Hi Hackaday,

I built G4rden https://g4rden.com : a browser garden planner that looks like a

tiny farming game but tries to be honest about climate and soil.

Writeup / public notes: https://sirsweater.github.io/g4rden-public/

The planner side is beds, frost dates, plant fit, watering, and a pixel plant

library. The tool I keep staring at is a RimWorld-style world overlay map: you

flip layers over the planet the way colony sims flip temperature, rainfall, and

ore. Modes include hardiness zone, last/first frost, growing season length,

annual and summer rain, summer/winter highs and lows, hot days, plus soil pH,

texture, and organic carbon. Hover a cell and you get the numbers; color is just

the glanceable layer.

Under that UI are the constraints that made the project interesting:

• Local-first. Garden state lives in localStorage. Account/sync is optional.
No trackers. It has to stay useful when upstream geo APIs flake.

• No real frontend build system. ~85 plain JS/JSX files at repo root, React
vendored, custom concatenating/transpiling builder. Everything hangs off
window.*. Charming or a crime, depending who you ask.

• Backend is one Cloudflare Pages router plus D1/KV/R2. Soil and climate run a
provider chain with hard fallbacks (USDA SSURGO, national mirrors where
licensed, SoilGrids; Open-Meteo live, cached proxy, precomputed grids,
latitude heuristic). Rule I keep re-learning: never remove a fallback tier.

• Months of work went into an R2 archive of open-licensed soil and climate
rasters so the map and the planner still work when SoilGrids or Open-Meteo
have a bad week. Ireland Teagasc series, UK LandIS Soilscapes (Open Licence,
not the non-commercial UKSO stuff), CHELSA V2.1 for rain and temp (CC0;
WorldClim was CC-BY-NC-SA so we dumped it), and a long Open-Meteo harvest that
packs 0.5° frost and zone grids. Free-tier weighted quota math on the archive
API is its own boss fight.

• Licensing is a build constraint, not a badge. Every mirrored source has a
license note and provenance checks. ESDAC/LUCAS and friends got a hard no.

It's a gardening tool dressed as a Game Boy farm sim, mostly because the

skeuomorphism kept me shipping instead of designing another SaaS dashboard. The

RimWorld map habit (swap layers, read the heat map, plan around it) turned out

to be the right mental model for "should I grow this here?"

Happy to send screenshots of the planner and the overlay modes if useful. Not a

press release. Just a weird little system that kept growing teeth.