A long time ago, in a garden far far away
Last January, I started searching for tools to help me grow my garden. I'm a
lazy software hacker by profession, and a planner by nature. I wanted tools to
help me create a garden calendar and plot out my garden, and some electronics to
automatically water my plants in the summer.
I never found any really good freely available tools, and certainly no open source tools, so I gave up and started writing my own. I ended up creating several different projects, including an Android app called ColdSnap that notifies of incoming frosts, a garden calendaring/todo list tool, and an Arduino-based watering system, loosely based off the Garduino. You can find those tools on github.
This January, I presented my tools at Linux Conference Australia in a talk called "Growing food with Open Source". I was amazed by the interest from the conference attendees, and by how many people told me about geeky garden projects I had never heard of. There was one person who told me they had already developed a project similar to the Garduino, but they were too worried about being in front of an audience to ever present it!
Of course, I wanted to keep in contact with all the awesome garden hackers at LCA, and hear about any projects they were working on. I realized there was no online representation for this community, where people combine their technology and science expertise with their passion for gardening. So I created it.
Welcome to GardenGeek.org!
I hope you can contribute to this community, or use this site to find a cool garden project to work on.
There's several ways you can contribute to GardenGeek.org:
Want to get some help on a project?
Join the GardenGeekery Google group.Know of a really cool project?
Add a link to the Projects page.Read an interesting article on garden science?
Add a note to the Science page.Want to talk about your awesome garden project?
Contribute a blog post.
(Email sarah@thesharps.us and ask for blog posting permissions for your username first).Just want to see what we're up to?
Follow GardenGeekery on twitter or Identica, or become a fan on Facebook