A gardening appliance includes a grow tower rotatably mounted within a liner and having a plurality of apertures for receiving one or more plant pods. A controller is operably coupled to a drive motor and a camera assembly and is configured to operate the drive motor to rotate the grow tower while obtaining a series of images. The controller is further configured to analyze the series of images using a machine learning image recognition process to identify a target image of the series of images that corresponds to an image having the best image quality or clarity.