GoTo Garden is a mobile app connecting home gardeners with neighbors itching to buy their excess fruit and veggies. Yum!

Raison d'etre

Home gardeners (urban agriculturalists, if you prefer) often grow too much. "Too much" means they grow more vegetables or fruit than they can eat, give away, can or freeze. A couple of years ago a neighbor from down the street rang our doorbell carrying grocery bags full of lettuce. She was going door to door with her excess. She, like me, cringed to think of it ending up in the compost heap.

The problem my particular neighbor had is not unique among gardeners. Today, there is not much of an avenue for gardeners who want to sell their excess. If we could formalize a method for the buying and selling of home grown produce between the gardeners and their neighbors, we would have something big. Something that would further bolster the food revolution. Something that would bring locals together in the effort to eat healthy, tasty, real food.

GoTo Garden aims to do just that: give gardeners an avenue for selling their excess (and everyone else access to this home grown goodness.)

Imagine if home gardeners across the country stepped up production and started to feed not only their own families, but folks in their neighborhood as well. GoTo Garden could help usher in the concept of "micro-local."

How does it work?

GoTo Garden is a mobile app connecting two groups of people: home gardeners with excess produce for sale + neighbors who relish homegrown produce enough to pay good money for it.

Once a gardener signs up with GoTo Garden, his or her garden will become searchable and locatable. GoTo Garden shows which veggies are for sale, which day(s) and hours you can stop by, and how much things cost.

If you are a home gardener, your backyard will temporarily become something of an old fashioned vegetable stand. Using GoTo Garden, you just share a little info about your gardens such as its locations, what kinds of fruits and veggies are available, photos and when you are "open" for business, say, every Tuesday afternoon between 4 and 7pm.

If you are on the buying end you can search and locate gardens in your neighborhood (or within reasonable driving distance) that will sell to you, using GoTo Garden. You might search for gardens within a two mile radius from their current location, or gardens with napa cabbage, or when they are "open."

Feature Set

Here are some of GoTo Garden's features:

If you are buying fruits and veggies you can:

• search for gardens by proximity to you
• search for gardens by the types of vegetables they sell
• set up reminders for visiting a garden
• create a list of gardens you want to visit
• peruse a list of veggies for sale along with other info about the garden
• get driving/walking directions to each garden
• receive notifications about new gardens in your area that have joined GoTo Garden

If you are selling fruits and veggies you can:

• advertise what veggies you are selling
• set up specific times that produce is for sale (for instance from 4 to 6 every Thursday night)
• post photos
• post updates

How will Home Gardeners benefit?

Home gardeners can often feed more than just their family and friends. I know this from chatting with gardeners over the years and from personal experience as a gardener. Many grow enough to feed several if not dozens of others.

Many would welcome the opportunity to find good homes for their excess and make some (often much needed) $$ off of the transaction. There are not any truly viable options for home gardeners to sell a bit of excess produce, today.

Less tangible benefits include the chance to meet other gardeners who use GoTo Garden as a consumer as well. For instance, lets say a newbie gardener uses GoTo Garden to supplement his or her ailing cucumber crop. He or she might end up learning a few tips about growing cucumbers in their area, whilst in the process of buying them from a seasoned gardener a mile or two away.

How will fruit and vegetable eaters benefit?

An untold number of other folks are itching to cook with homegrown tomatoes, corn, arugula, etc. fresh picked. Who isn't tickled when a neighbor stops by with a bag of home grown produce? I daresay anyone with taste buds.

Anyone would be able to locate gardeners all around them that have produce for sale. Imagine traveling a few miles or less to buy food grown on site.

How will the sustainable agriculture / local foods / urban agriculture movement benefit?

I believe the home gardener will play the starring role in the next chapter of the food revolution, much as the small farmer with CSA shares and booths at farmers markets has been the star of this most recent chapter. The home gardener - or urban agriculturalist if you prefer - is an increasingly powerful force. Home gardeners = "micro-local."

With GoTo Garden, home gardeners and the folks buying will develop a rapport with one another after a few visits. Such connections are vital for the long-term success of the sustainable and local food movements.

Another fringe benefit is that it localizes food production even more than a farmers market can. You may have heard that it is good for the environment and for your health to eat food grown locally. Food is generally considered "local" if it is gotten within a hundred or several hundred mile radius. That's pretty good but still not as good as buying from your neighbor a few blocks away.

While it is true that the urban agriculture movement promotes the importance of growing your own it could go a whole lot deeper: I envision communities where home gardeners feed their neighbors as well as their own family and friends. Thereby extending the reach of locally grown produce beyond that of the small farmers and farmers markets. Talk about real food security, and micro-local agriculture!

Together we can bolster the sustainable agriculture/urban agriculture/local foods movement. Through innovation, and just saying "no" to Big Ag, we can bring ever more *real* food to our families' dinner tables and friends' barbeques. GoTo Garden is one more avenue for tasty healthy food to find people hungry for the real deal.

What's its platform?

Android, initially. I happen to be an android developer, so its my starting place. The web and iOS versions will be next. If I raise substantially more than my target, I will create a web and an iOS version at the same time. Believe me, I want this to be in as many hands as possible.

Open source

I intend to open source the framework behind the mobile app. Perhaps this kind of generic application (that connects people who produce something  within a particular niche with people who would buy it locally) might be useful to others. I might call it the "Community Framework."

What stage is the project at currently?

The prototyping/mock-ups/feature-set/dreaming stage.

Where is the money going?

If I were independently wealthy, I would build this for free, out of love for spreading the accessibility of good food. I am not. I have to work for a living :( I figure this project will take me 680 hours to do it right (including development, maintenance, building community, responding to inquiries/comments/etc.) Please understand that that I will only receive 70 to 80% of the the $10,000 provided it gets funded (Kickstarter fees and Amazon fees are 10% off the top; and I another percentage of the money goes to pay for tee shirts, stickers and shipping.) So I will be bringing in about $11/hr to build it. Its not too terribly outrageous, I don't think.

You are my client. The more you pay me to build this freely downloadable GoTo Garden mobile app, the better it will be and the faster it will get done.

This will be my focus. I intend to build an app with real quality and usability at its core. With your help, this project will receive the kind of dedicated attention and love it needs to turn out well.

Remember, a lot of $1 donations add up! Thanks for anything you can share.

My background

I have extensive experience as a software and database developer (over fifteen years worth.) I have built android applications involving every aspect that GoTo Garden will require: GPS mapping/navigation, system notifications, syncing between local and remote cloud databases, and so on.

I am also an avid home gardener/urban agriculturalist/sustainable agriculturalist/foodie/mother of two young children -- all of which make me passionate about local, yummy, sustainably grown, chemical free food.