The reason we do it manually is because some crops use more water than others and some areas dry out faster so not everything needs watered at the same time. We grow a large vegetable garden, all watered by drip tapes, the kind where we manually flip a valve for each bed. I live in a large desert and I'm plum flummoxed by the number of people here growing Kentucky Bluegrass and watering it at least once a week, two or three times a week during the hottest part of summer. Or at the very least plant drought-tolerant grass that can go for weeks without water once established. If you live in an area where you need to water your lawn, give up on your lawn. Watering lawns is an egregious waste of water. It's really not that hard or time consuming to figure out, especially for a geek.
#OPENSPRINKLER PI COMMAND LINE HOW TO#
While this might be a fun project it doesn't add any value over just reading the manual on how to operate a sprinkler controller with a dial. That makes using it just about foolproof and can save water which translates to money. The exciting thing about the new connected sprinkler controllers like the rachio and others is that they know the weather and what works for the location you're in. It's a cute/fun project though.įirst thing I thought as well. That way when a problem comes up, you can look at the pictures and see the problem beginning and compare this to what was happening at the time with your notes.ĭrip systems are nice, but even if your garden is ridiculously massive, it doesn't need to be a complicated system and controlling it will never be a bottleneck. Take tons of pictures, and log all the fertilizers you give, pesticides (if any), watering amounts and frequency, etc. I know this sounds out of left field, but if you are really looking to harness automation to help you grow better and more efficiently, I would say using it for documentation is your best bet. Which is why I'll be using my Raspberry Pi to take a picture of my plants every minute this summer in a weather proof box.
Then you come to the realization that the easiest way to solve this problem is to just go look at your plants. You can get things like little water probes that you stick into the soil and try to get readings but you will quickly discover that the amount of water it picks up in spot A will not always be correlated to how much the plant it's sitting next to needs or does not need water. Pieces of wood, cheap plastic valves, 5 gallon buckets, nails, tubes. You can set up a manual drip system with almost nothing.
I have found that unless you are growing a shitload of stuff, you're better off just using a "manual" drip system - buckets with gravity feed and a nozzle along with a little twist valve to control drip rate.Or just manually watering. The hard part is ensuring that you are not giving your plants too much or too little water, dripping in a reasonable place, not flushing your plants, etc. I have my Raspberry in the box for months and so far wanted to do something related to the garden with it, but don't knew what exactly or how to start. I was looking in Amazon today just an hour ago, a dripping system and now I found this article.
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