The process of building and maintaining a garden can be daunting. It requires a great deal of knowledge about plants, soils, weather, and light conditions. It also requires a great deal of care to ensure that plants get the water and nutrients they need. Edyn’s upcoming smart garden system seeks to simplify all that for the common gardener.
Developed by ecologist and self-described garden enthusiast Jason Aramburu and funded by a Kickstarter campaign, the Edyn smart garden system monitors the sunlight, humidity, soil nutrients, and moisture levels of a garden. This data is cross-referenced with a collection of databases for plants, soil, and weather to produce recommendations for what sort of plants will thrive. The system interface, a smart phone app, even provides useful information such as the best times to plant recommend vegetables, fruit, and flowers and provides alerts for items requiring critical action, such as forecasted frosts.
The interface app provides critical data about garden conditions including moisture, sunlight, nutrition, and temperature. It even recommends plants suited for site specific conditions. Image credit: Edyn.
For the environmentally conscious gardener, this system is much more powerful than a simple monitor and warning tool. Edyn has a smart water valve which responds to the information it receives from the garden sensor. Unlike pre-programmed irrigation systems which require constant fine tuning and still often over- or under- water plants, the water valve alters its watering according to actual soil conditions. As a result, this smart system is an incredible tool for conserving resources while producing healthy, vigorous plants. The smart garden system effectively eliminates wasteful and harmful over-watering through the intercommunication between monitor and water valve. A great feature of the system is that it measures the amount of water usage, allowing gardeners to track just how much water they are using and saving. The system additionally runs on renewable energy, generating its own electricity via the solar panels on top of each device.
The system has not yet reached the market – Edyn is taking pre orders now – so it has yet to prove its efficacy in the everyday garden. All the same, the smart garden system has major implications for resource conservation and plant health in the landscape as a whole. The program and devices could be adapted for landscape beds and irrigation systems to provide the same level of efficiency in landscapes ranging from a residential perennial bed all the way to large scale commercial plantings.
Lead image – Edyn’s smart garden monitor is shown on the left and the water valve on the right. Image credit: Edyn
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