GardenBuddy.au — Case Study

Overview

More than a calculator — a garden management app

The first version of GardenBuddy was a set of gardening calculators on the dayboro.au domain. Useful, but limited to one postcode and one set of conditions. Version two is a standalone national platform where a gardener anywhere in Australia enters their postcode, and gets advice calibrated to their actual climate zone and current local conditions.

The core plugin — "Buddy the Sprout" — handles the full user journey: 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 our weather API and supermarket price data from a separate scraper that tracks Coles, Woolworths, Aldi, and IGA prices.

"The question it is built to answer: is it actually 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 currently charging."

WordPress Custom Plugin PMPro Membership our weather API Price Scraper Email Reports Climate Zone DB

GardenBuddy.au garden management platform

User Journey

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 based on growing degree day data pulled from the weather API.

3

Get live recommendations

Current temperature and humidity from our 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 is 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 would 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. Cross-referenced 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. GardenBuddy connects to live data so the advice reflects what is happening now — current weather, current pest conditions, current supermarket prices.

🌦️

our weather API — weather data

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

🛒

Supermarket price scraper

A separate gardenbuddy-prices plugin 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 accordingly.

🐛

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 climate-zone-specific planting guides. Enter a postcode, get a "what to plant this month" recommendation calibrated to the eight Australian climate zones, not just SE Queensland subtropical conditions.

📧

Weekly Gardener Digest

Built on the same dayboro-email-reports plugin engine used 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. Personalised per member based on 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, seeing exactly what the platform does before committing.

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 rewrite: a national climate zone database, a weather API layer (our weather API) 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 is not an incremental update, it is a different product.

Under the Hood

Six custom plugins, one platform

The platform is built entirely on WordPress with custom plugins. No SaaS garden management service behind it, no third-party app framework. Every piece of it is code we wrote and own.

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 the user-facing interface. 20+ shortcodes covering the entire user journey.

gardenbuddy-pests

Pest pressure model by climate zone. Temperature and humidity thresholds for 12 common garden pests. Integrates with 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, and cron job execution — and surfaces any failures in the WordPress admin before users notice them.

growzone-landing-pages

Generates SEO-optimised landing pages for each of the eight Australian climate zones and for specific postcodes. "What to grow in zone 6 this month" style pages that drive organic search traffic to the platform.

dayboro-email-reports (shared)

The same email reports engine used across dayboro.au. Queue-based sending, personalised content per subscriber, open tracking. On GardenBuddy it generates the weekly Gardener Digest with member-specific 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, postcode-based content, and PMPro membership — is a pattern we have now built twice. If your product involves connecting a member to live local data and giving them a personalised dashboard, this is the stack to use.

Talk to us about your project Custom plugin development

GardenBuddy.au.A garden managementapp built on WordPress.