Grows & plants

Grow Core has two cooperating layers. The environment layer is physical: a tent, its sensors and fans, and the control loop that holds a climate target (see Architecture). The cultivation layer sits beside it and tracks what you are growing — independent of any single tent, and crop-neutral so it works for cannabis, tomatoes, basil, or anything else.

Grows

A grow is one cultivation run: a species, an optional cultivar, and a configurable stage sequence. Grows have a lifecycle — active, completed, archived — and progress through their stages over time.

An environment can nominate one grow as its control grow. That grow’s current stage supplies automation presets — most importantly the photoperiod (daily light hours) — so moving a grow from vegetative to flowering can change the light schedule without touching the environment config.

Stages are defaults you start from, not fixed phases. Every crop family ships an editable stage preset (e.g. cannabis: seedling → vegetative → flowering → flush → drying → cure), and any grow can define its own ordered stages.

Plants

A grow contains plants. Each plant is tracked one of two ways:

• Individual — a single plant followed on its own.
• Group — a tray, bed, or batch counted by quantity.

Plants carry a lifecycle status (active, harvested, removed, archived) and a placement history: each move between locations is recorded, so you can see where a plant lived over the run. Plants can be moved, repotted, harvested, or removed, and each action is part of the record.

Species & cultivars

A species is a crop definition shipped as YAML in the growrig-catalog content catalog (species/<id>/species.yaml). The full set is browsable at Supported species. It declares:

• the default stage sequence and each stage’s default light hours;
• cultivar attributes — the species-specific fields a variety carries (cannabis, for example, declares genetics, flowering type, THC, CBD);
• care actions — which manual actions apply to this crop and what each action’s form captures.

A cultivar is a user-defined strain or variety within a species. Beyond the common fields (name, breeder, description, optional image) it carries values for its species’ declared attributes. Those extras live in a generic map, so adding a field to a species’ YAML needs no code change — the cultivar form renders the fields dynamically. This is the same data-driven pattern GrowRig uses for inventory columns and device capabilities.

The care journal

Care is the grow’s manual-action log: watering, feeding, inspecting, training, trimming, transplanting, treating, flushing, and harvesting. Which actions are available — and what each one’s form captures — comes from the grow’s species, so the journal only ever offers relevant actions.

A care action is recorded as a session: one event targeting one or more plants. “Mixed 5 L and fed all four plants” is logged once, while still noting what each plant received. Every entry is timestamped and attributed to a source (manual today; an automation source is reserved for irrigation/dosing equipment on the roadmap).

Feeding recipes

Feeding is watering with nutrients. Both are ordinary care events (water / feed) that differ only in the solution fields they set (recipe, pH, EC, runoff).

A feeding recipe is a nutrient schedule: an ordered set of products dosed across an ordered set of phases, each phase spanning one or more weeks. Recipes are deliberately flexible so they can model any brand’s chart. They come from two places that share one shape and one API:

• Built-in templates — read-only YAML under species/<id>/feedings.yaml (for example, a BioBizz schedule for cannabis). These seed a new recipe.
• User recipes — created in the app and stored on disk, fully editable.

Recipe products line up with the supported products catalog, so a schedule that calls for Bio·Grow and Bio·Bloom points at the same definitions you stock in inventory.

How it fits together

Species (YAML) ── defines ──> stages · cultivar attributes · care actions · feeding templates
      │
Cultivar ─ a variety of a species, with attribute values
      │
Grow ─ a run: species + cultivar + stage sequence  ──(control grow)──> Environment photoperiod
      │
Plants ─ individual or group units, with placement history
      │
Care journal ─ timestamped water/feed/inspect/… sessions, per plant

The cultivation layer is deliberately separate from the physical control loop: you can run the climate automation with no grow at all, or track a grow’s plants and care with no automation. Nominating a control grow is what links the two.