So, we touched very briefly on the topic of garden automation yesterday. And, we want to talk about it more. This topic is a lot more broad and misunderstood than people give it credit for.
Automation of the garden is not a sufficient substitute for the care of a garden. This is probably the most fundamental mistake that unsuspecting “garden automator’s” make. A lot of budding gardeners think, “Oh, if I can just automate watering of my garden, everything will grow perfectly and do well!” Just get a watering timer and it’s all good!
We’d even put ourselves in that category that might make people “think” this is true. And nothing could be further from the truth.
The focus that a lot of “garden automators” are missing is that advanced gardeners automate watering to free themselves up to care for other, more important things about their garden and plants! It isn’t so we can “ignore” our gardens and get to other “life things.”
We have a lot of “low touch, high quality” gardens in our repertoire. And one thing we’re often NOT doing is automating our watering efforts.
Quality plants, that are trained to get water from roots that go down a foot or two into the ground, simply need to be tended to less often. When plants are brought into proper maturity, they really only need to be watered every 2 to 3 days at most. Even in “warm” conditions.
Even more fundamental to water, plants need access to nutrition. As humans, we know that we can survive weeks without food, but only days without water. While the math is slightly different for plants, the overarching concept is the same. Nutrition is just as important as regular watering and if you’re not doing well on that front, your plants won’t be either. Especially if we’re talking “thriving” versus “being alive.”
Another big miss is weed mitigation. We grow in containers because it’s a whole lot easier to manage a small amount of soil for those weeds. Where we’re using wide expanses of native soils, we use high quality weed fabric to keep down native grasses and weeds. When we can’t use weed fabric due to high planting density? We plant so many fast growing plants that native weeds don’t have a chance. Major plant competition among your plants is far more of a source of failure than infrequent watering!
And these other, “more important things,” are tremendously difficult to automate. We do some of this kind of automation here at Frosty Garden, like using centrally fertigated sub irrigation growing techniques. (This is the practice you see in our outdoor pepper and greenhouse gardens.) But, outside of this, we have literally zero automation of fertility, weeding and general plant care. Honestly, that’s probably the most important aspects of the northern garden!
Like humans, plants need more than just water to survive. Sure, they can survive on “just water” for some time, but they definitely will not thrive. Achieving a “thriving” garden involves a number of different efforts that involve your plants environment, surroundings, access to food, ability to photosynthesize and a general tending to their needs. Basically, everything you are there to help them with.
We are “tech enthusiasts” here at Frosty Garden, so we’re uniquely poised to tell you that gardening doesn’t need another “watering computer.” Gardening isn’t missing some precise timer or a circuit to tell things to “do this one thing at this exact moment!”
No. It doesn’t work like that. Gardening requires care. Concern for one’s plants. A desire to help them do well. A need to understand what the plant needs and tending to those things. None of these things work on a precise schedule.
And if you tend to these “other things,” your garden will thrive, far more than by simply automating watering!
