I live in Vadodara, and most planting advice online assumes a climate that isn't mine: frost dates, spring and fall. Here the seasons are monsoon, winter and summer, and October to February is dry and mild. So I built a small app that gives planting advice for Indian cities, using an open model that runs entirely on my own computer.
What it does
You type your city, click What should I plant?, and get a short list of what to plant this week. The app picks the season (monsoon, winter or summer) from today's date, then asks Gemma (gemma3:4b), running locally through Ollama, to write the advice.
Code: https://github.com/RUSHILPATEL33/garden-planner
Why open-source mattered
- Free. No API key and no per-question cost. After the one-time download, it costs nothing to run.
- Offline. Once the model is downloaded, it works without internet, which suits a garden.
- Private. My city never leaves my computer.
What went wrong first
My first answer had three problems: raw ** symbols showing on the page, advice about winter rain and frost that doesn't fit Gujarat, and the same vegetable listed twice under two names (radish and mooli).
I fixed it by telling the model that India's October to February is dry and mild, limiting it to 5 plants with no repeats, and rendering bold text and lists properly on the page. With a small local model, the prompt does most of the work.
What I'd do next
[One or two ideas, for example more cities, a care schedule for the chosen crop, or Hindi and Gujarati support.]
How I built it
I used Cursor's agent for the first version and DevRelay to connect to the Hacktoberfest challenges.
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