Plant and Garden Care

Products and solutions related to gardens

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SOLUTIONS FOR PLANT AND GARDEN CARE

Contrary to the other smart home systems presented on these pages, this is an area where my own experiences are quite limited. This specific page will therefore be a work in progress, based both on my own future experimentation and further development/launch of new products/solutions.

Doing a first dive into this world, it seems clear that this is a confusing “landscape”, with a very broad range of what can be included in smart plant/garden care (there is for example an app called “SmartPlant App”, but this is just a kind of “expert system” providing advice about how to care for a large number of different plant species; it involves no kind of sensors, watering equipment, etc., thus not utilizing the opportunities offered by technology). Some areas that can be part of this category, without any claim to completeness, are:

Monitoring of plants/growth environment

In its most basic form, this is about using different types of sensors that can measure relevant parameters that dictate the growth conditions for plants. Experienced “plant care givers”/gardeners can probably use their experience/finger/visual inspection to assess important parameters, but even such persons can get much more insight from the use of sensors. Such sensors can be divided into (at least) three main groups:

Of the latter, “truly smart sensors”, there is a rich selection to choose among, and these can further be split into three types:

Typical parameters measured by smart sensors are soil humidity, temperature, light intensity, etc. The advantage of such sensors is of course to obtain a better understanding of the plants’ environment and based on this providing better care, which should lead to healthier plants and better “yield” if growing something producing crops. And as indicated above, under smart growth kits, the adjustment of the plant care based on sensor data can be done “manually” or integrated into more automized plant care.

When it comes to examples of specific products, we are mostly left with smart, stand-alone sensors (notice that some of these require a base station, which is often sold in kits with the sensor, and also that there used to be other sensors on the market which have been discontinued):

Automatic plant care/growth kits

Smart sensors must, as mentioned above, really be considered just a first, basic level of smart plant care. The next level is automatically utilizing the sensor measurement to control the plants’ environment/growth conditions. Also here, products/solutions blur a little and principally, there are (at least) two types of solutions:

Integrated growth kits also come both in versions with are not connected and which are, where the latter can be monitored/controlled from a smart phone or the likes. The former type doesn’t really belong to the category of smart garden care based on my definition, but some examples are Click and Grow Smart Garden 3 (we have one of these and there is an accompanying app, but this only gives tips about growing herbs), AeroGarden Harvest 360, Véritable Classic Garden, and there are many others.

Of “smarter” versions, i.e., which are online and offer different types of functionality enabled by this, there are also many to choose among so I will only mention a couple of examples: Smart Connect Véritable Garden, AeroGarden Bounty Wi-Fi and CityCrop Intelligent Indoor Smart Garden. Late 2020, the first solution with Apple Home support, SmallGarden By ēdn, was launched.

Controlling irrigation/other aspects

As mentioned above, the growth kits represent a kind of “miniature garden” where both light, water, nutrients, etc. are controlled based on sensor data. Ideally, a “smart garden” solution would do the same for a “real” garden. And there might be products out there to allow this, but if so, they are expensive and meant for professional use. For “normal” private gardens, it is, at least for now, most relevant to consider smart/automatic watering (and lawn care, which is covered below). On the other hand, indoor it is fairly easy to set up automatic control of light/heating for rooms/zones where plants are kept (or in a greenhouse for that matter). This will utilize principles and components described under lighting and climate control.

Smart watering/irrigation has many advantaged. It is of course convenient not having to drag a hose around the garden to water whenever one can find the time, but rather let an automatic system deal with this. Probably more important is that automatic watering allows water to be distributed at the most suitable time of day, depending on weather, soil conditions, etc., and furthermore that an optimal amount of water is dispensed. This is good for both plant well-being and the environment.

Principally speaking, there are two types of system for automatic watering:

Irrespective of the data source, the measurements are used to control the irrigation. Smart irrigation controllers are typically installed on/near an outdoor faucet and sits there to control the water flow. This is of course means that the other end of the hose must be connected to suitable water distribution solutions (nothing is achieved by connecting a “manual” hose to an automatic water controller), be it a basic sprinkler or more complicated networks of drip systems, even using a pump to increase the capacity/distance possible (Gardena, for example, offers a variety of such products). Also for smart water controllers, there have gradually been launched many products/systems to choose from, with somewhat differing functionality. Some examples are:

Notice that some of the products must be installed indoor (like the Gro 7 Zone Controller), but most others are installed outdoor, which also means that they must be brought inside or protected during winter if it gets below zero Celsius.

Smart lawn care

This is an area that has been developing over many years, and much more will likely happen in the coming years. Currently, this is mostly about robot lawn mowers, but there are visions for automatic fertilizer systems, moss removal, etc. Focusing on robot mowers, the situation is here like in many other product categories; there are “semi-smart” versions (which are not online and cannot be controlled from an app, which is sadly the type we ended up with by being a little too eager to invest, see outdoor) and “smart” ones, which are connected and offer different kinds of features (access from anywhere, GPS control, support for platforms like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant or IFTTT, etc.). The choice of smart robot mowers has become so extensive that only a few examples will be mentioned here:

The most advanced of these mowers allow integration with other parts of the smart home, but currently most of them are stand-alone products. I doubt, however, it will take very long before indoor and outdoor systems can be integrated in a much tighter fashion.