The Little Gardener

an AI-powered buddy to help you identify and diagnose your garden!

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Inspiration ⭐

Inspired by our love for nature walks and the spontaneous curiosity that strikes on every proud grass touching session, this app is for people who have also wondered, “What kind of duck is that?”, or, “Can I bring that leaf to the lettuce eating competition?” Whether you’re admiring a particularly glutinous squirrel, dreaming of bringing low-maintenance plants into your garden because your plants keep dying, or plotting to steal a plant cutting from your gatekeeping neighbor, this app was built to satiate the thirst for easily accessible knowledge.

What it does 🌱🌿

The Little Gardener simplifies plant identification and care. With The Little Gardener, users can immediately identify an unknown plant through uploading an image (via gallery or camera), for Google Gemini to recognize its scientific specs. Users can additionally use this to keep track of what plants are in their garden, as it saves the plant and its details into the user’s dashboard. User accounts ensure they can take their garden information with them wherever they go.

While in the dashboard, information about the user’s plant, as well as generic information about that species of plant, can be viewed. The user may also get a health analysis and care recommendation for each friend in their garden, also through the use of Google Gemini. This health analysis is specific to the photo and plant the user provides.

Users can update their saved plants by uploading a new image. This also allows for a new thorough health analysis, while previous images are still saved in a gallery for that plant, allowing the user to watch a plant’s progression.

Additionally, users can explore a variety of plants from the Perenual Plant API to learn more about plants that they might consider adding to their garden.

How we built it 🪴

  • Custom graphics and UI design: self made in Figma.
  • Front end: Developed in React Native via Expo Framework.
  • Back end: MongoDB for user accounts and user data, Google Gemini API for image recognition, and Perenual’s Plant API as a general dataset.

Challenges we ran into 🌵

Bold last minute decision to challenge ourselves with a tech stack we weren’t fluent in. Despite our experience in other tech stacks, we found that our idea would be best executed as a mobile app, and we were determined to rise to the challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 🌻

Our storybook-inspired UI! To inspire users to grow their little gardens into bigger ones, we designed a highly functional interface that sparks feelings of whimsy. Full implementation of our app’s main function–to recognize and diagnose plants in a user’s garden. You get a whole little gardening expert in your pocket!

What we learned 🌴

All of us had experience with React.js, but had not developed an app in React Native from scratch. We gained more in depth knowledge towards using React hooks effectively and got to adapt to a new framework quickly.

What's next for The Little Gardener ✨

  • Notifications–so you never forget to water your plant!
  • A social hub aspect would be very ideal, as users can contribute to helping each other identify plants that may be more generic-looking, especially in winter seasons. This could encourage a community of plant enjoyers too.
  • The search function could be further improved on, by allowing the user to search for a suitable plant based on specific filters.
  • Potentially identify other kinds of species, like determining if a mushroom is poisonous or edible. This would likely require extra warnings and should show the user multiple of the closest looking plant.
  • The identification tool could also be improved on for accuracy by taking into consideration the location of the user.
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