I’m a data scientist by profession, so probably 80% of the work was totally new to me. I built v1 using wordpress , v2 using django, and v3 I pivoted to using react and next js for frontend.
I would greatly appreciate any feedback on the site as well as any advice on how to grow it.
What's even cooler, is that they release all their data as open data¹. So you could create highly specialized listings if you want.
¹ https://www.gbif.org/publisher/da86174a-a605-43a4-a5e8-53d48...
It would also be really great to search for pollinator friendly plants (https://bluethumb.org is an excellent reference)
- usda hardiness zone - sun/shade tolerance - geographic origin - is it a nitrogen fixer - soil pH preference - wet/dry soil preference - when does it fruit?
This is a decent resource: https://permacultureplantdata.com/
Not sure if there's a way to say 'messiness factor'... some trees drop a lot of crap besides leaves.
It would be great to find native plants for your area.
(So tired of managing Garlic Mustard, Japanese Knotweed, Bittersweet and Buckthorn)
Btw, something I learned recently about house plants: In an analogous way to sneakers, there is a large subculture built around certain varieties of them. They get to be expensive, there is a network of trading, there are ones associated with high status, there are knockoffs (not joking) etc. Very interesting! This site does not appear to be about that subculture.
As the new growth appears, the genetic expression is no longer the desired type. It’s a real racket.
Like this one https://www.carnivero.com/collections/auction-items/products...
People also hike through the remotest areas to find new wild species. Very cool.
(Not sure if always but variegated->less green->less chlorophyll->harder to keep alive)
Other attributes: toxicity (when eaten or even touched), deer resistance, allelopathic potential, pollinator friendliness.
Assuming a USA buyer, you'd have to ask for their zip code, then match that to the plants, many of which would probably have to be individually coded & entered (the zip codes they are native to), a map blur across the US which would vary for each species.
The binary qualities (toxic/nontoxic) on the other hand seem easy to add.
For invasiveness: that may be a reason why not too many "Amazon for plants" websites exist. But a simple binary "flagged as invasive", like a red dot on its product page, would be a terrific addition.
Agreed!
In terms of difficulty:benefit, a binary invasive flag would get most of the way there. E.g. English Ivy, Bradford Pears, Mexican Petunia, creeping bamboo.
Buuuuut... this looks like it's mostly for house plants, for which invasiveness is less of a concern.
However, I think it should mostly generalize to outdoor plants as well.
At least in the US, you could simply add USDA hardiness zone [0], which roughly indicates the boundaries a cultivar can survive winter (freezing) and summer (heat), and is almost always listed.
I'd be shocked if there wasn't a zipcode-to-USDAH converter out there.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardiness_zone#United_States...
Upon clicking one of the plants, I see it was only American sites.
I get that this is just a hobby for the moment, but even if there was just a note somewhere, "USA only", that would have been appreciated.
It still irks me how Americans tend to treat the other 96% of the world as though we don't even exist on the same planet; that we're some sort of exotic tourist destination, or a spawn point for immigrants.
Parochialism isn't the preserve of the US although I still chuckle at being congratulated on my command of English by a shop assistant in Naples (Florida). I just thanked them rather than pointing out that I am ... actually ... English!
Naples in a nutshell. This story made my day.
(And I just spotted the pet safe tab - even better!)
Edit: could you include temperature suitability? Including plants that can or can't cope with snow, for example?
Can't you just find images, the same as you find plants? Or manually add them, or something. Maybe commission some, if you can't find anything for a certain plant.
https://www.getanyplant.com/plant/c6fb4f16ea74675f84d6085e02...
This is very cool
Things I would want:
1. Appropriate growing zone (ideally USDA hardiness zone low and high limit for Americans; others for other countries)
2. Filter by produces food
3. Needs pollinating partner; if so, what's appropriate (eg if you're looking at a Bing cherry it should tell you required and to get a Stella Ann, a Van, or a Black Tartarian; if you're looking at a Bavay's Green Gage it should tell you not required, but providing will double yield, and to get an Italian Blue Plum.)
4. Producing time-of-year
5. Water requirements (people in Arizona shouldn't grow rice)
6. Importation issues (many of these will be unavailable to a Floridian or a Californian by mail)
7. Sunlight requirements
8. Indoor appropriate
9. Container size if any
10. Soil acidity requirements
11. Filter by live plant vs seed vs whatever
12. Planting time of year
Since this is not an open source project, before I bombard you with technical questions I have to ask, are you open to discuss the structure of your app? Like about your sources, images, etc?
Few of my queries you mostly answered elsewhere in your replies about images and how you get the data.
How did you determine which plants to list? Is it just a database of all the unique plants from all sources or just a general plant database?
I see each plant shows price + x stores, does that mean you are archiving the prices and not scraping real time? How are you determining the time interval for that?
How are you handling wrongly or typo listed plants from your sources?
Since you mentioned this is using next and django, what are you using shopify for?
Are you an affiliate for most of them or nothing like that so far?
Sorry I don't really have any valuable feedback apart from what everyone mentioned, Search is really slow.
And some or most external links have an extra / in their hyperlink, so at
https://www.getanyplant.com/plant/4f5952a72087bce5e5c28a72c76c7563
https://planetdesert.com//products
Cool site!
V1 - Wordpress and jupyter notebooks (2 months)
V2 - Django (7 months)
V3 - Django + React (3 months)
Having a filter for the genus is a great idea too!
The search feels a little slow, and it's somewhat finicky: if I type in "ficus ginseng" I don't see a result, apparently because the title is "Ficus 'Ginseng'" so the single quotes are needed.
But I can see myself using this site! Nice work!
Is it done via some loose matching of keywords which is not verified by hand, or is there some kind of global identification system that is used by each of the sites?
Or is it done in collaboration with the sites?
Don't have much feedback since I'm not in the USA, eagerly waiting for an international expansion to Europe :)) Good luck!
If you want to grow it, my suggestion would be to use a social model, so allow people to store information about their own garden and then share a feed of events like "I planted this!" or "This flowered!" or "This reproduced!" or "I collected seeds!" to draw people to your platform. Sharing material and the use of endemic plants should be encouraged where possible, not just outright commercialism.
The gold standard today for accessible all-species info at the global level is iNaturalist (pulls in nice maps plus taxonomy plus Wikipedia, though unfortunately does not really delineate in the map between nominal natural range and current range). Not sure how you do it now but frankly it would be somewhat superfluous to attempt to reproduce such information independently, for example by maintaining your own image database.
Other things that can draw people to a site would include seasonally appropriate gardening tips (plant or fertilise or prune X now before Y season, check Z for A/B/C pest situation, clone P now, etc.), a relevant local events feed (which opens up potential travel revenue streams such as hotels, flights, group tours, etc.), and academic and publishing news in related areas.
Many of the nurseries have problems maintaining up to date stock lists. To commercialise, it may be useful to help them do so. To motivate them to get on the platform, you could for example allow parties to sign up for future purchases of crops not yet matured but with an estimate readiness date, thereby assisting the grower with cashflow and sales pipelining.
Many science-oriented resources, such as iNaturalist, license content with creative commons licenses, but don't permit commercial applications. That prevents me from making use of many of them as part of my site. But in general my aim is also much different, so certainly don't see myself as competing. I want to help people actually obtain and enjoy the plants rather than just study them.
I think your tip about leveraging social media is excellent! I will brainstorm content that users can share out, like you describe. Probably a good starting point is a way to share your wishlist (or current collection).
Your idea about maintaining stock lists and allowing pre-purchasing of plants is really brilliant. I don't know much about the nursery space, but I will try to learn more and think about your idea and other options in the space. What you describe makes a lot of sense. I really appreciate your ideas.
It's the first mobile app I have ever written and I enjoyed the process quite a bit!
My main goal was to deliver better identification accuracy than similar apps.
However I also wanted to provide useful plant information along with the identification and naively thought that this would have had to be a solved problem - surely there would be some online DB with all plants data neatly organized (I'd be even happy to pay for it!), in particular plant care information - but alas!
Every page I open I've been going to youtube to check on videos of the plants
Honestly just checking it out briefly, it didn't seem super useful. Why is there no way to sort by your plant hardiness zone?
Any pointers or guides that can get me started on a similar project? Reading through your responses here, I understand you're using Django and React. While I have some programming knowledge, I haven't worked on web apps.
I'm a little confused though, the prices are showing in USD and not NTD, and for some reason all the stores are in some country called "The United States?" I don't live there.
;)