Plants

A small, self-hosted plant watering and feeding tracker. One Python service in Docker gives you:

• A phone app (installable PWA). It shows today's checklist grouped by room in your watering-route order.
  • Tick each plant as you go, or tick a whole room at once.
  • "Soil still damp" pushes that plant's next check back by about a third of its interval.
  • Each plant has a page with its photo history, care notes, log and settings.
• Smart schedules. Summer and winter intervals blend by month. Pot size and light are optional nudges.
  • Outdoor plants open to the sky get credit for rain and are held back when rain or frost is forecast. Weather comes from Open-Meteo, so no key is needed.
  • Feeding happens only in its season.
• Claude as the gardener (MCP). Connect Claude to http://127.0.0.1:8772/mcp and say "I got a Monstera for the kitchen". Claude works out the schedule for your climate, logs care, snoozes plants and attaches photos.
• AI photo check-ups (optional). worker/photo_worker.py sends each new photo to Claude Code (claude -p, on your own subscription) for a short verdict and suggestions, comparing it with the previous photo.
  • A suggestion can carry a one-tap change: a new interval, the pot, the light, a dated reminder such as "Repot in March", or moving the plant to the graveyard.
  • Nothing changes until you tap it.
• Home Assistant (optional).
  • A sensor.plants_due sensor.
  • A morning phone notification with a labelled picture of every plant that's due, and All done / Tomorrow / List buttons. The buttons come back over HA's websocket, so no automation is needed.

Run it

cp .env.example .env      # set your location; HA settings are optional
docker compose up -d --build
docker exec plants python seed.py   # optional example rooms and plants

Open http://localhost:8772. To use it on your phone, put a reverse proxy with HTTPS in front of it and keep it on your LAN or VPN, because there is no login. Don't proxy /mcp.

Add the MCP to Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http plants http://127.0.0.1:8772/mcp

Photo worker (optional, runs on the host where claude is logged in): python worker/photo_worker.py. Use --once to test it.

Tests: docker exec plants python /app/tests/test_schedule.py (and the other files in tests/).

Schedule rules (plants/schedule.py)

• Seasons: each plant has a summer and a winter watering interval in days. The interval slides between them by month: full summer Jun-Aug, full winter Dec-Feb. These are Irish/UK seasons, so adjust schedule.py if you're elsewhere.
• Rain: outdoor plants open to the sky get a rain event for any day with 4mm or more of rain.
• No winter watering: if water_winter is empty, rain covers winter and there are no reminders from Nov to Feb.
• Outdoor holds: outdoor plants are held when 4mm or more of rain is due in the next 24h, or when the night drops to 1°C or below.
• Feeding: only between feed_from and feed_to. The first feed of each season is due at the season's start.

Data (plants.db and photos) lives in ./data. Back that folder up.