Watering the garden is important to do regularly if you want your plants to thrive. [Nikodem Bartnik] built a system to manage it for him, which keeps his garden growing.

The system has an Arduino that controls an irrigation system based around a pump that delivers water from a reservoir. It is paired with a water level sensor to monitor the water available in the system. Moisture sensors are also used to monitor prevailing soil conditions, to ensure that plants are not over- or under-watered. In this case, [Nikodem] designed his own resistive moisture sensor, which proved difficult but taught him a lot. Everything is then packed in a food container to make it waterproof for outdoor installation. A solar panel and charging system were also installed to operate the entire setup without requiring a mains connection.

While this system works, humidity sensors are somewhat unreliable and have a lot of wiring involved. The second revision removed the sensors and used a Pi Pico to implement a simple timer-based irrigation system.

Either way, both systems work and help keep vital water flowing into the garden bed. Automatic plant watering is a bit of a popular topic around, and we’ve seen some great hacks in that realm as of late. Video after the break.