Notes from the field

When you're choosing what to grow, the most useful question isn't "what's popular?" — it's "what can go in the ground today?" So the crop and flower pickers now show an "in season now" chip group, built from each crop's UK sowing window and pinned above the popularity and climate suggestions.

As ever, it's advice, never a filter: the full list stays open below, and when nothing is in season — midsummer is a quiet moment for ornamentals — the chips simply stay out of your way rather than inventing a suggestion.

There's no pretending here: the chips only appear once at least five distinct farms in your county grow something, so a "popular" label always reflects real neighbours, never a guess — and never any one farm's private data. Alongside it, the "well suited to your area" chips reflect your climate band. Both are advice, never a filter: the full list is always there, and a Highland grower can still pick chillies.

If your county's chips are empty, that's honesty, not a bug — it fills in as more growers near you join.

A chilli sown in March in a heated propagator, potted on into a polytunnel, will give you ripe fruit by late summer. The same plant outdoors will usually sulk to a few green pods before the season closes. If you're serious about heat-lovers — chillies, aubergines, most tomatoes — some kind of cover is the single best investment you can make.

That's exactly why Grovabe asks whether you grow outdoors, in a greenhouse or in a polytunnel, and shapes its advice around the answer — including being honest, in the Land planner, about which revenue figures only exist under glass.

A "Hutton day" is one where the minimum temperature stays at or above 10°C and the air spends at least six hours at 90% humidity or more. Two consecutive Hutton days and the conditions favour late blight — that's when Grovabe raises a warning for your potatoes and outdoor tomatoes.

Note the wording: conditions favour — go and scout. It's a forecast, not a detection, and we'll never dress one up as the other. The hour-by-hour humidity matters too: a daily average smooths away the overnight humid spell that actually drives infection, so we watch the hours.

This is a fact-check, not a forecast: APHA publishes its live restriction zones, and Grovabe asks a precise question — is this farm inside one? Alerts are filtered by species (bluetongue reaches ruminants; bird flu, poultry), so your feed never cries wolf. And a zone alert only clears when the restriction actually lifts at the source — never on a timer.

If an alert does land, Farma knows about the zone when you ask what it means for your stock — and for anything serious, it will point you to your vet and APHA's official guidance.

Move what you can move — containers are the one advantage you have, so tender plants come inside or against a house wall, which can run a couple of degrees warmer. Cover what you can't: fleece, an upturned pot, even newspaper buys several degrees. Water the compost in the afternoon — moist compost holds heat better than dry — and resist unwrapping too early; a bright morning after a frost is when the damage often happens.

Grovabe's weather agent checks the forecast for your location every hour and warns you the afternoon before, because a frost you hear about at 11pm is a frost you can't do much about.

A single bad day happens to every keeper. What matters is whether today is genuinely out of line for this batch — which is why Grovabe compares today's losses against the batch's own trailing 7-day average rather than a generic threshold. When today runs at double the trend or worse, that's a pattern, and you get a critical alert with the reasoning spelled out.

When one lands: check water first (a failed drinker line shows up in mortality fast), then feed, then house temperature — all three are on your batch's chart in Grovabe, so the story is usually right there. And for anything that looks like disease, ring your vet; Farma will tell you the same.