Plant sitters

Any household member creates a sitter link on the Household page, choosing how long it should last — up to 7 days on the free Seedling plan, and up to 90 on Garden and Greenhouse. The form suggests 14, or your plan’s maximum where that is lower. You send that link to your sitter — they need no account, no password and no app. The link is shown once, at the moment you create it, so copy it then; we cannot show it to you again afterwards.

It depends on your plan, because Garden and Greenhouse give the sitter a second page.

On every plan they get a to-do list. For each task due before the link expires, or already overdue, it shows:

• the plant’s name
• what needs doing (water, fertilise, prune, repot, or your custom task name)
• when it is due, and whether it is overdue
• which space the plant is in, and its placement note

How far ahead it reaches is the link’s own window, not a fixed week: a 7-day link on Seedling lists the next 7 days, a 90-day one on Garden or Greenhouse lists all 90. Plants with nothing due are not on this list at all.

On Garden and Greenhouse the Away Kit adds a printable plant-care brief, linked from that list. It covers every plant in your active care — not only the ones with something due — and for each one it adds three things the list does not show:

• the plant’s latest photo
• your house rule for it, word for word — the one-line rule from the plant form. If you never wrote one, the brief says the plant has no note. It does not fall back to the plant’s own notes: those stay in the household, which is what the privacy policy promises.
• its entry in our verified pet-toxicity list, where it has one

On neither page can they see your household members’ names or contact details, your saved location, task notes, the activity feed, analytics, your billing, or any other household.

The caveat you control: plant names, space names, placement notes and custom task names are your own free text, and the sitter sees them verbatim — as are house rules and plant photos once you are on Garden or Greenhouse. A door code, where the spare key lives, or anything else you would not hand to a neighbour does not belong in any of those fields while a sitter link is live. Move it, or rename the plant, first. Your plant notes are not in that list: no sitter link has shown them since we removed that fallback, and the privacy policy says so.

On the free Seedling plan, one thing: they can mark a listed task done. On Garden and Greenhouse the Away Kit adds a second: they can send you a photo of a plant on their list, with an optional note, which joins that plant’s timeline without becoming its main picture. On any plan they cannot add, edit or delete plants or tasks, snooze anything, invite anyone, or reach settings. Both a completion and a photo are recorded as “a plant sitter” rather than attributed to you or to any named person, and a completion advances the task’s schedule exactly as your own do.

Whoever created the link revokes it on the Household page, and an admin can revoke anyone’s and it stops working immediately. Otherwise it expires by itself on the date you chose — at most 7 days out on the free Seedling plan, and at most 90 on Garden and Greenhouse. Anyone holding the link can use it — it is the credential, so only send it to someone you trust, and revoke it if you forward it to the wrong person.