I'm reminded of that adage "Given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of a game". A fully automated setup is cool, but if it's working well, there's not much to do. You're not gardening any more.
I have a bunch of plants on my window sill, and considered getting moisture sensors and automating watering, but I realised that kind of defeats the point of looking after the plants myself. On top of the satisfaction of manual work, I recently realised that it's taught me an intuition - the quirks of how much water each plant wants at different times of year (even cacti are thirsty in summer!), and how soil composition and pot size affects water retention. It's probably not generally transferable knowledge, but it was fun to realise I'd come to know my plants really well.
Th author spent however long on setup and wrote up a blog post. They are doing something different than you, but it’s clear they are also having fun. There is room for two approaches, and I’m not going to tell anyone else their approach “defeats the point,” because we really don’t even have to agree on the point! Glad you enjoy your approach.
Or the author is doing this for SEO. He’s the founder of the AI platform all of this is running on. Or maybe he enjoys the technical tinkering more than the gardening ;)
I assume a comment here is very frequently an opinion not a normative statement. One way of consideration from among the many. His opinion, that this way defeats the point, is very well in line to say this way, we shouldn't even hint to shut up about it. It does not and cannot hinder anyone having alternative approach to the matter, it was not even implied here, as far as I can see, the room for alternative is there.
Hum, suddenly you have exactly the most skill wanted in gardening. People will pay for your magic touch on all those stinking needles and weeds out of control.
If it works also with moles, people will make queues at your door with marry me proposals.
We have a gardener who comes to do our garden. I love my garden. I'm totally useless at gardening and while I like the idea of learning it, the opportunity cost against my other ADHD hobbies makes it impractical. So I just walk around and enjoy my garden.
As someone with not much of a "green thumb", I would rather say this lets you keep the pleasant parts of gardening (planting, harvesting and generally enjoying your plants) while automating the chore of regularly watering them.
TIL what lakehouse means (a mix of "data lake" and "data warehouse" without the clarifying "data" part). Especially when mentioned in the same phrase as "garden", you tend to think of a physical house first...
I understand some of the comments here around "optimizing the fun out of the game". I'd also prefer to acquire an intuitive sense of plant health, vegetable seasons, etc.
But I also get the appeal of systemizing things and think for the type of person who loves automating and building systems, I was astounded about the low cost. I would've imagined this kind of setup to cost thousands of euros.
I'm curious about the future of systems like these. We recently saw internet-connected supermarket freezers hacked, so I wonder if internet-connected IoT stuff will be as commonplace in the future.
I want to do a similar project, but on my father-in-law's house! There I'll have more trouble because the backyard is all covered with cement and the place I want to use is a little distant from the house, so I'm thinking in put some solar panel and battery, there is a roof at this part, to protect the battery and I'll use the roof as a mean to collect water through a gutter. If I put this project I'll write about and share here!
I have just the soil sensor and a smart power plug controlling a plug. Both in Home Assistant and guided by a job in my personal assistant LLM. Much more simplistic. Love your setup!
>> I travel quite a bit. Who was going to tell me whether the plants looked healthy? Certainly not my children.
Why not? Why do you keep your family members away from your fantastic project? I would have loved to see something like "my younger kid noticed the leaf ...", "My wife watered the plants ..." etc.
Please remove all tech stuff from your garden. Manage it as a simple human. Let other humans of your family also take part in it.
While your project is technically awesome, you have removed all human factor from it, including yourself. You are letting the AI agents invade the last remaining turfs of the human tribes - the garden work.
You don't need a perfect, highly instrumented garden. That was never the need. Imprecision, lack of full metrics etc are perfectly natural. That's not achievement. That's vulgarity of pouring tons of tech into something natural as a garden, just because you can.
I agree with the sentiment that the human aspect of gardening can be fun, and personally I would not want to automate my own plant maintenance. But on the other hand, perhaps the author finds automation fun. Who are we to decide how they should do their own garden?
"other people's plants"? When did plants became personal property within a family? I understand you have your own clothes and other personal things, but plants or pets? People should stop claiming artificial, fine-grained ownerships on everything, within a family. Let family own things. Let family claim the work and achievements.
When did this person's hobby become your property to cast your whims upon?
If you succeed at proving that they're incompetent, incapable, just holding it wrong, or whatever: Then what? How would this finding improve anyone's situation -- at all, anywhere?
Jeez, this person is just combining their hobbies into something they apparently think is fun and you’re resting the whole world on their shoulders. Relax.
Because the OP is just dehumanising some basic, primary stuff, it's like telling someone to not sh*t in public because in so doing it also casts a bad light on us, people who happen to be watching him because we just happen to share the same sidewalk.
I don't want to be part of a world where people invaded by AI psychosis have turned a basic human thing like gardening into this AI-monstrosity.
Let’s say they just set up some sensors and automation based on regular algorithms or something like Home Assistant, would that pass muster to you? As in ‘hey look at this, I hacked some plants!’? This is just going one step further. You’re free to not like AI (I’m reluctant myself) but this seems to me like someone bashing some stuff together for fun. In my opinion you’re overreacting.
Yes. we must know everything. Caterpillar pooping, butterfly flapping wings, leaves wiggling - instrument everything, collect tons of numbers and call it "Big data", and ask AI to munch on the data and and ask it to post a mile long blog article.
You just used all major areas of tech - Sensor feeds, Big Data processing, Cloud and AI agents. Only blockchain & quantum computing is missing. What a project.
Whats wrong with sensors and data analysis? Sounds like a good small scale project to start with the subject. Do you think sensors and data are only used for "evil megatech"?
The "evil megatech" is brainwashing you into believing that all big data or sensor data is really a need. But the need is created by the tech and forced upon.
Spend serious money in several garden sensors for an orchard.
Puts the orchard at the shadow.
Near a Parthenocissus
We all had been there. AI is not real I.
Friends don't let friends to be mocked forever by their partners about the smallest pumpkin violin in the world produced with a Lex-Lutor's level plan. If water is guaranteed by sensors, start by moving this raised bed to a sunny place, buddy. Or plant groceries able to climb.
And for Potato's sake, don't brag in front of your family about your smart stuff before to have obtained a decent result. It always ends the same.
The only good part is that this kale will have bigger leaves at the shadow, but bigger and tastier are inversely proportional in gardening.
Author here. This started as a 2 m² vegetable bed and got out of hand: 8 soil probes, a weather station, a camera, and a Rain Bird valve that I control through an old Android phone tapping its own app.
The part I found interesting: a fixed rules engine for watering kept being wrong in ways that needed context (forecast, last week's response, what the leaves look like). So an agent now runs every morning, reads the full history (4M readings, 62 MB in Iceberg), changes watering within hard limits, and logs what it expects to happen so it can check itself the next day.
Disclosure: the data side runs on LakehouseBox, which I'm building. The code is at github.com/jatorre/garden-lake. Happy to answer anything, including "why not Home Assistant."
One practical lesson with agents that control physical things: give them a small set of named actions with hard limits, such as 'water zone 2 for at most 10 minutes', instead of raw device access. Models sometimes misread a sensor value or repeat an action because they forgot they already did it. A log of past actions that the agent reads before every decision, plus a cap on how often each action can run per day, turns most of those mistakes into harmless no-ops. A plant can survive one bad guess but not a stuck valve.
I'm reminded of that adage "Given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of a game". A fully automated setup is cool, but if it's working well, there's not much to do. You're not gardening any more.
I have a bunch of plants on my window sill, and considered getting moisture sensors and automating watering, but I realised that kind of defeats the point of looking after the plants myself. On top of the satisfaction of manual work, I recently realised that it's taught me an intuition - the quirks of how much water each plant wants at different times of year (even cacti are thirsty in summer!), and how soil composition and pot size affects water retention. It's probably not generally transferable knowledge, but it was fun to realise I'd come to know my plants really well.
Th author spent however long on setup and wrote up a blog post. They are doing something different than you, but it’s clear they are also having fun. There is room for two approaches, and I’m not going to tell anyone else their approach “defeats the point,” because we really don’t even have to agree on the point! Glad you enjoy your approach.
Or the author is doing this for SEO. He’s the founder of the AI platform all of this is running on. Or maybe he enjoys the technical tinkering more than the gardening ;)
I assume a comment here is very frequently an opinion not a normative statement. One way of consideration from among the many. His opinion, that this way defeats the point, is very well in line to say this way, we shouldn't even hint to shut up about it. It does not and cannot hinder anyone having alternative approach to the matter, it was not even implied here, as far as I can see, the room for alternative is there.
I don't like gardening, so that sounds like a win to me. I can kill any plant. I don't enjoy that. I enjoy having nice plants around me.
> I don't like gardening
heressy!
> I can kill any plant
Hum, suddenly you have exactly the most skill wanted in gardening. People will pay for your magic touch on all those stinking needles and weeds out of control. If it works also with moles, people will make queues at your door with marry me proposals.
We have a gardener who comes to do our garden. I love my garden. I'm totally useless at gardening and while I like the idea of learning it, the opportunity cost against my other ADHD hobbies makes it impractical. So I just walk around and enjoy my garden.
> You're not gardening any more.
You are though. Its the automation you garden now.
the curse of automation
Some might call it the joy of automation.
You could get more of that out of Factorio…
As someone with not much of a "green thumb", I would rather say this lets you keep the pleasant parts of gardening (planting, harvesting and generally enjoying your plants) while automating the chore of regularly watering them.
I think he's farming now.
TIL what lakehouse means (a mix of "data lake" and "data warehouse" without the clarifying "data" part). Especially when mentioned in the same phrase as "garden", you tend to think of a physical house first...
this comment made me think "oh this is about a data warehouse?" which it is not. it _is_ about a garden and automating watering and other chores.
The massive data lakehouse at my dayjob was affectionately named "the swamp"
I understand some of the comments here around "optimizing the fun out of the game". I'd also prefer to acquire an intuitive sense of plant health, vegetable seasons, etc.
But I also get the appeal of systemizing things and think for the type of person who loves automating and building systems, I was astounded about the low cost. I would've imagined this kind of setup to cost thousands of euros.
I'm curious about the future of systems like these. We recently saw internet-connected supermarket freezers hacked, so I wonder if internet-connected IoT stuff will be as commonplace in the future.
I want to do a similar project, but on my father-in-law's house! There I'll have more trouble because the backyard is all covered with cement and the place I want to use is a little distant from the house, so I'm thinking in put some solar panel and battery, there is a roof at this part, to protect the battery and I'll use the roof as a mean to collect water through a gutter. If I put this project I'll write about and share here!
I have just the soil sensor and a smart power plug controlling a plug. Both in Home Assistant and guided by a job in my personal assistant LLM. Much more simplistic. Love your setup!
Too much AI writing; also, the author should have went with some hydroponics to scratch the tech itch.
They probably asked the whole plan from ai, what to buy and how to se it up. The blog text is obviously ai generated.
>> I travel quite a bit. Who was going to tell me whether the plants looked healthy? Certainly not my children.
Why not? Why do you keep your family members away from your fantastic project? I would have loved to see something like "my younger kid noticed the leaf ...", "My wife watered the plants ..." etc.
Please remove all tech stuff from your garden. Manage it as a simple human. Let other humans of your family also take part in it.
While your project is technically awesome, you have removed all human factor from it, including yourself. You are letting the AI agents invade the last remaining turfs of the human tribes - the garden work.
You don't need a perfect, highly instrumented garden. That was never the need. Imprecision, lack of full metrics etc are perfectly natural. That's not achievement. That's vulgarity of pouring tons of tech into something natural as a garden, just because you can.
I agree with the sentiment that the human aspect of gardening can be fun, and personally I would not want to automate my own plant maintenance. But on the other hand, perhaps the author finds automation fun. Who are we to decide how they should do their own garden?
Why not? OP seems to enjoy it. Everyone have the right to "tend their own garden" as they want.
Let people have some fun, it's not like he is pushing people to abandon manually taking care of a garden.
> Let other humans of your family also take part in it.
Not everyone wants to take care of other people’s plants. Maybe he already tried to involve his kids and it turned out they were just not interested.
"other people's plants"? When did plants became personal property within a family? I understand you have your own clothes and other personal things, but plants or pets? People should stop claiming artificial, fine-grained ownerships on everything, within a family. Let family own things. Let family claim the work and achievements.
I have a couple of questions.
When did this person's hobby become your property to cast your whims upon?
If you succeed at proving that they're incompetent, incapable, just holding it wrong, or whatever: Then what? How would this finding improve anyone's situation -- at all, anywhere?
HN is not a property store. A post here becomes a target of comments when it is posted, if you don't know that.
Zeurpiet
Jeez, this person is just combining their hobbies into something they apparently think is fun and you’re resting the whole world on their shoulders. Relax.
Because the OP is just dehumanising some basic, primary stuff, it's like telling someone to not sh*t in public because in so doing it also casts a bad light on us, people who happen to be watching him because we just happen to share the same sidewalk.
I don't want to be part of a world where people invaded by AI psychosis have turned a basic human thing like gardening into this AI-monstrosity.
Let’s say they just set up some sensors and automation based on regular algorithms or something like Home Assistant, would that pass muster to you? As in ‘hey look at this, I hacked some plants!’? This is just going one step further. You’re free to not like AI (I’m reluctant myself) but this seems to me like someone bashing some stuff together for fun. In my opinion you’re overreacting.
People like you will complain when AI makes it unnecessary to use pesticides in farming. bUT mUh hUmaNizED FArmiNG?
This guy paganel literally doesn't think mathematics is necessary in any science or tech. Really don't know what to say to that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50451025
> Why not? Why do you keep your family members away from your fantastic project?
Kids these days want to play on their sega and listen to hip hop.
But how else would he know the cat pissed in it?
Yes. we must know everything. Caterpillar pooping, butterfly flapping wings, leaves wiggling - instrument everything, collect tons of numbers and call it "Big data", and ask AI to munch on the data and and ask it to post a mile long blog article.
You just used all major areas of tech - Sensor feeds, Big Data processing, Cloud and AI agents. Only blockchain & quantum computing is missing. What a project.
Whats wrong with sensors and data analysis? Sounds like a good small scale project to start with the subject. Do you think sensors and data are only used for "evil megatech"?
The "evil megatech" is brainwashing you into believing that all big data or sensor data is really a need. But the need is created by the tech and forced upon.
Great sharing! It's quite fun to read all the story behind the development.
I do love a good goat-skinning project
Spend serious money in several garden sensors for an orchard.
Puts the orchard at the shadow.
Near a Parthenocissus
We all had been there. AI is not real I.
Friends don't let friends to be mocked forever by their partners about the smallest pumpkin violin in the world produced with a Lex-Lutor's level plan. If water is guaranteed by sensors, start by moving this raised bed to a sunny place, buddy. Or plant groceries able to climb.
And for Potato's sake, don't brag in front of your family about your smart stuff before to have obtained a decent result. It always ends the same.
The only good part is that this kale will have bigger leaves at the shadow, but bigger and tastier are inversely proportional in gardening.
At least disclose using AI to write the post? The writing is grating to read.
I wonder why Claude didn't suggest him to use Home Assistant from the very start. Pinning sensors in Google Earth sounds - sorry - ridiculous.
That's not lettuce, that's cabbage
why not write this yourself? wouldn't it be more fun? it'd certainly be more fun to read
It's a pet project, not a newspaper. Not anyone have plenty of free time on their end.
"Lakeshed"
Author here. This started as a 2 m² vegetable bed and got out of hand: 8 soil probes, a weather station, a camera, and a Rain Bird valve that I control through an old Android phone tapping its own app.
The part I found interesting: a fixed rules engine for watering kept being wrong in ways that needed context (forecast, last week's response, what the leaves look like). So an agent now runs every morning, reads the full history (4M readings, 62 MB in Iceberg), changes watering within hard limits, and logs what it expects to happen so it can check itself the next day.
Disclosure: the data side runs on LakehouseBox, which I'm building. The code is at github.com/jatorre/garden-lake. Happy to answer anything, including "why not Home Assistant."
Would you be interested in adding a small patch nearby as a control group? Just to check how much improvement the rig makes?
Your cabbage looks very healthy and sturdy! Very neat!
But in my gardening experience cabbage is just like that. You sensor setup is at least tomato worthy.
Very nice post! The github repo might still be private though. Getting a 404.
One practical lesson with agents that control physical things: give them a small set of named actions with hard limits, such as 'water zone 2 for at most 10 minutes', instead of raw device access. Models sometimes misread a sensor value or repeat an action because they forgot they already did it. A log of past actions that the agent reads before every decision, plus a cap on how often each action can run per day, turns most of those mistakes into harmless no-ops. A plant can survive one bad guess but not a stuck valve.
Our robot overlords need to learn via reinforcement; if that means killing a few plants then better to overwater the plants than overwater humans.
How do you handle stale sensor readings? I've seen agents act on hours-old data because nothing told them it was old.