Starting a food producing garden should be easier to do successfully. Getting data related to your specific gardening conditions can be time consuming and tedious for the average person who does not have any gardening experience. In 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic, there has been an increase in food insecurities for people because of grocery supply chain fulfillment concerns. A simple yet shocking Google trends search for terms like “how to start a garden”, “food shortage”, and “food insecurity” since 2004 in the US have more than doubled in March of 2020 alone, during the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. A search for “garden apps” has also shown more than double the interest in the same time frame on average.
People want and need to grow their food to reduce their food anxieties. Having an alternative food source can also reduce national food-related supply chain disruptions caused by climate change, natural disasters, or even global pandemics.
STEMMED Gardens was created to make gardening easier by crowdsourcing scientific data and real-life gardening success and failures. We created an iOS and Android application with an Azure based backend for users to be able to plan, maintain, troubleshoot, and share those gardening experiences. New and experienced users can easily retrieve and identify plant information and gardening techniques that can be used in each stage of their personal food garden journey.