alt Hacker NewsI'm reminded of that adage "Given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of a game". A fully automated setup is cool, but if it's working well, there's not much to do. You're not gardening any more.
I have a bunch of plants on my window sill, and considered getting moisture sensors and automating watering, but I realised that kind of defeats the point of looking after the plants myself. On top of the satisfaction of manual work, I recently realised that it's taught me an intuition - the quirks of how much water each plant wants at different times of year (even cacti are thirsty in summer!), and how soil composition and pot size affects water retention. It's probably not generally transferable knowledge, but it was fun to realise I'd come to know my plants really well.
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I don't like gardening, so that sounds like a win to me. I can kill any plant. I don't enjoy that. I enjoy having nice plants around me.
We have a gardener who comes to do our garden. I love my garden. I'm totally useless at gardening and while I like the idea of learning it, the opportunity cost against my other ADHD hobbies makes it impractical. So I just walk around and enjoy my garden.
> You're not gardening any more.
You are though. Its the automation you garden now.
the curse of automation
As someone with not much of a "green thumb", I would rather say this lets you keep the pleasant parts of gardening (planting, harvesting and generally enjoying your plants) while automating the chore of regularly watering them.
I think he's farming now.
Th author spent however long on setup and wrote up a blog post. They are doing something different than you, but it’s clear they are also having fun. There is room for two approaches, and I’m not going to tell anyone else their approach “defeats the point,” because we really don’t even have to agree on the point! Glad you enjoy your approach.