Field guide
How Solarpunk Garden Steward makes recommendations
Solarpunk Garden Steward combines a broad climate baseline with the crops and conditions you report. The result is a useful planning aid—not a live weather service or a substitute for local horticultural advice.
Open planner1. Climate baseline
A city selection maps to a built-in USDA hardiness zone. The app then groups zones into five broad climate bands to choose crop planting windows. Hardiness zones describe average annual extreme minimum temperature; they do not predict an exact first or last frost date.
2. Crop reference data
Each crop record includes planting windows, maturity ranges, watering needs, companion relationships, common pests, succession notes, and harvest cues. The planner uses these records to build calendars, alerts, and crop guides.
3. Advice that adapts
Daily tasks and harvest estimates also consider growing method, experience level, equipment such as drip irrigation or shade cloth, and the soil quality, pest pressure, and growth vigor you report for each crop.
4. Privacy and limits
Garden profiles, crop conditions, task history, mapped commons nodes, local exchanges, and relay packets stay in browser storage on your device unless you deliberately copy or carry them elsewhere. The app does not connect to radio hardware. Recommendations are estimates. Confirm unusual weather, microclimates, frost warnings, and local planting dates with your forecast and county Extension office.
5. Bounded agent loop
The Garden Steward follows an observable cycle: read local context, sequence a short mission queue, open a permitted tool, wait for human confirmation, and add the result to local history. It cannot change the physical garden, contact people, or send your profile to a cloud service. Regeneration entries and agent cycles remain reversible and auditable.
Primary references
- USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map for zone definitions and lookup.
- USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture Extension network for finding local, research-based guidance.
- NOAA U.S. Climate Normals for historical local climate context.
About this field guide
A local-first garden agent and neighborhood commons planner for food, water, tools, repair, clean energy, and resilient communication. Your profile and garden history stay on this device.