Growth stages for the garden

I added growth stages to the garden today, which is something I've been meaning to do since I started the notes section. Every note now carries a stage label and a pair of dates: when it was planted and when it was last tended.

The stages are borrowed from the digital gardening tradition, and they map to how I actually think about the notes already. A seedling is a rough idea I dropped in so I wouldn't lose it, something that might be a single paragraph or even just a title and a sentence. Budding means I've gone back and cleaned it up, connected it to other notes, and feel okay about someone reading it even if it's not fully fleshed out. Evergreen is for notes that are reasonably complete and represent something I'm fairly confident about, though "evergreen" doesn't mean "finished" because I still revise them when my thinking changes.

The dates are the part that actually matters to me more than the labels. A note that was planted six months ago and last tended yesterday tells a different story than one planted yesterday with the same content. It signals that the idea has been through some revision cycles and isn't just a first draft I published and forgot about. I want readers to have that context without me having to spell it out in the note itself.

On the implementation side, the garden index now groups notes by stage instead of listing them flat, and the auto-generation means I don't have to remember to update the index every time I add a new note. The stage and dates live in the frontmatter, so tending a note is just bumping the date and optionally promoting the stage when it feels right.