Toado

Project intro

Toado is a small garden helper built for one real garden: a farm in Varmland, Sweden, with fruit trees, bushes, beds and a greenhouse. Each morning it shows one card with a few jobs for today, chosen from the season, the weather and what the gardener has already done — open the greenhouse on a warm day, cover things on a frosty night, water something not watered for a while, harvest apples and pears while they are still firm. The facts come first from plain TypeScript rules that can be tested (greenhouse open/close, frost tolerance per plant and pot, watering intervals, seasonal care months); Gemma 4, running locally through Ollama, then picks a handful of jobs from that rule-produced list, groups them and words them in plain language, but cannot add a job of its own. You can also ask questions with a photo — for example, photographing a leaf with reddish-brown spots and getting an answer that says what it can see, how sure it is, and what to check outside. The app keeps a log of what was watered, pruned and harvested, and reads that log back when planning the next day. It has care information for 40 common garden plants built in, and a demo garden button on the first screen. Disclosure, as the author states: there is no hosted version to click through — Toado runs on the author's own computer and is used on a phone through Tailscale — so this draft uses the verified-live GitHub repository as demoUrl, and users run it locally with Ollama. A question with a photo takes around 25 seconds for the first answer, and Gemma can be wrong (the author caught it once suggesting composting leaves with apple scab), which is why the important facts come from the rules, not the model.