Why?

--Inspiration-- One of our group members, Zachary, has experience gardening with mint and beets to which he expressed his frustrations with how little he knew going in. Although Zachary's interest in sustainability meant he stuck with this hobby, for many, this knowledge gap is disorienting and frustrating, ultimately disincentivizing urban farming.

With an experienced web developer on our team, we figured that a web application which resolved this knowledge gap would ultimately bring in more people to practice sustainability, as opposed to the many a lack of information would drive away.

How It Addresses the Problem

Through our research of home gardening communities and useful, publicly accessible information, we concluded that the best information to provide novices with were as follows:

When to water their plants
What crops to plant
Potential obstacles that might crop up while farming

By tracking water levels and encouraging users to only water their crops when it doesn't rain, using location services to determine the most compatible crops for a user to plant, and environmentally-sustainable methods of disease curing and pest removal, we created an accessible almanac for beginners to reference which encourages sustainable farming practices.

What did we learn?

Originally, this project was conceived as a web app which would utilize a front-end and a back-end which would communicate with APIs for the client server. Members of our front-end splinter gained hands-on experience in developing with React.js and Tailwind.css, while our back-end developers learned how to utilize Gradle with Java to automate the production of server architecture, implement the REST protocol to communicate with servers, and communicate with APIs.

Ultimately, the biggest lesson we had to learn was that not all ideas make it to the end of production. The scale of our ambitions were ultimately too large, leading us to scale back the back-end until it was more efficient to delegate this proof-of concept to just the front-end.