GroLocal

Inspiration

We kept coming back to the same idea: most neighbourhoods are full of things nobody outside that household ever finds out about. A gardener with more seedlings than they know what to do with. A recipe that's been in a family for two generations. A plant that only means something because of where it came from. None of that ever crosses the fence line, even though the person who'd love to know about it might live three doors down.

The hackathon stimulus asked how technology can connect and strengthen the building blocks that make up our world. That question pointed straight at the gap we kept noticing. We didn't want to build another marketplace app. We wanted to build something where a seedling could be the start of an actual relationship between two neighbours, not just a transaction.

What it does

GroLocal is a community gardening platform that connects neighbours through plants, food, knowledge and culture.

Users create a profile with their name, suburb, heritage and a short bio, then build a digital garden tracking what they grow. From there, GroLocal offers several connected features.

A local marketplace lets people list surplus seedlings, produce and gardening resources for neighbours to purchase, swap or claim, with a claiming flow that records the transaction and provides pickup details.

Stories and cultural knowledge let gardeners attach the history behind a plant or recipe, so a curry leaf tree or a family's tomato sauce recipe carries its context rather than just being another listing.

Growing journeys let users log entries against a plant as it develops, turning a single seedling into a documented story over time.

A map-based discovery experience shows nearby gardeners and resources, a discussions space lets neighbours trade advice and recipes, and a following system lets people keep up with gardeners whose work they're interested in. An AI chatbot sits across the platform to help users navigate it and answer gardening questions.

How we built it

GroLocal is a full-stack web app built with Next.js and TypeScript. The frontend uses React and Tailwind CSS, styled around a simple, earthy visual identity meant to feel like soil and gardens rather than a typical tech product.

The backend runs on Prisma with a SQLite database, modelling users, plants, gardens, listings, purchases and claims, stories, follows, discussion posts and growing logs. Next.js API routes handle the app's core actions: creating listings, updating profiles, recording purchases and adding growing-log entries.

The map is built with Leaflet, icons come from Lucide React, and the AI chatbot runs on the Google Gemini API.

We split the work across the team rather than each person owning one page in isolation. One person led the database structure and the Home, Market and Profile pages. Another led the Discussions page and the overall visual design direction, keeping the interface consistent across the app. The other two focused on shaping the concept, the presentation script and the demo video, while still contributing to development and testing throughout.

Challenges we ran into

Getting four people working on the same Next.js codebase inside a single 24-hour window meant merge conflicts were a constant risk, especially in shared files like the global layout and styling. We got ahead of it by branching early, agreeing who owned which pages, and building the shared design tokens as a group before splitting off to work independently.

Balancing the marketplace against the cultural and story features was harder than expected. It would have been easy to let GroLocal collapse into being just another listings app. Keeping the story and heritage features central, not bolted on, took deliberate effort at every stage.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that GroLocal ended up as a genuinely working prototype rather than a set of disconnected screens. A user can create a profile, list a seedling, have a neighbour claim it, see that reflected on their profile, and log a growing journey for the plant that resulted, all inside one coherent flow.

We're also proud of how the marketplace and the cultural storytelling reinforce each other. A listing isn't just an item, it's connected to the gardener, the plant and often a story about where that plant came from, which is exactly the connection we set out to build.

What we learned

We learned how much a small, consistent database schema simplifies everything built on top of it. Getting the Prisma models right early meant every page after that had a stable foundation to query against.

We also learned how much a shared, restrained design system saves at speed. Agreeing on a palette, a type pairing and a small set of component rules before splitting into branches meant our four separately built pages still looked like one product by the end.

What's next for GroLocal

We'd want to build out verified pickup and exchange safety, since that's the part we deliberately kept simple for the prototype. Seasonal planting reminders tied to a user's specific plants and climate would make the growing journey feature genuinely useful past the first entry. We'd also like to explore partnering with local councils or community gardens, so GroLocal could plug into gardens that already exist rather than only individual backyards.