When I moved out of the city, one of the biggest benefits of having a yard was the ability to grow a real garden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had tried growing blueberries on a city balcony, with limited success. But after moving to New Hampshire and being greeted by a neighbor\u2019s basket of fresh vegetables, it became clear that a decent garden could feed us for much of the summer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At least in theory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the next two years, I tried organically growing cantaloupe, watermelon, Brussels sprouts, cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, herbs, corn, blueberries, and fruit trees. Some of it worked. A lot didn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One year we had more cucumbers than we could eat. The next year, cucumber beetles killed the plants before August. One fall, I had tomato plants full of fruit, but the tomatoes stayed green and failed to ripen. The corn was \u201cknee high by the Fourth of July,\u201d then stalled and produced tough inedible ears. A couple of giant green caterpillars defoliated much of a young apple tree. The plums developed shot hole fungus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The problem was not effort. The problem was that each crop was its own agronomic systems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each crop had its own seed and harvest timing, pests, soil preferences, pruning needs, watering sensitivity, and failure modes. Cucumber beetles required one playbook. Tomatoes required another. Fruit trees were a different game entirely. Trying to learn a dozen crops at once meant I had a dozens of unknown unknowns, and was always reactionary. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then, during winter of 2022-2023 ChatGPT was launched.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the garden, AI has been a game changer. Not because it magically waters plants or spreads diatomaceous earth. That might be coming in GPT-6. It helps me manage timing, context, and decisions required for each vegetable or fruit to thrive. It makes sense of messy real-world systems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here is how I have applied AI:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For best results, AI needs to be aligned to the context of your system. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the garden, that means location, USDA growing zone and frost dates, approximate soil conditions, bed locations and exposure, tools like irrigation, and of course what you are growing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The same principle applies almost anywhere you employ AI. Quality of your responses improves dramatically with context, guard rails, and reference material to tune the output of the model. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Otherwise, it’s fish emulsion in, compost out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To best keep background information and memory organized, I keep garden work in a dedicated AI project. That allows better customization and eliminates the need to remind the model what worked and what didn’t. The project maintains a memory and context. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This can be especially useful for supporting documents. Growing guides, equipment manuals, charts, university extension articles, and landscape plans can become reference material and quickly accessed via simple prompts. This can be one of the quickest ways to get AI up to speed on a specific context. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This turns AI from a search tool to something more like an analyst with mission context, constraints, and a library to draw from. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Prompt quality is the difference between useful output and an articulate guess. This is where a little effort goes a long way – yet users tend to think of AI prompts as search engine inputs only a few words long. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A weak prompt is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n When should I plant carrots?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n A better prompt is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am in southern New Hampshire. It is April 5th. Night lows are still touching the low 30s but we are getting into the 70s during the day. I loosened the soil in my bed as it compacted over the winter. I have some compost on hand for when it is needed. Is it time to sow carrot seeds in my beds?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n That prompt gives the agent much more context: location, date, crop, soil condition, objective, and prior failure mode.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The same pattern works when asking about a business challenge or how to improve your golf swing. The more clearly the situation, constraints, decision criteria, and desired output are defined, the more useful the response becomes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Organizing the project into specific topic threads further helps narrow the context and achieve better, more focused and less erroneous responses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I use crop-specific threads to focus on the care of each plant type. Just as different products or business lines benefit from dedicated strategy reviews and institutional memory, carrots and tomatoes require different cultivation practice and results vary for different reasons. These threads can be maintained over the long term to learn from previous successes or failures while adapting to changing conditions. Details like seed-start timing, fertilizer preferences, irrigation, pest mitigation, and harvest timing are managed alongside observations and outcomes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Time-specific threads are more like recurring operations reviews. What did we accomplish last week, what are pressing needs this week, and how are we positioned versus last year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt is April 5th and I just started tomato seeds indoors. What am I forgetting?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt is April 15th. Is it too early to sow sunflower seeds?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt is May 1st. What should I be doing in the garden this week?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n This cadence has been useful to address unknown unknowns, improving timing, and to manage supply-chain items like seed trays, mulch, and compost. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Hold<\/em><\/strong>: peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash\u00a0<\/em>in ground<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0until:<\/em> None of that is exotic advice. But getting the right reminder at the right time is often the difference between a good result and another batch of green tomatoes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Do not let threads drift or drag on forever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Drifting threads lose the core context and long threads can accumulate too much detail bogging down the model. Asking about cabbage worms in your cucumber thread can cause the model to draw the wrong context. If a long thread is slowing down, it may be time to archive it. Quick queries or one-off questions deserve their own threads that can be cleaned out occasionally. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Remember, AI is just connecting the data you provide with reference material, it’s training data, and if enabled, online sources. As that web gets too wide, the signal becomes weaker. <\/p>\n\n\n\n AI has a tendency to be confidently wrong – this can be fatal to your asparagus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is particularly an issue if you lack subject-mater confidence and cannot detect a bad response. The mitigation is simple: ask for sources, specify the source quality you want, and compare key information against those sources. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For gardening, I specify university extension articles, seed company growing guides, and manufacture instructions. In many cases I request links to references inline with the response for easy verification. In other contexts, asking the model to cite patents, executive quotes, press releases, and competitors websites can help prevent AI from hallucinating competitive threats. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Gardening has become a useful test case for the application of AI because the feedback loop is real and apparent and quick. If the analysis is wrong, the plants wilt, bolt, rot, stall, or get eaten. And if all fails, I can still shop at the farmers market. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The real harvest has been refining how I use AI tools. <\/p>\n\n\n\n AI’s value is not in drafting emails or blogs. It is organizing abundant and disparate information, recognizing context, highlighting unknowns, and extracting useful analysis. Applied with structure and sourcing discipline, it reduces uncertainty and improves the pace and quality of decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even for carrots.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I moved out of the city, one of the biggest benefits of having a yard was the ability to grow a real garden. I had tried growing blueberries on a city balcony, with limited success. But after moving to New Hampshire and being greeted … Continue readingWhat My Garden Taught Me About AI<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":839,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,11,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-food","category-projects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.justinmcclellan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.justinmcclellan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.justinmcclellan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.justinmcclellan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.justinmcclellan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=838"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.justinmcclellan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":840,"href":"http:\/\/www.justinmcclellan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838\/revisions\/840"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.justinmcclellan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.justinmcclellan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.justinmcclellan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.justinmcclellan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}4. Organizing Your Project<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
– soil \u2265 60\u00b0F (peppers really want 65\u00b0F+)<\/em>
– nights consistently \u2265 50\u00b0F<\/em>
Your pepper germination issues track with temp; peppers need ~80\u201385\u00b0F soil. If trays are cooler, they stall.<\/em>
Action now<\/em><\/strong>
– Keep hardening off tomatoes<\/em>
– Use the tunnel strategically for\u00a0<\/em>soil warming<\/em><\/strong>, not just frost protection<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n5. Keep Context Clean<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
6. Validate Answers<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The Orchard View<\/h3>\n\n\n\n