Reminders and notifications

Working from the most common cause down:

• Nothing was due. We only remind about tasks due in the next 24 hours or already overdue, and only for active plants.
• You already got one today. There is at most one reminder per person, per household, per channel, per day — and it bundles every due task together rather than pinging per plant.
• The channel is off. In Settings → Notifications, email is on by default; browser notifications are off until you turn them on and grant permission.
• Quiet hours. These pause email (and SMS) inside your window. Nothing is lost — the next hourly pass delivers once the window lifts.
• You’re on vacation. An active vacation window suppresses all of your reminders.
• Browser notifications need more than a tick. See the browser question below.

The scan runs hourly, so a task that becomes due at 09:05 may be notified at 10:00 rather than immediately.

Browser notifications have more moving parts than the other channels:

• Your browser must have granted permission. If you dismissed the prompt rather than allowing it, the setting is not saved. If you blocked it, you have to unblock the site in your browser before the button will work.
• Permission is per browser and per device. Enabling it on your laptop does nothing for your phone.
• Some devices support only foreground notifications — pop-ups while a Family Greenhouse tab is open. When that’s the case the app tells you explicitly that background delivery is unavailable on that device.
• In-tab pop-ups for newly-overdue tasks only appear on the dashboard, and on the first load in a browser session anything already overdue is marked as seen without popping up. Only tasks that cross the line afterwards will announce themselves.

Quiet hours deliberately do not silence browser notifications — your operating system’s own Do Not Disturb handles that better than we can.

The most likely reason is your time zone. Quiet hours are evaluated in the time zone stored on your account, and that defaults to UTC. The settings form pre-fills your browser’s time zone, but it is only saved when you actually press Save quiet hours. If you have never pressed it, your window is being applied in UTC.

Two other things worth knowing: you must set both a start and an end (one alone is rejected), and a window where start and end are identical suppresses nothing. Windows that cross midnight — 22:00 to 07:00 — work as you would expect.

The weekly digest and the annual recap carry an Unsubscribe from these link in the footer, and they are sent with the headers that put a one-click Unsubscribe button at the top of the message in Gmail, Apple Mail and other clients that support them. Either one works in a single click, and neither needs you to be signed in.

For finer control, open Settings → Notifications. Unticking Email stops everything, including task reminders — those carry no unsubscribe link of their own, because they are answering a task you created. If you want reminders but not the Monday summary, untick just Weekly plant digest and leave email on. One email always goes out regardless of preferences: the welcome message when you first create a household.

If you can’t sign in and have no recent digest to unsubscribe from, email support@familygreenhouse.net and we’ll do it for you.

An email summary of what is overdue in your household, sent on Mondays. It is email only — there is no browser or SMS version — and it is skipped entirely for households with nothing overdue, so a quiet week means no email rather than an empty one. It lists up to five plants but the subject line tells you the true total. If it lands during your quiet hours, a later pass the same day delivers it.

An opt-in nudge when one of your plants is entering a typical season for a common pest. Turn them on under Settings → Notifications. They only fire for plants with a species we recognise, at most one pest per plant, and at most once every 90 days for the same plant and pest. They are a seasonal prompt to go and look at the plant — not a detection, and not evidence that anything is actually wrong.

Not right now. SMS is built but switched off — the phone-verification form is hidden and the app will tell you that SMS delivery is not enabled. Email and browser reminders work normally. We haven’t committed to a date for turning it on.

No. Your notification preferences, quiet hours and time zone are stored once per account and apply everywhere. What is per household is the reminder itself: you can receive one reminder per household per day, so being in two households means up to two reminders.