Smart Garden

General Discussion
1

Hi guys

I’m new to SmartThings and love the world of potential that this open up. I’m an avid gardener and my first thoughts would be how to make my garden even smarter.

The initial vision I have to automate the watering of my garden. Most people who think about this, think in terms of timers. I really don’t like this idea that much as it doesn’t take into account current weather conditions and how much water the plants need at a given time. Hence most of the time, you end up using more water than you need to.

In gardening circles, people are just starting to think about using soil moisture sensors to determine the current needs of the plants. Unfortunately, this is currently a mostly manual process  and hence doesn’t seem much wide spread adoption.

I would like to employ the use of various soil moisture sensors, water valves and smartthings to bring some intelligence to my garden beds. Note, in the end I am likely to want one sensor and valve per garden bed as each vegetable crop has different requirements.

My current problem is knowing where to start?

I know that the hardware exists:

But which one do I get? I understand that even if the device itself doesn’t have bluetooth or zwave, assuming the device is electronic ThingsModule to hook it into the system, but noting being an electronics guru, I’m not sure what I need to look for in a candidate device or how I would begin to join the two together.

I am willing to learn the electronics required to get things working, but I need some help getting started. Does anyone have any ideas?

2

Anthony - have you checked out PlantLink on Kickstarter?

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1387729422/plant-link-listen-to-your-plants

Funding has closed and they’re off and running, but they’ll presumably have more units for sale after they’ve delivered the Kickstarter rewards.

3

Huge thanks for pointing this out. Huge help!

4

You might also want to give gardenbot http://gardenbot.org/about/ a look as well. It looks like it would be relatively easy to integrate a gardenbot build with the smartthings hub via the arduino shield and avoid maintaining multiple systems for home and garden automation.

5

@vdhant

I’m not as into gardening as you, but I live in an arid state with inground sprinklers for my lawn, and I’ve been planning to get around to something like this as well…both for my lawn and for the small garden areas that we do have.

If you get working on this and come up with something that works well for you, please post about it - I’d love to hear about what you end up doing and how it works!