I used Claude to learn to garden

Gardening is fiddly work subject to highly local weather conditions, microclimates, regional and local pest and plant disease pressures, and hyperlocal effects like shade, light and heat reflection from building materials, and water quality.

I started with one tomato plant on a concrete south-facing patio and over time gained confidence in Claude's guidance as it repeatedly succeeded as I added multiple other flower and vegetable varieties. It taught me how to perform rescue surgery on a pumpkin plant after a squash vine borer infestation. The plant has almost completed growing two sugar pumpkins in a challenging setup (containers and vertical trellis).

I grew tomato plants that I realized later (as I learned what questions to ask Claude to get the answers that I needed) should not have succeeded as robustly as they did under Claude's customized fertilizer schedule and support for too-small containers.

I rescued a half-dead gardenia from a 75% off sale rack in a hardware store parking lot, and Claude taught me exactly how to revive it. It is thriving and I have exquisitely perfumed fall blooms.

I bought a grow light to start lettuce and broccoli raab inside for fall transplant. Claude customized my setup for that based on the light's technical specifications. They are all thriving.

I used Claude to generate a hyperlocal heat. shade, and sun diagram of the patio with a slider so I can view it by day and month, based on my exact location and orientation of the patio including ambient heat from the brick wall, the height of my containers, and projected size of plants to enable me to grow plants requiring some shade and lower temps to live (my garden patio is south facing and in near total sun). That artifact also has drag and drop container elements so I could tweak the locations (it is a 12x15 patio requiring a lot of optimization to make best use of it).

As I became more confident and came to really love the physical labor involved, I expanded into advance planning for next year as that requires specific prep tasks in fall and winter, and extensive discussion of best varieties to grow in my specific context. Claude was able to support this process much more efficiently than I'd have been able to do with solo research alone (I do always check his output with review).

I used Claude to create another artifact that is an interactive calendar and task manager by month and week for putting the garden to bed in November, starting native perennials that require winter dormancy to flower in spring, and prompt seedling sowing in the correct week to ensure transplantation on time for each plant's required grow time and temperature constraints.

Over the course of the last three months I have given Claude a range of instructions to qualitatively improve answers and minimize the amount of back and forth challenges and reconsideration required to zero in on a plan. I have learned a lot about how to frame and build my own inquiries/prompts.

I have learned a tremendous amount about gardening from this process, with great yields (literally).

It would have taken me several years of trial and error and learning piecemeal from books and individual humans to get to a similar level of success in such a short time.

What I enjoyed most about this process was using Claude to more fully understand and interact with living physical objects. I frequently uploaded photos to him asking to identify a pest or plant damage and respond appropriately to it (saving many plants and extending harvest time). I uploaded photos of plants in various stages of growth to ask what I was seeing and what it meant (for example, a yellowing femae pumpkin blossom that Claude informed me was being thrown by the heat - he always peeks at the weather conditions on instruction).

Claude walked me through other concerning observations with curative actions using his photo analysis. If he couldn't be specific, he gave a range of possibilities.