Grow a beautiful garden with home automation
A beautiful, lush garden is a wonderful thing. Not only does it look good year-round and impress the neighbours, but it’s also a great place to spend time in the summer months and entertain guests.
However, a good garden is not an easy thing to maintain. It takes many hours of hard work and toil to create a beautiful garden in the first place, and then many more hours to keep it that way. If you take a vacation or have a few busy weeks, things can start to go wrong fast.
The good news here is that home automation can save the day. With the right tools, you can build a smart garden that cares for itself in many ways and is more efficient, convenient, and even more impressive.
In this article, we’ll take a look at why a smart garden is the best kind of garden, and some of the smart features you could consider building into your own outdoor space.
How home automation helps with gardening
- It saves time and stress. Smart gardening tools allow you to automate a lot of your gardening work, from mowing the lawn to watering the flowers, so you can spend more time enjoying your garden and less time worrying about it.
- It’s more efficient. With the right combination of smart gardening tools, you can optimize energy use in your garden, saving water, power, and money.
- Your garden will grow better. Smart gardening devices know how to optimize your garden, ensuring your plants have just the right balance of nutrients, light, water, and more to grow in the perfect way.
Features of a smart garden
Now let’s take a look at some of the top smart gardening devices and how they work to transform your little patch of nature into the perfect self-nurturing paradise.
Smart sprinklers
Watering the garden is one of those monotonous tasks that brings very little joy but is impossible to avoid. Well, not anymore! Smart sprinklers can take care of this tedious task, working according to a pre-set schedule or even based on sensors that measure the dryness of the soil. Smart sprinklers even know when to conserve water, saving you money on bills.
Smart lawn mowers
There can be a certain satisfaction in trimming the lawn, but most of the time it’s a chore. Fortunately, mowing the lawn is one of those gardening tasks that are particularly easy to automate, and smart lawn mowers can easily take care of it.
Smart lighting
The right lighting can make the difference between a welcoming, ambient outdoor space and a dark patch of grass. As well as making your garden more hospitable to you and your guests, lighting is also useful for security reasons and for helping plants grow.
Smart lighting can take your garden lighting up another notch. It can decide when to turn on based on a pre-determined schedule or by detecting light levels, and it can even adjust lighting levels to suit the environment. Smart lights can detect movement for security, and can measure natural light levels and switch on to provide your plants with the light they need.
Smart indoor plant care
Not all gardens are outdoors. More and more people, especially in cities, are tending to their own indoor gardens. There are many benefits to this — plants in the home have been shown to improve mood, boost focus, and even help you heal faster.
Home automation devices can make sure your indoor garden is healthy and cared for even when you’re not around by automating watering and feeding, managing light levels, and keeping track of your plants’ health via sensors.
Smart soil and plant sensors
Many smart garden tools simply automate tasks we can already do ourselves. But what about things we can’t do, at least not without specialist equipment? One example is measuring the levels of moisture and the balance of nutrients in your soil. Smart garden tools are able to do this, along with monitoring other conditions like temperature and light levels.
By keeping track of this data, your smart garden can ensure your plants have the perfect environment to grow, allowing you to make changes and adjustments in response to changes in conditions. You can learn about the perfect time to water your plants, the exact nutrients your soil needs most, and much more. It’s a data-driven approach to gardening.
Weather sensors
The weather can be an unpredictable thing, but it’s one of the most important factors when it comes to growing and managing a healthy garden. Keeping track of the weather is now easier than ever with the right smart garden solutions, which can monitor things like rain, temperature, humidity, and more.
This information allows you to better understand your garden and learn what types of plants thrive best there, as well as make adjustments to help your current plants adapt and grow more successfully.
Grow a smart garden with Arduino
Arduino’s Project Hub is full of examples of people who have used automation to build their own, DIY garden projects. Arduino is built to be simple, user-friendly, and effective — helping you take control of your home automation.
To learn more, visit the home page.