I build immersive tech for a living. VR training platforms, GPS-triggered immersive walks, spatial computing tools. But the most useful thing I’ve built recently? An AI assistant called Thyme that knows every plant in my garden, tracks my seed orders, and told me to grow agretti before I even knew what agretti was.
Let me explain.
A balcony, an acre, and a lot of cardboard
I moved from a London flat to a country farmhouse less than six months ago. The flat had a balcony. The farmhouse has nearly an acre of garden. Which sounds idyllic until you realise two things: it was almost entirely lawn, and I had never gardened before in my life.
If you follow no-dig, you know what comes next: cardboard. Lots of it. I was raiding moving boxes, asking shops for their bins, pulling cardboard out of skips, anything to smother the grass so I could start building beds on top with compost. When you’re converting that much lawn into a productive garden with zero experience, you quickly become the weird bloke who gets excited about an Amazon parcel because of the box it came in.
The problem was keeping track of what I was actually growing. What I’d planted, where it was, what stage it was at, what needed doing next. A complete beginner with that much garden needed a system.
I tried the usual gardening apps. They were all... fine. Generic. “Water regularly.” Thanks. None of them could tell me what’s ready to pot on in the greenhouse versus the windowsill, when to plant out, or what to sow next. I didn’t need an encyclopaedia. I needed a gardening mate who knew my actual setup.
So I built one
The whole thing started as a weekend experiment using OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent that’s been blowing up this year. If you haven’t come across it, it’s basically a self-hosted AI assistant that lives on your own hardware, connects to your messaging apps, and remembers everything you tell it. I’ve got it running Claude under the hood, and everything stays on my machine.
I didn’t need to build a whole app from scratch. I just needed to give an already-capable agent the right context and let it become my gardening mate. It named itself Thyme. I didn’t argue.
What it knows
It knows we follow no-dig principles. If you’re not familiar, no-dig is exactly what it sounds like. You don’t turn the soil. You build it up with compost on top and let the biology do the work. It’s better for soil structure, better for worms, and frankly better for my back.
My biggest influence is Charles Dowding, who’s basically the godfather of no-dig gardening in the UK. He also happens to live around the corner from me in Somerset, which is either inspiring or intimidating depending on the day.
My wife got me onto Milli Proust’s new book How Does Your Garden Grow?, which makes sense given she’s the flower grower of the two of us. There’s a brilliant section on making natural structures like hazel pea trellises. I can’t stop building things out of hazel now.
I’ve set things up so the agent pulls from Charles’s blog articles, from Milli’s content, and from a few other gardeners I follow. So when I ask a question, I’m not getting generic AI output. I’m getting recommendations grounded in no-dig methodology from the people I actually trust. It’s like having a curated expert panel in my pocket rather than a search engine.
What it tracks
Every plant gets logged with its location: which garden bed, the greenhouse, the cold shelf, or a windowsill. It knows what’s in compost and when it went in. It keeps a running journal of what’s happened, what’s been sown, what’s been moved. Which beds are producing, where the slugs are worst, what germinated well and what didn’t take.
Because it holds all of that context, the advice it gives is properly specific: when to germinate seeds, how many seeds per module, how deep to sow, whether to multi-clump or sow individually, when something’s ready to plant out, whether to harden off on the cold shelf first.
It plans succession sowings so there’s always something coming through, and gives me a task list for the week and the month ahead. When there’s a frost coming, it warns me so I can get out and fleece everything before I lose a bed of seedlings overnight. For someone who’s learning as they go, that kind of structure is everything.
The seed tracking is where things got unexpectedly fun. Part of my motivation for growing is to eat things I can’t easily find in a supermarket, and Thyme has run with that idea. It knows which organic suppliers I use, and rather than telling me to “try a heritage tomato,” it recommends specific open-pollinated heritage varieties from my actual suppliers. It’s been nudging me towards increasingly exotic and colourful seeds I’d never have found on my own. My garden has become this mad patchwork of varieties I never would have picked from a catalogue: rainbow kale, candy beetroot, purple peas, agretti, Asian greens, fancy shallots, wasabi rocket, crystal lemon cucumbers, padrón peppers, rat tail radish, curly peppers. I’ve become a heritage seed collector almost by accident.
How I talk to it
Day-to-day, I just message it on WhatsApp. I’ll fire off something like “what should I be doing in the garden this week?” and it comes back with
“your tomato seedlings on the windowsill are probably ready to pot on into 9cm pots. They’ve been in modules for three weeks now. Don’t put them outside yet, the overnight temps are still too low. Move them to the greenhouse next week if the forecast holds.”
Another time I asked it what to do with a gap in one of the raised beds. It suggested sowing rat tail radish, explained that the spot gets enough light and the trailing pods would fill the space nicely, and found me seeds from one of my usual suppliers. I’d never heard of rat tail radish. You grow them for the pods, not the root. Now they’re one of my favourite things in the garden.
At my desk, I’ll use Matrix instead. Same agent, same memory, different channel. Like texting a mate who happens to know everything about no-dig horticulture and never judges you for forgetting to water the beans.
My wife uses it too, through a simple web frontend I built for her. She’s not going to set up a Matrix client, and she shouldn’t have to. We’ve split the garden between us: I’m focused on the kitchen garden, she’s focused on cut flowers. She’ll ask something like “when should I take dahlia cuttings?” and get an answer based on where her tubers are, what the weather’s doing, and what Milli Proust recommends. Meanwhile I’m asking it whether my purple peas need a support frame yet. Same assistant, completely different conversations.
The freedom of not shipping
The best software is sometimes software nobody else will ever use. We’re so conditioned to think about scale, about user numbers and market fit. But my gardening assistant doesn’t need onboarding flows or payment integrations or a marketing page. It just needs to work for us, in our garden, with our plants. Because it’s personal, I can be opinionated about it. I don’t need to support every possible plant in every possible climate. I just need to support my plants in my climate. That constraint makes it better, not worse.
That’s where AI actually shines. Not as a general-purpose oracle, but as something that takes a specific, messy, personal context and makes sense of it. A good gardener visiting your plot does the same thing. They look at what you’ve got, factor in the conditions, and give you tailored advice. Thyme does that too, just filtered through no-dig philosophy and my preferred seed suppliers instead of whatever the top Google result happens to be.
It’s not perfect. It occasionally gets a bit keen, and I’ve learned to double-check anything that sounds too confident about pest identification. But as a thinking partner for a complete beginner who went from a balcony to an acre overnight? It’s been transformative.
There’s a real freedom in building something you never have to ship.
Season two
I want to add photo logging, snapping a picture of each bed every week so I can track growth visually over the seasons. Crop rotation is the other big one. As the beds mature, it should be able to tell me not to plant brassicas where I had brassicas last season, and suggest what to rotate in instead.
And Thyme might be getting a sibling. I’ve started building Roux, a kitchen assistant that knows what’s growing in the garden, what’s in my pantry, and how I actually cook. It understands my level, my style, and it adapts every recipe for our Aga. It’s already suggesting which leaf varieties to grow for a Michelin-starred salad. That’s another post.
Honestly, the best feature is the one it already has: it knows my garden.
Six months ago I didn’t know what agretti was, I’d never composted anything, and the closest I’d come to growing food was a basil plant on a windowsill in Islington. Now I’ve got raised beds full of heritage varieties I can’t even spell, a greenhouse full of seedlings, and an AI assistant that texts me on WhatsApp when my purple peas need a support frame.
I spend my working life building virtual worlds. Turns out the most useful thing I’ve ever built is a real one.
I’m Ben Huss. I build immersive tech at Immersi and Cobble, and talk to people making the future of spatial computing on The Immersive Technologist podcast. Sometimes I also grow things.