What I Built
A simple Garden Planner that tells users what vegetables, herbs, and flowers to plant this week based on their city and current month. Built with Google's open-weight Gemma 4 31B model.
The Problem
I live in Sunwal, Nepal. Every season I wonder: "What should I plant right now?" Most gardening apps are US-focused, need internet, or cost money. I wanted something free, private, and local.
Demo
Input: City = Sunwal, Month = October
Output:
- Leafy Greens: spinach, mustard greens (rayo), fenugreek (methi)
- Root Vegetables: carrots, radishes
- Cool-Season Veggies: cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli
- Legumes: garden peas
- Flowers: marigolds (sayapatri), petunias
It even suggested Nepal-specific crops — that's the power of open models trained on diverse data.
How I Built It
- Got a free API key from Google AI Studio
- Wrote a 30-line Python script using
requests - Called Gemma 4 via the Gemini API
- Used a prompt that asks for 5 bullet points
Why Open-Source AI Mattered
- Free — no cost to run, no paid API tier
- Private — my location and garden data stay with me
- Swappable — I can switch to any open model (Gemma, Llama, Mistral) without rewriting code
- Local-first future — one day I can run this on my laptop with no internet at all
A closed AI API would have cost money, locked me into one provider, and sent my location data to a server I don't control.
What's Next
Add frost-date logic per city, support Nepali language output, and run Gemma locally with Ollama.
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