Arduino project: Garduino = Garden + Arduino (indoors)

This had to be the next Arduino project to highlight.  Given the coming garden season, yet still too early for many to get onto the garden or have their plants outdoors.

The image of this working Garduino may not show much as far as the arduino, but you can probably notice the wire coming from the left plant bucket and of course, notice that this is inside, on a window sill.

It is hard to tell if this Garduino instructable is the first of its kind, but the comments section shows this project was created at least four years ago.

If you are ready to start getting ready to garden and are still stuck indoors with your plants, manually taking care of them, then this instructable by liseman is probably for you.

As liseman notes on that Garduino instructable:
"Garduino is a gardening Arduino. So far, Garduino:
-Waters my plants whenever their soil moisture level drops below a predefined value.
-Turns on grow lights, but only when it's dark out and only long enough to make the plants get 15 hours of total light (sunlight + supplemental light) daily.
-Alerts me if the temperature around the plants drops below 50 degrees."

This is a 14 step project and is probably quite time consuming, although most gardening is.

But as far as cost, this is what liseman claims:
"I built this using recycled / free materials wherever I could think to. It cost significantly less than $100 in total."

In the project, you will be putting together relays, a watering and lighting system, moisture, light, and temperature sensors, preparing the plants in their beds, so you need plants / seeds, pots, and proper soil.

Finally, you will need the following miscelaneous tools and equipment:

• Multimeter
• Wire stripper
• Solder
• Electrical tape
• 3 ~10k-ohm resistors 
• 1 ~210-ohm resistor (for the LED) 
• several feet 22-gauge wire 
• 1 Arduino (in my case a Duemanilove, but any should work) 
• 1 Protoshield (Ladyada's model) 
• 1 mini circuit board 
• Hot glue gun, with glue   

I guess technically, this is only a ten step process, as step 1 is getting your parts and step 12, 13 and 14 are just reminders to enjoy, share, and improve.

There's no easy way to say this, and this is just a reminder, but this will probably take time to do.  Days if not a week or two.  But again, since gardening, especially indoors, is a practice of love, then time is what you give.

Also, you don't have to think that you must have the electronic bits in place before you begin.  You can plant your seeds and get them started and then you can add the garduino as you make it ready.

Good luck with this project.  You shouldn't need it, and hopefully the amount of work doesn't scare you off.  The instructions, plus the control software, is clear enough that it shouldn't actually be too difficult to do.