You have now filled beds by hand, and by hand is the right way to place the few plants whose position you care about: the tomato that has to be where you can reach it, the tree you are siting for shade. It is a poor way to place forty carrots. This lesson is about the other half of the workflow, the one that starts from a list rather than from a spot. The plant library is the catalogue of what a species is. The plant queue is the list of how many of each you mean to grow. And the guided planter is the thing that reads both, looks at your beds, and proposes where each plant should go and why, one at a time, with an Accept and a Skip and an Undo. It is about fourteen minutes, and at the end of it you should be able to go from an empty planting list to a fully planted garden without placing a single plant by hand.

Three objectives. First, you will be able to say what the plant library and the plant queue each hold, and why they are two things rather than one. That distinction is the whole basis for everything else in the lesson and it takes thirty seconds to explain and a while to believe. Second, you will be able to build a queue: add species to it, set quantities, and read the progress each row reports back as the garden fills. Third, you will be able to run a guided planting session end to end, which means selecting beds, reading a proposal and the reasons attached to it, accepting or skipping, auto-filling the rest, and finishing, which is the step that actually commits anything.

Two panels, and people confuse them constantly, so here is the difference stated as plainly as it can be. The plant library is a catalogue. Every species in it carries real numbers: a spacing, a mature radius and height, a sun requirement, a water requirement, days to maturity, and a set of interactions with animals and pests. Those numbers are facts about the plant and they do not change because of your garden. Picking one in the library makes it the active species, which is what the by-hand tools inherit. The plant queue is not a catalogue, it is a target. A row in it says: I want twelve lettuces in this garden. And the number it shows you is placed against planned, three of twelve, because a queue quantity counts what is in the ground, not what is left to do. That is worth saying twice, because it changes what happens when you edit a row. If five tomatoes are already planted and you set the row to six, the planter has one to place, not six. The queue is a statement about the finished garden.

This is a guided planting session running. Select one or more beds on the canvas, press Guided plant, and the planter starts proposing. Each proposal is one plant of one species in one spot, drawn as a ghost on the canvas so you can see where it would land, and it comes with its reasons: a short list of pluses and minuses saying why here rather than somewhere else. Sun hours matching the species' requirement. Water need clustered with its neighbours so you are not running a hose to one thirsty plant in a dry bed. Tall plants placed where their own shadow falls out of the garden rather than across the bed behind them. You can Accept it, Skip to the next idea, or Undo the last one you took. When you are convinced, Auto-fill takes the best pick over and over until nothing more fits. And then Finish, which is the one that matters: until you press Finish nothing has actually been planted. The ghosts are a proposal, not a commitment, and Cancel throws the whole session away without touching the garden.

Five steps. First, pick: open the plant library and choose your species, reading the numbers on the card rather than the name, because spacing and mature size are what decide how many of them your ground can hold. Second, queue: add each one to the plant queue and set the quantity you actually want in the finished garden. Third, select: click a bed on the canvas, and shift-click to add more. The planter only works on ground you have selected, and the button tells you how many beds it is about to work on. Fourth, guide: press Guided plant and work through the proposals. Accept the ones you like, skip the ones you do not, and when you are satisfied it is behaving sensibly, Auto-fill the rest. Fifth, finish, and this is the step people miss: Finish commits everything you accepted. Closing the panel or pressing Cancel throws the session away, and the queue rows will still read zero placed.

Four things that go wrong. The first is pressing Cancel, or just closing the panel, at the end of a session and wondering where the plants went. Nothing is committed until Finish, and that is deliberate, because a proposal you have not looked at should not be able to change your garden. The second is a queue that never empties. If a row will not go down, the ground you selected genuinely cannot hold any more of that species at its spacing, and the honest answers are more beds, wider spacing, or fewer plants, not more clicking. The third is proposals that all look wrong, which usually means the species is wrong for the site rather than that the planter is confused: read the minus reasons, and if they all say the same thing about sun, the bed is the problem. And the fourth is expecting the planter to fill ground it was not given. It works on selected beds only, so a bed you forgot to select stays empty however long you auto-fill.

Three things. The library and the queue are different objects: one is a catalogue of what a species is, the other is a target for how many you want here, and the queue counts placed against planned rather than work outstanding. The guided planter reasons out loud, and the reasons are the point: it is not placing plants at random and hoping, it is matching sun to requirement, clustering water needs, and keeping tall plants' shadows off the beds behind them, and it will tell you which of those it is doing at every step. And nothing is planted until Finish, which is what makes the whole session safe to experiment in. You now have a garden planted from a list. The next lesson goes back to the sun, and asks whether the light your beds actually get matches what everything you have just planted needs.