GardenGuru

Add your plant
List view
Chatbot
Community: share with friends
Garden view

Inspiration

When I moved out, my childhood bedroom was transformed into a greenhouse. My dad got sooo into gardening that he basically stopped texting me back. That’s when I had the idea: what if I built a gamified gardening app to get his attention?

What started as a joke turned into a real app, and something genuinely helpful for plant lovers and plant forgetters alike.

What it does

GardenGuru is a gamified plant care app that helps users:

Track their plants with watering and fertilising reminders
Earn XP and level up as they care for their garden
Customise their layout with drag-and-drop plant views and backgrounds
Use plant image recognition to identify new plants
Chat with a garden assistant for tips and encouragement
Join a cosy plant-loving community and share garden progress with friends

It's designed to make plant care simple, playful, and rewarding. 🌱

How we built it

I actually documented the whole thing on my YouTube channel here.

But basically:

Brainstorming with Gemini
Give Gemini prompt to Stitch to generate a quick mockup
Copy Stitch frames into Figma to personalise it
Give screenshot of Figma frames to Bolt + enhanced prompt with Gemini
First basic version with basic functionalities in Bolt
Generate assets with ChatGPT and then edit in Photoshop
Export Bolt code and add in the assets in VS Code
Tweak little things here and there with Copilot or copy-pasting from Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini
Import back into Bolt to integrate Supabase
Deploy on a website for now to get first user feedback

Challenges we ran into

Maintaining a balance between "game-like" and "app-like" design was harder than expected. It was tough not to get carried away and add all the features I could think of!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building something completely from scratch and having complete strangers from the internet try it out and give feedback, definitely wasn't expected! Did I get my dad's attention back? Not really. But it inspired him to create his own apps with Bolt, so now instead of gardenings he's on his computer the whole day. Don't know which one is better tbh.

What we learned

TypeScript! I'm a data scientist at my day job and I've always wanted to learn frontend coding, but it always seemed so intimidating. All the curly brackets and semi colons... Whereas with Bolt you get functioning code in just a few minutes and can work from here. And it doesn't seem as terrifying anymore. I had such a blast making this!

Supabase too. All the process of connecting it to a database from scratch and then deploying it.... If I didn't have Bolt holding my hand through it the entire time, I wouldn't have had the courage to do this.

What's next for GardenGuru

Make it into an actual app! Add proper authentiction, paid features, bring it to the app store. Can't wait to see what's next, but with the reviews I've received so far, I'm super optimistic!