Your plant vs the plant — why we separate profiles from plantings

Most garden apps conflate two different things: knowledge about a plant, and your actual plant in your garden. That distinction sounds academic until you've lost three seasons of notes in a data update, or found generic growing tips overwriting your own observations. In MyPlot, these are always kept separate — and that separation is one of the most important design decisions in the app.

A plant profile in MyPlot is shared knowledge. It contains the growing guide — sun requirements, water needs, spacing, companion plants, harvest timing. That information is the same for every tomato in every garden. If we improve the growing guide for Truss Tomatoes based on new data or user feedback, every MyPlot user benefits from that improvement automatically.

A planting is your tomato. It has a specific location (Bed 2), a specific variety (Grosse Lisse), a sow date, and a timeline of events that belongs entirely to your garden and nobody else's. Improvements to the shared tomato profile never touch your planting record. Your history stays yours.

This matters for a few reasons. First, you can have multiple plantings of the same plant — two beds of tomatoes, successive sowings of lettuce, a container and an in-ground basil — all with completely separate timelines and histories. Searching "how long do my tomatoes take to harvest" returns an answer from your own records, not a generic guide.

Second, it enables proper rotation tracking. When you add a new planting to a bed, MyPlot can tell you what grew there before. It flags allium-after-allium situations, or three consecutive years of brassicas in the same spot, because that history lives on the planting — specific to a location — not on a shared plant profile that has no memory of your beds.

Third, your data stays stable when the library improves. If we update the companion planting data for tomatoes, your planting record doesn't change. Your own notes about what you planted next to your tomatoes last season don't get overwritten by a library update. The two systems are kept intentionally separate so the shared knowledge and your personal record can both improve without interfering with each other.

It's a small architectural decision that makes a large practical difference over multiple seasons. The longer you use MyPlot, the more your planting records diverge from the shared profile in useful ways — your specific variety notes, your specific pest encounters, your specific yields. That's the data that actually helps you grow better over time.