We automate cultivation processes

System. The magic word of modern and efficient gardening. Automatic cultivation systems will take care of regular irrigation and sophisticated control units will ensure optimal climate and lighting for the plants in day or night mode. This even applies in your absence, so if indoor growing grabbed you and won't let go, why not do it systematically like a true professional? You will enjoy higher yields and with the time or energy saved you can do as you please!

Forgetting manual routines and hand-watering is tempting and easy! But a few years ago, if you wanted to get a system for indoor cultivation of vegetables, fruit or herbs at home, the only solution was to pay a lot. Today the market offers a wide range of more or less advanced self-watering systems and control units fortunately rich enough that an enthusiastic beginner as well as a commercial grower can choose with no problem, so literally anyone can cultivate like a pro. This explains the huge popularity of various hydroponic and aeroponic systems nowadays.

Automatic solar irrigation will again allow you to significantly simplify outdoor cultivation, whether it's watering your garden, a field bed, young trees in an orchard, or the English lawn in front of your house.

Efficiency — that's what it's all about...

Before you start automating your current cultivation activities at home and elevate them to a pro level, or if you intend to simplify the beginnings with some basic self-watering system, it's good to clarify a few basic parameters first, similar to when choosing a growbox. The main one is the scale of the planned yield, which most often determines the amount you'll invest in new home cultivation equipment. That, of course, is closely related to the size of the growing area you have available. After that it mainly depends on your budget.

Great yields as a matter of course? Automating primary and supporting cultivation processes will allow you to perfectly optimize growing conditions. You will also save on water, energy and fertilizer consumption.

With the right investment in autonomous systems you no longer need to worry about proper timing and execution of the following processes:

• Day / night mode switching based on entered input parameters
• Automatic irrigation and monitoring of the water level in the reservoir
• Humidity regulation
• Climate monitoring

Another difference lies in whether you want only selected functions worry-free within indoor growing processes, or all of them — in such cases a universal automatic control unit comes in handy for every cultivator, such as the GSE Smart Grow Controller, which has a higher purchase price but provides a full alternative to many other costly devices. The unit handles everything from switching lights, to regulating fans or humidifiers depending on the microclimate, to dosing carbon dioxide.

Less is sometimes more

If you were to take away only one piece of information from this text, remember that plants in general benefit from a lower dose and intensity of watering, but welcome the highest possible watering frequency. And that is precisely why automatic irrigation, compared to time- and physically-demanding hand-watering, always delivers incomparably better harvests!

Now let's introduce the different types and examples of automatic irrigation systems.

Hydroponic systems

A reliable passive type of low-maintenance irrigation is represented by the cultivation systems AutoPot, which work well with all types of growing media.

Among growers with varying experience around the world, the hydroponic systems Atami Wilma are famous; they are a convenient entry ticket into the range of possibilities hydroponics offers and bring joyful harvests even to complete beginners! Higher-end sets also cater to seasoned or commercial cultivators. In the image you can see one of the most sought-after models — Atami WILMA Large.

With this type of drip irrigation the nutrient solution travels through tubes to the top of the pots where it soaks directly into the substrate and each plant then takes exactly what it needs. That applies to water with nutrients as well as oxygen. Additionally nothing goes to waste, because any solution that isn't absorbed is reused later, which brings us back to one of the main reasons to get an automatic system — efficiency. The timer adapts feeding to the individual needs of each plant.

For the roots of large plants, or for cultivating a mother plant, self-watering pots Flo Gro are excellent. Other types of hydroponic systems also include vertical NFT.

Aeroponic systems

We saved the best for last! We mean automatic irrigation systems that require no substrate to operate and will deliver dream-like yields thanks to precise dosing of the solution with ideal oxygen levels. This premise is supported by the fact that NASA also uses similar technology for researching plant cultivation in space. A typical example is the Aeroflo 40 shown in the picture.

We hope this article helped you form a clear idea of what automatic cultivation systems and control units can bring you. Also remember to properly care for hydroponic and aeroponic systems so they operate at one hundred percent for a long time. Feel free to ask us anything you are curious about on this topic. We will gladly answer your questions at the familiar email address info@higarden.cz.

- Hydroponic systems
- AutoPot
- Atami Wilma
- Flo Gro self-watering pots
- Aeroponic systems