It pays to watch the soil moisture closely if you want large vegetables. I’ve had good results this year using my garden logging system. Actually my vegetables have gotten a little out of hand. I think the cat is a bit scared too 😉 :
I’ve been kind of obsessed with soil moisture now that my logging system is up and running. I’ve checked the log a couple of times a day, and when the moisture level was low I ran out and turned on the sprinkler. I hope the large size doesn’t affect the taste too much.
What I did was that I checked the soil moisture graph and when the level was below 30 % I would water the vegetables. Looking at the graph below it shows that I’ve turned on the sprinkler three times during a week (week 27), Tuesday at 09:00, Wednesday at 23:00 and Friday at 21:00:
This process screams for a computer controlled solution and I’m working on connecting a water pump to the logging system to make it a soil moisture control system instead. It would need a hysteresis, like for instance turning the water ON below 30 % and turning it OFF above 80 %.
Another thing I’m working on is replacing my 1-wire Ethernet cable with proper outdoor Ethernet cable. The existing system has worked without any problems for half a year, but I just want to make the whole system even more durable, since the whole point of building this is to free time and energy and instability problems and break-downs take up just that, time and energy.
