Starting a Smart Indoor Garden

What’s at stake?  Are you providing life support or inadvertently executing a death sentence?  Are you improving the system, or adding more dependencies?

Bigger than a window herb garden but smaller than a greenhouse?

A basic, low-cost, reliable, indoor garden is a controlled environment typically in the form of a tent inside a room, inside a garage.  You have one or two AC-powered ventilation fans, recirculating and/or one is the intake and the other is the exhaust.  You have two super bright fluorescent lamps connected to a mechanical/digital timer controlled AC outlet providing the plants with their appropriate light-cycle.  Your plants are contained in soil, or a basic deep water culture hydroponics system. A large plastic reservoir with multiple grow baskets containing clay pellets partially submerged in the nutrient solution being aerated by an aquarium-style air-pump that’s connected to an air-stone, creating bubbles, preventing stagnation, keeping the culture healthy. 

An inexpensive household digital temperature and humidity gauge provides daily readouts including minimums and maximums.

The next “smart” enhancement can be to use a temperature controlled AC outlet for at least one of the fans helping to keep the temperature and humidity in range while reducing the power consumption being used by a continuously operating fan motor.

Next Up:  Digging Deeper into Indoor Gardening

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