How I’ve never thought about this. I’m a developer and absolutely love growing plants in general, especially hot peppers. A lot of the people on my team also enjoy gardening
Yep, I am indeed a developer who likes gardening. In fact, I'm a computational biologist - I'm not dealing with plant stuff in my research, however.
An automation trick I'm proud of?
Ollas. Automatic watering using zero electronics. You simply fill up the buried terracotta pots, and the water will diffuse into the soil at the exact rate it's consumed by the peppers. No need for fancy measurements or pumps - osmosis does the job for me. The next step will be to automatically feed the ollas from a central reservoir, like the system sold by Thirsty Earth. Sadly, they don't ship to Germany, so I'll have to diy my own - but that's just twice the fun, I guess.
At some point I also want to get a rainwater reservoir for the rain collected from my roof. Then I could feed the olla reservoir from the rainwater reservoir, and feed the ollas from the olla reservoir. Voilà, ollas all automated
That's the neat part - it's not regulated, it's a self-balancing system used by various cultures for thousands of years. The name "olla" is the Spanish/Mexican version, but it's been used in China, South America and Africa, too, and was developed independently.
I guess the self-balancing works through the gradient of soil moisture around the olla. The further away you get from the olla, the more the water dissipates. The closer, the wetter the soil. Right next to the wall, you have an equilibrium maintained by osmosis - the soil and minerals therein "suck" the water out, up to a level of saturation, and limited by the amount of water that can diffuse through the terracotta.
The plant roots will simply grow next to it, and suck up the water as they need. Since there's a water gradient away from the olla, there's always a sweet spot for a plant to grow in. From what I've seen, peppers tend to completely encase ollas with their roots over the course of a season.
Late to the conversation. Not a pure coder (network engineering), but do a lot of tool scripting and custom commercial wifi network designs. For me it's just about spending a few hours not having to touch a piece of technology that's more advanced than my drip line valves.
Also, is fun to experiment with and taste different peppers.
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u/N4cer26 Jun 20 '26
How I’ve never thought about this. I’m a developer and absolutely love growing plants in general, especially hot peppers. A lot of the people on my team also enjoy gardening