mcneill-shiner / trellis-garden-app

A garden tracker: personal seed library, planting calendar, and task list

Trellis Garden Planner App

Objective

A web app for use in planning a garden, particularly tracking planting dates and other time-sensitive tasks.

Who is it for?

Any vegetable gardener, whether they're working a small community garden plot or a large homestead. Trellis is geared towards both gardeners growing from seed, as well as those transplanting nursery-bought seedlings.

MVP Functionality

• Define basic garden settings such as zone and frost dates
• Add plants to planner from available templates
• Maintain a garden task list based on plants that have been added, with dates automatically calculated based on garden and plant settings
• Check off gardening tasks as they're completed

Future Functionality

• Ability to customize plants from template
• Weather forecast, including frost and heat warnings
• Garden zone lookup by zip
• Guidance on selecting frost dates
• Easily adjust frost date based on forecast (w/ advice)
• GANNT/calendar view of tasks
• Succession planting
• Ability to add more than one garden
• Option to distinguish between beginner & experienced gardener, with tooltips displaying or not
• Email notifications: summary of the week's tasks, what was completed, links to helpful content
• Alerts (email & dashboard) to set the next season's frost dates
• Content & knowledge base
• Store (dropship)
• Major feature: space planning tool, eventually with a time component
• User setting: week start on Sunday or Monday

App Status

Current Feature: Dashboard/Tasks

• Before accessing dashboard, calendar, or seed library--validate that user has garden
• Max width for tables
• Red styling for overdue tasks
• How to handle plant tasks in db--separate table, with only completed & date?
• Keep due dates entirely dynamic based on plant data?

Next Steps

• Set up plant db
• Dashboard ui (w/ hardcoded sample data to start?)
• Switch out bootstrap for tailwind
• Set up basic design system
• Research alternate names
• Schema/validation for zone/frost dates
• Remove unnecessary packages
• Change name/desc in package.json
• Fix nav issue - logged in logo should lead to dashboard
• Fix day/night temps as plant timing option in sample data
• Refactor cjs to esm

Questions/Unknowns

• Do users' plants need to work as copies/references to the original db?
• Is a nonrelational db the best option for this? Most flexible
• Best way to handle the plant db/JSON formatting? Lots of tools for the linting, but is there something better for the initial object building?
• Does it make sense to set up plant db/API separately, so it can be made open source in the future?
• When are standards for next season's frost dates set?
• Do I need a date library? And if so, which one? Day.js seems like it would do the job.
• Will things get complicated with time zones? Should I be pegging a garden to the zip code's time zone to solve for that?
• How to handle plants that should really be planted based on air or soil temps rather than dates? Ex. eggplant. Have date range for calendar/task list, but then also include a note?

Data: Gardens, Plants, Tasks

• How to relate tasks to plants and gardens? Tasks would be regenerated for the new season once a frost date is set (for the first time including the new year?), but if a user changes their frost date later in the season, we'd want timing to be recalculated but not for the tasks to be completely regenerated. They may have already completed some early-season tasks, for example, and we don't want to lose that data.
• Also need to account for users' preference between growing from seed and transplanting. How should tasks be generated? Is there a way to adjust if user changes preferences?
• For succession, need to include end date
• Also specify spring/fall harvests. Should all specify this?
• Tasks have a year, season, and optional succession
• Plants have an array of seasons, and succession t/f
• Tasks are initiated in two way: 1) frost dates are set for the year; 2) plant is added to garden
• Need a check: must have a current-year frost date before adding plants to garden. Or should this be current-season? I.e. as soon as 2023 frost date passes, you can't add any new plants until setting 2024 frost dates
• Is season really necessary? Seems like it only matters if there are two distinct growing seasons. In that case, you'd need to specify planting dates for both seasons. So split "events" into Spring and Fall? Do we specify Summer when that's relevant? For plants with only one season, you'd never need to refer to the season itself. Plus the names feel fuzzy...Early vs Late Spring, Summer, etc.
• Should only have one garden record for each userId. How to deal w/ this? Down the road, may want to support multiple, in which case garden id would probably be part of url query.