tap the + icon to start a new chat.
  • From the global view, each saved chat shows which garden it belongs to.
  • Tap the trash icon on a conversation to delete it. Your chats are private to you, even in a shared garden.

Access and cost

The assistant runs on real AI models, so access is tiered to keep the cost sustainable:

  • Free trial: a one-week free trial when you first use it.
  • Advanced and Expert: included after the trial, with a monthly fair-use limit that only the heaviest users would reach.
  • Advanced uses a fast model; Expert uses a stronger model (and unlocks plant diagnosis).

See Plans and billing for what each tier includes.

Note: The garden assistant is rolling out gradually. If you do not see the assistant button, either it has not been enabled for your account yet, or your assistant access has lapsed (the trial ended, or a paid tier hit its monthly limit).