Fair’s fair: a site called Open Source Orchard should disclose its own stack.
The words. Every post starts as my real experience – field notes, photos, voice memos, and the data from our orchard database. I work with an AI assistant (Claude) that drafts from my raw material, and then I review, correct, and approve everything before it publishes. The experiences, opinions, mistakes, scores, and photographs are all genuinely ours; the AI is the drafting and editing layer that makes a one-person publication possible on homestead hours. Nothing publishes without my hands on it.
The photos. All real, all taken here on our phones. No stock photography, no AI-generated images of the property. What you see is what the place looks like, including the weeds.
The data. The orchard runs on a plant database we generate with our own Python scripts inside Obsidian – seven rows, 133 guilds, individual records per plant. Field Report scores come from that record and from what actually happened, not from catalog copy.
The money. Once a month, The Orchard Ledger publishes this site’s income, costs, and hours. Affiliate links are disclosed at the top of any post that has them, and we only link things we use and would rebuy.
The stack, for the curious: WordPress on managed hosting, Kadence theme, the usual analytics, and an unreasonable number of spreadsheets. If you want to build your own version of any of this, ask – open source means the recipe is available.
Why disclose all this? Because the entire value of this site is that it’s real. The AI-assisted workflow is itself one of our farm-tech experiments, and hiding it would be against the house rules. We’d rather show the system – that’s sort of the whole idea.