Why do we talk about gardening on a site that is dedicated to electronics and home automation? Gardening is a perfect candidate for automation!
One of the best ways to increase your success in the garden is to add an automated watering system. You can purchase a simple, off the shelf timer from a big box store, and use it to water your plants. This step alone will almost certainly increase your gardening success.
However, this is not the only thing we can automate in the garden. You can do better! Consider adding some other automations to your garden:
- Detect soil moisture with a capacitive moisture sensore and only water plants when they need it.
- Add a freeze sensor to your garden to detect when the temperature drops below a certain threshold. If the temperature drops below a certain threshold, you can turn on a heater to keep your plants warm. Or you can turn on a fan to prevent frost. Or you can send an MQTT message to your home automation system to do just about anything you can imagine.
- Add a water barrel and monitor the temperature of the water barrel.
- Add a motion sensor to your garden and use it to scare off deer and other animals.
Gardening is a great way to get started with home automation. It is easy to get started, and you can see the results of your work almost immediately. You can also use your garden to learn about other home automation technologies, such as capacitive moisture sensors, temperature sensors, and motion sensors.
