Goals

The overall goals of the app are to enable planning:

  1. vital growth of delicious edible crops, while
  2. providing a diverse and functioning ecosystem, and
  3. creating outdoor living spaces for both animals & humans.

To achieve these goals the app provides, e.g.:

  • visual indications for permaculture:
    1. what makes sense according to known and easily measurable natural constraints
    2. is practical for the gardener
    3. enhances diversity and supports the ecosystem
  • suggestions for:
    • what is seasonal
    • increasing diversity

Non-functional Goals

  1. aesthetic UI that is fun to use
  2. low barriers for collaboration
  3. low memory consumption and good performance
  4. privacy: data should remain within Verein

Main Features

  • users have any number of maps
  • maps have any number of layers (see below)
  • some layers can have alternatives and/or can be used offline
  • users work on alternatives of layers on the same map together
  • undo/redo for changes in the map
  • copy&paste of selection including succeeding crops across maps
  • zoom
  • internationalization: English, German
  • algorithms for polyculture, considerations of natural constraints and automatic suggestions
  • Nextcloud integrations (calendar entries, Deck tasks)
  • social network features (e.g. notification that someone entered your garden)
  • privacy: no tracking, analytics, external JavaScript, fonts, etc.

Layers

In all layers --- except for base --- past, current or future entities might be intermixed. While editing any layer other layers are (transparently) displayed or hidden.

  • Base1 (import photo or site plan as base image, define borders, scale, orientation)
  • Terrain
  • Landscape1 (height&sketch of permanent structures like walls, ponds, constructions, beds)
  • Labels (allows to put text labels, e.g. names for beds)
  • Trees (taxa, stem position&height&sketch&type of forest, trees, hedge, bushes etc.)
  • Wind (more or less windy places, wind orientation)
  • Shade (more/less sun exposure vs. shade)
  • Infrastructure (outlets, wifi spots, taps, water storage tanks, irrigation systems, ...)
  • Hydrology (surface water runoff, natural reservoirs, gullies, rills, ...)
  • Soil (pH Values of topsoil, subsoil)
  • Paths (ways, fences, stepping stones)
  • Habitats (taxa, areas for (wild)life, nesting aids, heaps of stones or leaves, perches)
  • Zones (of different visitation frequency)
  • Plants1 (taxa, individual and fields of plants)
  • Warnings1
  • Photos (sharing of photo with GPS coordinates and a Nextcloud chats per photo)
  • Fertilization
  • Watering
  • Todos (creates Deck cards in Nextcloud)
  • Drawing (for anything else)

1 Essential (most used) layers: are more prominently shown than others.

Use Cases

For more details about each requirement, continue reading Use Cases (Chapter).