connected garden

The Connected Greenhouse

If you’ve read this blog before, it’s possible that you picked up on my interest in rigging up a whole garden with connected hose splitters and smart plant sensors – but until all those connected garden bits are cheaper to manufacture, that dream is somewhat cost-prohibitive (especially considering all the different plant varieties growing on our little ¾ acre urban farm).

However, this year the early springtime garden routine got much easier, thanks to a little IoT enabling. As part of the process of growing food from seed, I typically spend an inordinate amount of time every year trying to keep tomato and pepper seedlings alive until they can be planted in the ground. This year, an IFTTT-enabled (IF This Then That, also known simply as IF) greenhouse came to the rescue.

It started with a weekend of cursing at (and constructing) a kit greenhouse at the edge of the vegetable garden. Then, a Netatmo weather station, a WeMo switch, and a small waterproof heater completed the setup.

I set up IF recipes to control the WeMo switch in response to the greenhouse temperature, eliminating the need to turn the heater off and on every morning and night. Next, a barrage of IF alerts to notify us in case something in the system failed (more on this later).

Of course, the night we got all of this up and running, one of Colorado’s Famous Late Spring Blizzards rolled in, dropping almost two feet of slushy snow and knocking out our power for the entire next day. The Netatmo base station just sat there useless with its plug in the wall, while the battery-powered module in the greenhouse kept flinging out its data for nobody to see.

This brings me to an important point. If only the Netatmo base station had a battery backup, or if the Netatmo app had the capability of communicating directly with the module in our greenhouse, all that happened next could have been avoided.

Instead, the first few hours without power were mainly spent hand-wringing, trying to calculate how fast the temperature might be falling in the greenhouse, and wondering aloud about all the horrible ways a seedling rescue mission in a blizzard might backfire. Hours later, with no word from the power crews and the outside temperatures falling fast, my sister and I ventured out into the blinding horizontal snow to retrieve our seedlings. Side note, Leslie was lucky enough to be “stranded” in Hawaii on this particular day (good things happen to good people).

As soon as I opened the greenhouse door, warm air whooshed out. The plants probably would have been fine for several more hours, but the Netatmo module couldn’t tell us that. In the end, most of the seedlings survived the storm – but it would have been a lot easier had we been able to connect to the greenhouse module directly from the Netatmo app during the blackout.

Once the power came back on, the connected greenhouse quickly proved its worth. I set up a bunch of IFTTT recipes to help monitor conditions in the greenhouse and warn us if the temperature got too hot or cold, for example by changing the color of the Philips Hue lights or sending texts.

Another of my favorite new IFTTT recipes connects with Comcast Labs and displays an alert on the TV screen when the greenhouse temperature gets too high. This saved the day one sunny spring morning, when I became distracted by a breaking news report on my way out to open up the greenhouse.

So in summary, IFTTT is a useful tool in the garden as well as the home, and it’s a wonder that any seedlings ever survived in my care without it.

We first dabbled with IFTTT back in 2014, and we’re still finding new ways to use the platform as it integrates with more apps and devices. And we’ve got plenty more favorites to share from our box of IFTTT recipes – so stay tuned!