My first attempt at growing vegetables. 🥗 As an engineer I have never been anything but technical. As a test to myself I wanted to combine technology with gardening. So me and ChatGPT have started the 5 gal bucket garden challenge. I planted black seeded Simpson lettuce next to chives, which ChatGPT recommended for the southern USA where I live. ChatGPT even setup a watering and monitoring schedule for me and set all my alarms and reminders. Here we go. I’m so excited. This is day 5 so hoping for sprouts in the next week or so.
by N1ghtS7alker
13 Comments
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Just take care not to over/under water. AI doesn’t know the properties of your soil, temperature, humidity, light, wind.. and any other factors.
Personally I would try to learn from a person and not from some 1’s and 0’s. .. but however you learn just have fun.
So you’ve made what is unfortunately an extremely common mistake for novice container gardeners. You don’t have enough soil. It should be up to the very top of the bucket. It shouldn’t really matter too much because the things you’re growing have shallow roots, but it does somewhat limit the light that reaches the plants, especially when they’re small.
Edit to add: don’t trust chatgpt for a watering schedule. A silly program has no idea when your plant needs water because there are just too many variables. If it’s hot and dry your plant will take up a lot of water. If it’s hot and humid, it might not need so much. Gardening is as much an art as a science. You’ve got to learn to feel the soil and observe what the plants are telling you because they’ll let you know when they need water. It is an extremely fun and rewarding hobby so just trying to give you a little advice so you don’t fail and get turned off. I’ve been gardening my entire life and even after 30+ years I still screw things up. Learning what *not* to do is part of the fun!
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Most obvious question.. you drilled drainage holes in those buckets, right?
ChatGPT is a chatbot. It’s not giving you fact-based answers; it’s generating language. Â
Just another soil tip, you don’t have to wait for it to settle. When I fill my pots, I push the soil down (pretty aggressively) so it’s at the level I want. Best of luck to you!
Best of luck! Like others have said it’s best to fill the soil to the top of the container but I think you’ll still have some ok results. The gardening community is generally some of the kindest, good hearted, people in the world, so if you get the chance to talk to some gardeners in real life you’ll likely get some great advice and learn a whole lot more than ChatGPT will ever be able to offer.Â
Ask around at your local nurseries, garden clubs, kind neighbors with nice gardens, local facebook groups etc. Some online advice isnt applicable for your climate, so what works for a YouTuber or redditor may not work for you.
Did you drill holes in the bottom of the bucket?
Welcome to the hobby. You need to be aware that most of us care about nature and are actively against the use of AI due to the environmental harm it causes, so your “experiment” probably won’t be received very well here. Might be better suited to a tech forum or something.
You’ve made it clear in the comments that you don’t care about damaging the environment. But you might care about the fact that in its current form AI *massively sucks* at giving plant advice and you’re pretty much guaranteed to fail if you continue listening to it.
First off, the soil is way too low. The edges of the bucket will be blocking light. Second, those are horrible choices for a bucket. You could grow like maybe one head of lettuce in there. One. Not several and also chives. As the plants grow they’ll smother each other out. I can’t tell if that bucket is inside or on a porch, but if it’s inside, they’re unlikely to even sprout.
Whatever watering advice it gives you should not be trusted. *Do not follow that schedule*. A chat bot doesn’t know about the humidity, the light levels, the volume of soil, the material of the container, your soil mix, the location of the container, or any of the other multiple variables that affect watering. It’s just going to skim the internet and tell you a mashup of advice it pieced together from random reddit threads. You’d have better luck asking a Ouija board for a watering schedule.
Gardening is very accessible for anyone who wants to learn. Just try a book. Or any of the billions of articles about planting seeds. Or ask a forum for suggestions. Or join a local gardening group. Anything but the chat bot.
Chives will chive btw. I would fill the pit up more though.
Very interested in seeing the progress. You can spam me with progress photos anytime. I love it!
Good luck to you – I grow many things in buckets because they are relatively cheap, uniform in size, and I can tier them in a small space. You can successfully growna whole host of various produce in buckets. Don’t be afraid to experiment!