Help

What the words in Loamhand mean, and how to do the common things.

How do I…

Log watering in one tap: Tap the due badge on a plant, or pick water from its Log… menu. The toast offers "Add a note" and "Undo".
Find a plant: Type in "Find a plant or bed" on Gardens or a garden page — a plant, its variety or nickname, or a bed.
Move a bed on the garden map: Turn on Arrange plots, then drag the bed, or tap it and tap where it goes. The arrow keys nudge it; R turns a bed.
Bring back something I retired: A bed: the toast's Undo, or Retired beds at the bottom of the garden page. A garden: Retired gardens at the bottom of the Gardens page.
Add a plant that is not in the catalogue: In the add planting dialog, "Can't find it? Add your own plant". Fill in what you know; each field says what the app can do with it.
Share a garden: Gardens → Manage on the garden → Members → Invite. Choose gardener or observer; they get an email with a link.
Get my data out: Manage on a garden → Export for spreadsheets of that garden. Settings → Export for everything you have, as one file.
Use it without signal: Most things you record are saved on the phone and sent when you are back online. Sign out only once they have gone — Settings warns you if any have not.

What does it mean

Garden, plot, bed: A garden is a place — your back yard, a balcony, a community plot, anywhere in the world. It has a location, which is where the forecast comes from (and, for a US garden, the hardiness zone and frost dates).; A plot is one bed, patch, pot or set of pots inside it. "Bed" and "plot" mean the same thing here. A plot can be marked indoors, and then the forecast leaves it alone.
Planting: One entry for something growing in a plot: a row of carrots, four basil plants, an apple tree. It has a status (planned, sprouting, growing, harvesting, dormant, finished), a timeline of what was done to it, and its own tasks.
Origin: seed, seedling, division, cutting, bulb, already growing: How the plant arrived. It decides where the planting starts and how its dates are worked out: a seed starts as planned, a nursery seedling as transplanted, and something already growing when you started the record starts as growing, without pretending we saw it sprout.
Variety: The named kind you planted — 'Sungold', 'Brandywine'. It is recorded as you typed it and used to compare seasons. Schedules still come from the plant itself, not the variety.
Grown as: on its own, as a group, or as a patch: On its own: one plant, one card — a tree, or four basil plants you want to tell apart.; As a group: several plants treated as one, like 50 seeds sown in a tray. "Separate into plants" turns a group into one card each later.; As a patch: an area rather than a count, like a sown strip of salad leaves. Give its size and it takes that much room in the bed.
Nickname: An optional name for one planting, so "Bertha" and the other three tomatoes can be told apart on Today and in the drawing.
Grown as a bonsai, kept in a container: Both say this plant is not heading for its full size here, so the app stops warning that it is too big for its pot.; Bonsai also halves the watering interval for a plant in a pot (not for succulents, which store their own water) and suggests root-pruning every couple of years. A container plant still gets a suggestion to pot up when it outgrows its pot. "Let it grow out" goes back to normal.
Task, and Done: Something to do on a day: water the basil, check for pests. Tasks are made from each plant's care intervals and move on when you mark one done or log the care. "Done" ticks off a task; undo it from the toast if you tapped by mistake.
Finish: Ends a planting: it was harvested out, died, was pulled or bolted. Its tasks stop and it moves to Finished. Its history stays, and "Plant again" starts it over in the same place.
Suggestion: An idea rather than a deadline — "consider a bigger pot for the maple". Suggestions are never overdue and never count toward what is due today. Dismiss one and it stays quiet for a year.
Why a task is due, and how sure we are: Every task says why it is due: when it was last done, how often the plant wants it, and, for watering, the forecast.; High means the reason rests on things we know. Medium or low means something is missing or old — no forecast, no care recorded yet, a figure from the catalogue rather than your plant — and the reason says what.
Moved for the rain: When rain is likely (60% or more) in the next day, an outdoor watering task moves to tomorrow, at most twice in a row. Indoor plots are never moved: rain does not reach a windowsill.
Frost and heat alerts: From your garden's forecast: a frost watch at 36°F, freeze warnings at 32°F and 28°F, heat at 90°F and above. When a frost-tender plant is outdoors, a task to cover it is added. "Got it" hides an alert for you; snooze hides it for a few hours.
Hardiness zone: The USDA zone for your garden, looked up from its location, or typed in if you know better. It says which perennials survive your winters outdoors. It does not apply to indoor plots.; It is looked up for US gardens only for now. Outside the US a garden has no zone until you type one — if you know your USDA-equivalent zone, enter it.
Outside the US: what is measured and what is estimated: The forecast is real wherever you are: NOAA's in the US, MET Norway's everywhere else, and the weather strip says which. Rain-skip and frost and heat alerts work from it anywhere.; Planting and care timings — days to harvest, how often to water, when to sow — come from US extension services. Outside the US they are a starting point, not local advice; the plant picker says so for a garden abroad.; Hardiness zones and frost dates are US-only for now.
Units: Settings → Units switches sizes, temperatures and volumes between imperial and metric. Nothing you recorded changes, and a harvest keeps the unit you weighed it in. An account whose first garden is outside the US starts in metric.
Season year: The season review counts a calendar year unless you say otherwise. South of the equator, where one summer runs from December into February, set the garden's season to start in July (Manage → Details) and the review counts July to June, named like "2026–27".
Frost dates: typical and cautious: The last 32°F night of spring and the first of fall, from the nearest NOAA weather station with 1991–2020 records. The station, how far away it is and how many years it covers are always shown.; Typical is the date the last spring frost comes after in 1 year in 2. Cautious is the 1-year-in-10 date: later in spring, earlier in fall. Waiting for the cautious date is the safe choice for tender plants.; Where frost does not come every year, the dates describe only the years it does, and the app says how many years that is. Some mountain stations can freeze in any month, and have no dates at all.; These are station averages, not your garden. A cold hollow, a sheltered wall or a city courtyard can shift them by a week or more. If you know better, enter your own under Manage → Location; no later lookup replaces them.; The planting calendar times frost-tender plants, like tomatoes and beans, from the cautious date, and hardy ones, like peas and lettuce, from the typical date. Under Manage → Details you can time tender plants from the typical date instead. Both dates are always shown.
Planting calendar: When to start seeds indoors, sow outdoors, plant out and expect a harvest, counted from your garden's frost dates and extension-service timing for each plant. Every date says where it comes from. Plants with no published timing show the catalogue's planting seasons instead, marked low confidence.; A seed gets no watering tasks until it is sown, whether it is planned for today or a later day. A suggestion to sow it appears on Today (a week ahead for a later day); marking it Sown records the sowing and starts its care.
Dormant: A perennial resting for the winter. Its tasks pause until you mark it growing again.
Some details still unknown: Some plants in the catalogue are missing figures no source we trust publishes — soil pH, feeding needs. They are fully usable; the app simply says nothing where it would otherwise have had to guess. Plants you add yourself work the same way.
Hill: Plants grouped to grow together on the plot drawing, like corn, beans and squash in a three sisters bed. A hill moves as one, and plants in it share ground rather than counting as crowded.
Steward, gardener, observer, helper: Everyone in a garden can see all of it.; A steward runs the garden: members, invites, beds, and working any bed.; A gardener works the beds they tend, and any bed nobody tends. A steward can let a gardener add beds too.; An observer can look but not change anything.; A helper is someone a bed's gardener lets in while they are away: either just to tick off tasks, or to do everything on that one bed.

Show me around

Each page has a short guided tour that points at its big ideas one at a time. Pages offer theirs the first time you open them; replay any of them here. You can quit a tour whenever you like.

Still stuck? Write to support@loamhand.com.