Community Garden Helper

Helps tell people when crops can be planted in their area and when they will be able to be harvested. Intended user is people in food deserts who do not have easy access to fresh produce.

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Inspiration

I was inspired to build this project for two reasons. First, I was inspired by issues with accessibility to fresh produce in food deserts. I know a lot of non-profit organizations have been started to help food desert communities create community gardens. I wanted to make an application to help these communities know what nutritional produce will grow best in their climate. And second, I wanted to promote community gardens for their environmental benefits such as encouraging native pollinators, and improving air and soil quality.

What it does

Community Garden Helper allows the user to input the climate zone in which they live (information about climate zones can be found here https://www.gardenate.com/zones/) and the current month of the year. It will then output the crops that can be planted in that climate zone during that month and will also tell the user when the crops can be harvested. Essentially, it is a planner for growing crops in community gardens.

How we built it

I built this program using Java. It contains 5 different classes that all work together including the GardenManager, Crop object, file reader, user interface, and the User object. I also attempted to create a website (I have very little experience with HTML, CSS, and JS) but time ran short. It is still in the GitHub Repo if you want to see the little bit I did.

Challenges we ran into

Time was definitely an issue. This was the first Hackathon I have done without a team. I spent a lot of time at the beginning researching food deserts and crops that are nutritional. This meant that I was scrambling when debugging the code and never had time to make a user interface that was nicer than a text-based one.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I haven't worked with Java at all this semester, so I am proud that I was able to remember how to use Java. I was also proud of my design process when creating the program.

What we learned

I learned that I much prefer working in a team for a Hackathon!

What's next for Community Garden Helper

In the future, I hope to add more crops as options. I also hope to make a nicer user interface and to allow the user to specify the crop they want to learn more about. Finally, I want to add information about climate zones directly on the application so that the user knows what climate zone they live in

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