01 / The problem
Most garden advice is written for nobody in particular. It ignores your soil, your sun and the climate outside your door. So people buy the wrong plants, watch them die, and decide they are bad at gardening.
02 / What I built
A plan for your bed
Pick a size, a shape and how much sun it gets. The app returns a planting plan with plants placed by zone, quantities and what looks good in each season.
Swap one plant
Do not like a pick? Ask for one replacement in that spot, and keep the rest of the plan.
Your conditions, filled in
A postal code turns into a hardiness zone, a soil type and a soil pH, so you do not have to know any of it.
A weekly care list
Seasonal tasks with a short reason for each one, so the work is spread out instead of dumped in spring.
Name that plant
Point the camera at a plant and get an answer back, then save it to your garden.
Credits, not a subscription
Buy a pack when you want another bed or another design. Nothing recurring to cancel.
03 / Key decisions
01
The planting rules live in the prompt
Zone splits, how much of a bed to fill, plant density, hero plant rules and toxic plant exclusions are written into the request, and the model returns the plan as JSON. That made the rules quick to change, and it means the app has to be careful with what comes back.
02
Credits gate the AI, and the gate is plain data
A count on the bed and a balance on the profile decide whether a generation may run. A purchase tops the balance up. None of it depends on the model, so the paywall keeps working even when the AI does not.
03
The care list is deliberately not AI
Tasks come from a fixed table, copied per user. The weekly list is predictable, it costs nothing to run, and it cannot hallucinate a job that would kill your plants.
04
Every table locked to its owner from day one
All 20 tables use row level security with one ownership rule repeated across the schema, plus a short list of shared plant tables everyone can read.
04 / Screens
05 / Outcome
The app is live on the App Store and Google Play.
People start with a blank bed and finish with a plan, a shopping list and a weekly routine.