Garden Guide Generator

Thu, Jun 15, 2023

With the release of the new GPT-4 models that support “function calls” I decided it was time that we actually produce something of use. We were inspired by this post that used the new API features to draft up a recipe application.

We have recently been really focused on our container garden, so doing something related to that seemed like the best idea to start with.

When we started our garden this year we took effort to generate an Excel spreadsheet that laid out all of the plants next to each other and overlaid their sowing and harvest months. It actually took quite a lot of work to get our custom little document together. It got us to thinking that maybe we could harness AI/LLMs to generate garden guides.

So we did! We just released a beta¹ version of our Garden Guide Generator which can be found on Github, here.

To use the application, you need an OpenAI API key and have the OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable set in your shell. After that, install the requirements and run the program like so:

python garden_planner.py 8b broccoli,spinach,thyme

The above will generate a guide for zone 8b for broccoli, spinach, and thyme. It will save both a PDF and an HTML file.

We may consider doing a batch download of this data and making a small website where people can make their own guides. We would probably not let that site call GPT-4, however.

Hope to see more gardens soon!