Local Micro-Climate Garden Planner 🌱 | Open-Source AI for Touch Grass

Hyma Sri Narala — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:46:25 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass

What I Built

The Local Micro-Climate Garden Planner is a full-stack, local-first web application designed to encourage people to spend less time staring at digital screens and more time outside interacting with nature ("Touch Grass").

🌿 The Problem

Urban micro-climates vary drastically within the exact same city. A 4th-floor south-facing balcony experiences intense sun and dry winds, while a ground-floor terrace remains shaded. Generic online advice leads to withered seedlings and frustrated beginner gardeners.

🎯 The Solution

Our application acts as a personal, intelligent gardening mentor:

Micro-Climate Profiling: Captures garden location, growing space (balcony, terrace, windowsill, plot), daily sunlight, soil mix, water routine, and temperature.
Transparent 6-Factor Rule Engine: Scores plant suitability from 0 to 100% using deterministic biological rules—ensuring plant safety without black-box AI hallucinations.
Live & Offline Climate Dashboard: Integrates real-time weather from Open-Meteo API with a zero-network manual fallback.
Local Open-Weight AI Assistant: Powered by Ollama (qwen2.5 / llama3.2) with 100% local privacy (no paid cloud API keys required) and deterministic fallbacks.
7-Day Outdoor Action Plan: Climate-aware daily tasks (soil finger test, pot drainage check, seed sowing, leaf inspection) specifically designed to get users outdoors.
My Garden Progress Tracker: SQLite-backed tracker to monitor growth stages (seeded, sprouted, growing, harvestable) and record observations.

Demo

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/Hyma27/Garden-Planner
Local Application URL: http://localhost:5173
FastAPI Backend & Swagger Docs: http://localhost:8000/docs

📸 Application Highlights

Home Hero: Nature-inspired modern SaaS dashboard inviting users to plan their garden.
Micro-Climate Setup: Accessible forms with tooltips explaining direct vs partial sunlight and soil aeration.
Climate Dashboard: Recharts crop suitability visualization and real-time Open-Meteo weather warnings for extreme heat or frost.
Plant Recommendations: Suitability score badges with full point breakdown rationale ("Why this suits your garden").
AI Gardening Assistant: Context-grounded chat interface that highlights a "Suggested Outdoor Action" with every response.

Code

The project is built with a modular, maintainable full-stack architecture:

Frontend: React 19, Vite, Tailwind CSS v4, Lucide React Icons, Recharts
Backend: Python 3.12, FastAPI, Pydantic v2, Uvicorn, HTTPX
Database: SQLite (Zero-config local persistence)
AI Engine: Ollama running open-weight models (qwen2.5:latest or llama3.2:latest)
Live Weather: Open-Meteo REST API (No API key needed)
Test Suite: Pytest (11/11 tests passing for recommendation scoring, SQLite CRUD, and AI fallback)

🐙 Repository Link

👉 GitHub Repository: Hyma27/Garden-Planner

Open Innovation & Local-First AI

We believe open innovation makes technology more private, transparent, and accessible:

100% Local Inference: Runs locally via Ollama. Personal garden details and chat messages never leave your machine.
Zero Paid API Keys: Requires no cloud AI subscriptions or API keys.
Deterministic Rule Safety: Recommendations are calculated via verified biological constraints rather than LLM text generation.
Offline Fallback Engine: If Ollama is offline or hardware is limited, the app seamlessly switches to a rule-based fallback response engine.

My Agent Session

This full-stack application was pair-programmed and built using Google Antigravity AI Agent. The agent performed:

End-to-end project scaffolding (React + FastAPI + SQLite).
Designing the rule-based plant recommendation engine.
Open-Meteo API integration with fallback handling.
Ollama local AI client integration.
Unit and integration testing with Pytest (11 passing tests).

Prize Categories

Primary Category: Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge — Week 1: Touch Grass

Grow smarter. Step outside. Touch grass. 🌱

DEV Community: Hyma Sri Narala