I recently bought some house plant seeds via a mail order seed company. I don’t seem to have the knack of caring for the seeds though. I followed the instructions on the packet but don’t seem to be having much luck in getting any of the seeds to sprout. I am thinking that next time I attempt this I will need some automation on my side. When I was looking into what some other people had done I came across this DIY Soil Moisture Sensor on The Cheap Vegetable Gardener site. There is also lots of cool information on the site for monitoring and controlling plant growing. If you have an extra PC case kicking around you can get some use out of that too!
“You should calibrate the sensor by getting a reading with the probe dry then again when it is full saturated in water. Ironically, the probe I made was almost exactly specifications as the one I repurposed from a cheap commercial soil moisture sensor so I didn’t even have to modify the constants on the automated computerized grow box software.”