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Case Study: National Garden Platform

GardenBuddy.au.
A garden management
app built on WordPress.

Not a calculator page. A full vegetable garden management platform I built as a custom WordPress plugin: climate zones by postcode covering all of Australia, live pest pressure from my weather data, harvest logging, ROI reports against Coles and Woolworths prices, and a weekly Gardener Digest email.

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AU
National Coverage
6
Custom Plugins
4
Live Data Sources
v2.0
Plugin Version

Overview

From calculators to a garden management app

The first version of GardenBuddy was a set of gardening calculators I ran on the dayboro.au domain. Useful, but limited to one postcode and one set of conditions. So I rebuilt it as a standalone national platform. A gardener anywhere in Australia enters their postcode and gets advice calibrated to their actual climate zone and what's happening locally right now.

The core plugin, "Buddy the Sprout", handles everything a member does: climate zone detection from postcode, garden bed setup, plant tracking from seed to harvest, pest monitoring, watering records, harvest logging, ROI calculations, and automated email recommendations. It pulls live weather data from my weather API and supermarket price data from a separate scraper I wrote that tracks Coles, Woolworths, Aldi, and IGA prices.

"The question I built it to answer: is it cheaper to grow this myself, given my local conditions, than to buy it at Coles? The answer changes depending on where you live, what you grow, and what the shops are charging this week."

WordPress Custom Plugin PMPro Membership our weather API Price Scraper Email Reports Climate Zone DB
GardenBuddy.au garden management platform

How It Works

From postcode to planting advice in three steps

1
Enter your postcode
The platform looks up the climate zone for that postcode from a national database. Australia has eight climate zones. Subtropical SE Queensland is zone 2, temperate Melbourne is zone 6, and so on. Every piece of planting advice, every pest risk threshold, and every growing guide is then filtered to match your zone.
2
Set up your garden beds
Add one or more garden beds with dimensions, soil type, and sun exposure. Then add plants to each bed: the variety, planting date, and how many seeds or seedlings went in. From that point, the platform tracks growth stages automatically from growing degree day data it pulls off the weather API. You don't update anything by hand.
3
Get live recommendations
Current temperature and humidity from my weather API feed the pest pressure model. If conditions favour aphids or fungal disease for your zone, you get an alert. The "Plant Now" panel shows what's in season for your postcode this month. The weekly Gardener Digest email summarises conditions, upcoming plant tasks, and current supermarket prices for what you are growing.
4
Log your harvests
Every harvest gets logged: the vegetable, the weight in kilos, and the date. The platform calculates your ROI: what you grew versus what you'd have paid at the supermarket for the same quantity. The price comparison uses the live scraped price data, not a fixed number.

What the platform tracks

  • 🌱
    Garden beds and plants

    Add beds, add plants per bed, track planting dates, growth stages, expected harvest windows.

  • 🌿
    Pest and treatment records

    Log pest sightings and treatments applied. Checked against live pest pressure alerts.

  • 💧
    Watering, fertilising, mulching

    Record maintenance events per bed. The platform tracks when each bed was last watered and flags overdue tasks.

  • ⚖️
    Harvest history and ROI

    Every kilo logged. ROI calculated monthly against current Coles/Woolworths/Aldi/IGA average prices.

Live Data

Four live data sources, all integrated

Static gardening advice is what most apps give you. I connected GardenBuddy to live data so the advice reflects what's happening now: current weather, current pest conditions, current supermarket prices.

🌦️

Weather data from our weather API

Current temperature, humidity, rainfall, and evapotranspiration from my Lyndhurst Hill weather station. The pest pressure model and the watering schedule calculator read from this API in real time. Members outside Dayboro get BOM sourced conditions for their postcode through the same API layer.

🛒

Supermarket price scraper

A separate gardenbuddy-prices plugin I wrote scrapes current vegetable prices from Coles, Woolworths, Aldi, and IGA at regular intervals. The ROI calculator uses these live prices, not fixed averages. If zucchini drops to $1.50/kg at Coles, the ROI on growing it drops with it.

🐛

Pest pressure model

The gardenbuddy-pests plugin maintains a model of pest activity thresholds by climate zone. Current temperature and humidity from the weather API feed into the model. If conditions are in the danger range for aphids, fungal disease, or caterpillar activity in zone 2, members in that zone get an alert.

🗓️

Planting calendar by postcode

The growzone-landing-pages plugin generates planting guides per climate zone. Enter a postcode, get a "what to plant this month" recommendation calibrated to the eight Australian climate zones, not just my own subtropical corner of SE Queensland.

📧

Weekly Gardener Digest

Built on the same dayboro-email-reports plugin engine I use on dayboro.au. The weekly digest covers current pest pressure, plant tasks due this week, upcoming weather, and supermarket prices for the vegetables the member is growing. It's personalised per member from their garden bed contents.

🧑‍🌾

Demo garden

A fully populated example garden showing every feature: beds, plants at different growth stages, past harvest records, pest alerts, and an ROI report. New users can explore the demo garden without signing up, so they see exactly what the platform does before they commit.

Version 2: what changed

Version 1 was a set of static calculators using weather data files from dayboro.au. It worked for Dayboro but not for anyone on a different postcode. Version 2 was a full (re)-build: a national climate zone database, a weather API layer that can serve conditions for any Australian postcode, and a proper user account system with garden bed management. The plugin version number (v2.0.6) reflects this. It isn't an incremental update, it's a different product.

Under the Hood

Six custom plugins, one platform

I built the platform entirely on WordPress with custom plugins. No SaaS garden service behind it, no app framework from someone else. Every piece of it is code I wrote and own. There's no licence fee sitting under it that isn't mine.

garden-buddy (core)

The main plugin, "Buddy the Sprout" v2.0.6. Garden bed management, plant tracking, growth stage calculation, harvest logging, ROI reports, the My Garden dashboard, and everything members see and click. 20+ shortcodes covering the whole platform.

gardenbuddy-pests

Pest pressure model by climate zone. Temperature and humidity thresholds for 12 common garden pests. It reads the weather API to flag active risk conditions. Alerts appear in the My Garden dashboard and the weekly email.

gardenbuddy-prices

Supermarket price scraper. Tracks current retail prices for 40+ vegetables across Coles, Woolworths, Aldi, and IGA. Feeds the ROI calculator and the monthly price report section of the Gardener Digest.

gardenbuddy-buddy-check

A health check plugin that monitors the platform's data pipelines (weather API connectivity, price scraper freshness, cron job execution) and surfaces any failures in the WordPress admin before members notice them.

growzone-landing-pages

Generates landing pages for each of the eight Australian climate zones and for specific postcodes, tuned for organic search. "What to grow in zone 6 this month" style pages that bring gardeners to the platform.

dayboro-email-reports (shared)

The same email reports engine I run across dayboro.au. Queued sending, personalised content per subscriber, open tracking. On GardenBuddy it generates the weekly Gardener Digest with each member's own garden data.

Full technology list

WordPress 6.x PHP 8.4 MariaDB PMPro Membership Elementor Pro our weather API Redis cache Custom price scraper Australian climate zone DB Custom email queue BOM weather data DirectAdmin Google Site Kit

What we can build for you

A membership platform with live data baked in.

The GardenBuddy architecture (custom plugin, live data API, personalised email, content by postcode, PMPro membership) is a pattern I've now built twice, whilst the code stays mine to reuse on the next project. If your product involves connecting a member to live local data and giving them a personalised dashboard, this is the stack I'd use.

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