This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass
What I Built
SproutWeek tells a home gardener what to plant and do outside this week.
You enter your town, your space (balcony pots, backyard, community plot or windowsill) and how much sun you get. It returns a short list of what to plant now, with why and how, a few outdoor chores for the week, and what to hold off on. It uses today's date, so the advice changes as the season does.
The goal is to make the screen the shortest part of the day: read the plan for a minute, then go outside and plant something. It's for beginners who have a balcony or a small patch and don't know what to grow right now.
Demo
Code
SproutWeek
Tells a home gardener what to plant and do outside this week, using Gemma running locally in Ollama (works offline). Run: pip install -r requirements.txt && python -m uvicorn app:app --port 8002 (open http://127.0.0.1:8002)
How I Built It
- Model: Gemma 3, an open-weight model, running locally through Ollama.
- Backend: a small FastAPI app in Python. It adds today's date, the place, the space and the sunlight to a strict prompt, sends it to Gemma, and parses the JSON that comes back.
- Frontend: a single HTML page with a short form and clear cards for "Plant now", "Do outside this week" and "Hold off on", plus a print button so the plan can go on the fridge.
- Auto-detect: the app finds whichever Gemma model is installed in Ollama, so there is nothing to configure.
I built the project with AI assistance (Claude) and ran it on my own Ubuntu laptop.
Why Does Open Innovation Matter?
- Works offline: once the model is downloaded, it needs no internet. That fits a garden app, since gardens often have poor signal.
- Free to use: there are no per-request fees, so it can be asked every week all season.
- Private: where you live and what you grow never leave your machine.
- Adjustable: because the model is open, the prompt can be tuned for a region's climate, or the model swapped for a better one, with nobody's permission.
I Took It Outside
On Sunday morning I typed in "Kolkata, West Bengal", chose "balcony pots" and "6 hours" of sun, and read SproutWeek's plan once. It took the model about four minutes on my laptop. Then I closed the lid and went out.
It told me to plant spinach, coriander and radish now, and to start tomato seedlings in a bigger pot. It told me to hold off on lettuce until the nights cool down. I had three old paint buckets and a bag of potting soil, so I drilled drain holes in the buckets, filled them, and sowed the spinach, coriander and radish seeds. That took about 45 minutes, and I spent maybe two of them looking at the screen.
What worked: Each plant had a one-line "how", like sowing depth and spacing, which was short enough to follow with muddy hands. The "hold off on" card saved me from wasting lettuce seeds.
What went wrong: It suggested a tomato variety that needs more sun than my balcony gets, even though I entered 6 hours. I swapped it for cherry tomatoes after checking myself. It also gave me a sowing depth for radish that looked too deep, so I used the depth printed on the seed packet.
What I'd add: A "what I've already planted" list, so next week's plan builds on this week's.
Prize Categories
- Best Use of Gemma
