Automated gardening systems are growing environments controlled in part or entirely by technology. This in turn lowers or eliminates labor demands on the grower. Cannabis cultivators need to continually monitor and modify many factors throughout the grow cycle to ensure the highest-quality and quantity yields possible. These factors include watering schedules, nutrient cycles, fresh air exchange, lighting, and temperature.
Controlling all of these factors manually every day can be quite time-consuming and labor-intensive. Perhaps less so for those overseeing small operations in their bedrooms, but much more so for larger-scale and industrial, growing operations. Regardless of the size of a grow, all growers can benefit in some way from automation, a term that refers to the automatic completion of a task at the hands of technology.
YOU CAN IMPLEMENT AUTOMATION TOO
Small home-growers may choose to only implement automation into a small aspect of their grow, such as lighting. Large-scale growers can greatly benefit from automating as many of their systems as possible in order to free up time and energy. Full automation allows growers to leave their crop unattended for fairly long periods of time.
Automation technology can replace pretty much every aspect of manual work. If you are new to this domain and want to try it out, start off by replacing one system at a time with some form of automation, and see how it works for you.
THE ENVIRONMENT DICTATES DEMANDS
Demands for automation change vastly depending on the growing environment. Outdoor plants usually require much less automation as they receive light from the sun, some water from the rain, and natural fresh air exchange. However, automated watering through irrigation can greatly assist plants in drier regions.
Plants cultivated indoors or within greenhouses are ultimately being grown in an environment unnatural to them. This makes them more reliant on technology in order to survive and thrive, and more technology means more opportunities to develop automated systems. Factors such as humidity and temperature are especially important within indoor settings.
TIMERS
Timers are one of the staples within automated grow-ops, and are also one of the simplest forms to set up. Timers can be used to facilitate different aspects of climate control indoors, and therefore have the potential to greatly lower overall labor and repetition of tasks.
One area in which timers are often used is lighting. During the vegetative phase of the grow cycle for photoperiod strains, a light cycle of 18–24 hours a day is often used. During the flowering stage, a light cycle of 12 hours on and 12 hours off is applied. This means that growers have to visit their tent on a daily basis to manage just one of the many demands of their crop. This can also cause problems when growers need to travel and leave their plants unattended.
An analogue or digital timer can be rigged up to the lighting system to fully automate this task at different points throughout the grow cycle. This simple adjustment to the system makes lighting completely automated. Yet lighting isn’t the only use for timers in grow operations; they can also be used to automate fans, pumps, and CO₂ systems. Both analogue and digital timers can get the job done.
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