The Growstuff Project

Originally published at Growstuff Blog. You can comment here or there.

There’s nothing quite as arbitrary as declaring January 1st to be the start of the year. Those of us who grow food know that the seasons shift and vary: long or short, hot or cold, wet or dry, according to far more complex systems than a number on a calendar.

Still, for our northern hemisphere friends, the Gregorian calendar’s new year does mark a time of planning and dreaming about 2015’s garden. I’m seeing more and more people talking about seed catalogs and what they want to plant when the weather warms up. Here in the temperate southern latitudes, our summer is in full swing, with tomatoes and zucchini the most popular topics of veggie-gardener conversation.

Are you feeling inspired by seed catalogs? Overwhelmed by zucchini? Use Growstuff to track what you’re growing and harvesting this year.

We have big plans for 2015.

We’re building a platform to share free food-growing information, helping people all round the world learn skills, become more self-sufficient, more resilient in the face of environmental and economic challenges, and build healthier families and communities.

In 2015 we want to reach thousands more people, collect planting and harvest data from growers on every continent, offer useful growing advice to new and experienced growers alike, foster a collaborative and sharing community, and build an ecosystem of apps and services based on Growstuff’s data.

You can be a part of it.

There are dozens of ways to get involved. Here are just a few ideas:

• Research crops to add to our database
• Run a local Growstuff meetup in your area
• Test our website’s latest features
• Help us tell Growstuff’s story and share it with your network
• Let us know your great ideas for Growstuff’s future

Come join us and help make it happen!

Upcoming Growstuff events

As usual our Melbourne coding contingent are having regular get-togethers to build new Growstuff features. You can join us at:

• Ruby hack night — 2nd Tuesday of the month at Inspire9 in Richmond. The next one will be Tuesday March 10th.
• Hackstuff — last Sunday of the month. This is usually at Library at the Dock, Docklands, but in January we’ll be visiting Ballarat for some veggie garden tours and a change of scenery.
• February 4th we will be at Melbourne’s Open Knowledge Workshop at Thoughtworks in the CBD.

We’ve found in-person events to be one of the best ways to meet people who care about good food, open source software, and bringing the two together. If you’d like to hold a local Growstuff event (either a coding session, or a social get together), let us know!

Information about all upcoming events can be found on our Growstuff events page.

What’s new on the tech front

A quick update on some of our recent progress on the tech side:

• A big change to our process: we’ve moved to Github issues to track features, bugs, and other technical work we want to do. This integrates better with our coding practices, and is easier for new people to participate in, than our previous issue tracker.
• Taylor has led a fantastic effort to upgrade our software to Rails 4, which will lead on to many future improvements.
• Yoong, Alex and Miles have been working on social features, including following other members, improvements to posts and discussions, and better notifications. We’ve also been working on some design for private accounts, and figuring out all the implications of that.
• We have some massive uploads of new crops staged and ready to go, thanks to the folks who attended our London coding weekend, including Juliet, Marion, and Sam.
• Taylor and Maki made a great start on internationalising our website, to allow it to be translated into other languages.
• We’re actively working on building version 1 of our API, as a result of the crowdfunding we ran last year. Thanks to Paul for his work on the initial framework for this!
• Heaps of other features and bugfixes, too many too enumerate here, but a shoutout to our new code contributors Emma, Kevin, Justin, and Wendy all of whom will have code included in our next release.

Thanks everyone for all your work!

If you’d like to keep up with Growstuff between newsletters, check out the Growstuff blog or follow us on Twitter or Facebook.