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The Internet of Things Comes To Your Garden
Iddo Genuth writes Connected devices are becoming ubiquitous — a number of new companies are now offering WIFI and BT enabled devices that can let you control almost all aspects of your garden from your smartphone or tablet, save you money on water and allow you to monitor your plant's health from a distance. In the past few months we have seen an explosion of new companies and products belonging to the 'Internet Of Things' (IOT) and this trend isn't skipping the garden. For years irrigation controllers were amongst the most hated, unintuitive devices around, but a new generation of small start-up companies such as Rachio, GreenIQ and GreenBox are looking to change that. They want to create completely new ways to interact with our garden which will be more wireless and more connected (with lots of smart sensors that will tell us what is going on with our plants before it's too late).
yet this
for hated software!
Watering a garden is not hard, even if you do it yourself. Or you can set up a timer.
WEEDING a garden is hard. Got a robot for that? Didn't think so.
Advanced Mycorrhizal networking technology, as pioneered by fungi at least 400 million years ago, has been providing advanced inter-plant networking technology (as well as a robust nutrient exchange infrastructure) since you were small, shrew-like, creatures busy 'disrupting' dinosaurs.
Bah!
Ever wonder why, after almost a century of technological development, a lot of small time and hobby farmers still drive 1940's era tractors?
A, because they're cheap to buy and fix. B, because if it ain't broke, it don't need fixin'.
I'm sure all these fancy garden toys are quite popular with the hipster, urban-farming-because-its-hip crowd, but for actual subsistence farming? Not so much.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I've been using this wonderful device for controlling drip irrigation:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...
The user interface is brain-dead simple. The dial simply has 17 settings, for ... ...
1: Daily for 2 minutes
2: Daily for 5 minutes
3: Daily for 10 minutes
7: Every other day for 5 minutes
8: Every other day for 10 minutes
12: Every third day for 10 minutes
13: Every third day for 15 minutes
That's it! There isn't an option for "2 minutes every 3 days" because -- guess what -- gardeners don't actually need that level of control! It just has a laser focus on a simple user interface that will be good for 99% of residential customers.
Would my life be better if I had to change the batteries in the irrigation controller every 5 days to power its wifi? Or if I had to run mains power and Ethernet cabling out into the garden for it? Would my life be better if I had a fiddly iPhone/Android app with more settings pages than I'd care to use, maybe a cloud-based controller like my Nest? Do I ever go on holiday and wish I'd changed the watering schedule before departing?
NO.
Wifi interference / trying to get an outside single. May get in the way of this working good.
,,,a small thing that kills slugs?
Why won't you edit?
Most of my property is xeriscaped.
The rest is planter boxes with vegetables.
I manually, by hand, water my drought tolerant plants maybe twice a week.
I manually, by hand, water my planter box vegetables, herbs, fruit, etc usually daily.
What I have to water isn't huge, but it takes a while.
I actually enjoy watering. I get to see my plants, check how they are doing, etc;
I actually check the soil and how moist it is, see what bugs there are/aren't, the status of my garden in general as I water.
Maybe I'm odd but I actually like doing it.
I would assume if someone had a massive garden/yard then doing some kind of app based control of multiple drip systems, etc would be the way to go, but for me I would rather Keep It Simple Stupid. Plus I don't have to dick around with all of the management that comes with drip systems, sprinklers(nightmare), apps, phone settings, blah, blah, blah.
For me the garden is a way to get away from tech for a while.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The company created a small, slick-looking, controller that costumers can connect instead of their old irrigation controller
I hope that Garden Gnome costume isn't too tight around the waist!
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The Internet of Things Comes To Your Garden
Again with the "your." Unless the powers that be are going to force people to install e-Gnomes, the "Internet of Things" is not coming to my garden.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Growing up on a farm we had timer for watering, it was a hands off process mostly and occurred at night. Trees grew just fine and the main issue was fixing drippers or repairing holes in the watering lines caused by rats or other vermin.
This type of farming worked just fine. However, if I could add technology to it easily and cheaply it would have been much better. Wireless inline pressure sensors that I could overlay onto a map to tell where breaks or holes were would save lots of time. Wireless PPM (parts per million) meters could help monitor distribution of fertilizer so I can make adjustments. Finally web cameras could help monitor the property for security or vermin threats.
On a small farm thats less than 50 acres this would allow me to be an armchair farmer, sit on my butt mostly and address issues as they come up. However thats now why you become a farmer, the interface with the plants and trees is the whole point.
These systems definately have advantages and disadvantages and I can see using them making you lazy and technology failures causing dead crops. I can also see them making life easier and growing more efficient.
I think this is great. I think the IOT is mostly hype- I don't care if my washing machine tells me its out of soap, but if I'm on a trip and my garden is getting parched or flooded or my tomatoes are ripe then I want to know about it so I can send someone to check on it. Right now I handle this with a webcam, but that doesn't let me measure soil moisture content.
I'm an embedded developer and also have a hobby garden. So when things got cheap enough I got really excited about building a contraption to monitor moisture, ph, amount of sun and to adjust fertilizer and water levels accordingly. Then I realized that for hobby gardeners this really defeats the purpose. We garden for fun, and at least for me, I don't like bringing technology to things that don't need it.
On the other hand, those guys out in colorado growing pot will love this kind of thing.
I've been using this wonderful device for controlling drip irrigation:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...
I used something kind of like that for about two weeks, until one day I came home to find that the mechanism had spontaneously exploded* sometime hours before, and my garden had turned into a small swamp-like biome.
Now I just mulch properly and water in the morning/evening like I used to; the mulch makes all the difference in the world.
* Caveat, the model was one of those super-cheap ones from Harbor Freight, so I should have expected catastrophic failure.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I spend a ton of money on flowers and I always forget to water them. And I pay around 13$ pr. cubic meter around here (when I don't use rainwater) thanks to "green" taxes.
http://modernfarmer.com/2013/0...
Unfortunately, they're only focusing on lettuce for right now.
Personally, I just use a hydroponics system, so I don't have to worry about significant weed problems. (algae and insect problems, yes, but not weeds).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Does your solution account for weather forecast? Because watering the lawn 12 hours before it is going to rain seems like a bit of a waste.
I'd love to have a timer that was smart enough to read the local weather forecast, and make decisions. I'd also love to have a timer where I could walk the zones in my garden periodically and using my smart phone/tablet and increase/decrease the amount of watering duration for the zone.
I'm still watering my veggies with a sprinkler, for the most part. I check my soil's moisture with my finger, and I calculate how much water has been put down using either a couple tin cans or some cheapie rain gauges.
I guess this new equipment is now going to be added to the list of things I'm not using. On the bright side, it also means some hacker isn't going to turn my vegetable garden into a bog garden from the comfort of their parents' basement... they'll have to sneak into my yard and turn on the faucet by hand (and hope they make it past the dogs and the homeowner).
#DeleteChrome
Who reads the title as: The Internet of Things Comes To Your "Garden"?
Uh.. yeah, I have a remote "garden" in need of monitoring, watering, etc. My, uh, vegetables are very special to me in the remote hills of Colorado.
what if I get stuck in a walled garden?
Does your solution account for weather forecast? Because watering the lawn 12 hours before it is going to rain seems like a bit of a waste.
Unless this system has a rain gauge, basing a watering schedule on weather forecasts is a sure way to kill your plants - really, how accurate are forecasts?
And even then, the forecasts just give a rain probability: not how much.
All this electronic shit just sucks more and more power and does not add that much to our lives.
It's one thing if you are a farmer (and they have things that blows the doors off of these gimmicks) but for a sub-urban gardener? Please. Your money is better spent on current technologies that do not require a $499 tablet - and $499 goes a looooonnng way with current gardening tech.
And for those of us who garden, we're out there just about everyday so these gimmicks will add nothing to our ability to grow our stuff.
Speaking as a Northern Californian. If I didn't waste the water they would just send it to LA.
Better here then there.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
They've figured out one more gadget mobile way to extract unnecessary money from your wallet. You'll feel lighter, slimmer and faster without all that money clogging up your bank account!
Handling water may possibly become my first Arduino or RaspPi project, if I can get through my newbie ignorance, and learn some new tricks as an old dog.
We have flood irrigation that comes in from an acequia every couple weeks (used to be every week, but times are changing) at an irregular rate at irregular time-of-day. (You can't deal with this, just using timers, and the amount of water pressure is tiny compared to what you usually have on a typical garden hose, so lots of cheap ubiquitous gadgets don't work here.) I leave a floodgate open (i.e. remove a coffee can from the end of a tube), go to work, go back home for lunch, go back to work, go home at end of day. For various reasons that you can probably imagine, it's bad to leave the floodgate open after we have collected a certain amount of water. Things work out fine if it happens to finish at lunch time (or if it's so slow that it hasn't finished until end of day), but otherwise, someone has to leave their workplace and go home to deal with it.
That is lame, in a way that really does (slightly) matter.
Thus I'm tempted to either build a sensor (or just cheeze out with a webcam, though that's less geeky) and some kind of remote-controllable motorized floodgate.
AFAICT nobody sells anything for this; it's up to me. As it happens, there are lots of guides online for building this kind of stuff, but they're all within the context of Dwarf Fortress! Yeah, right, as if I want a gate that'll remain stuck open just because there's a butterfly or elephant carcass in the way.
Lower tech solution: find retired neighbor to do it, in exchange for beer or something. This is actually the cheapest/smartest way to do, but rubs me the wrong way. I'm sure you all understand.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The reason I have a garden is to have a place where I can go outside and putter around with living things. The pace at which things happen in the garden is very slow and relaxing. The needs of the plants are simple.
The most stressful thing that happens in my garden is the annual competition between me and the birds to see who will get the grapes and blueberries. Really though I don't mind much if the birds get some. They are enjoyable to have around in their own way.
The last thing I want is some sort of automation that takes away from this process and replaces it with the technology that I am trying to escape from with my hobby.
That's all I need, fucking ads while picking my tomatoes.
I just read every post (up to this point), and it's the real gardeners who are opposed to the tech solutions.
That's not what gardening is about. You have to get out there and get your hands dirty to enjoy it. I was born with a "green thumb" and can grow almost anything, even plants that are supposed to be outside of my growing zone. But you gotta be out there with 'em to know what they need and when they need it. Too many people over-water, plant in the wrong place, or over-fertilize and then wonder what went wrong.
I even like my weeds. Many of them are edible!
My chiles don't need no steenking internet.
...I think I will continue mowing the grass by myself, rather than wasting twice the time fixing network interfaces, rebooting controllers, changing batteries, etc.
The fact that my cucumbers aren't on my home network is a source of constant shame and sorrow.