xperimentia

At the suggestion of a friend I decided to start this blog about my experiments with sustainable gardening, garden automation and computer programming. I have worked in the retail nursery business, horticultural pest control, the computer industry, the printing industry, and most recently for a company that produces sensor based science education equipment and curriculum.

I am now retired and have been working to implement gardening methods that make use of natural processes and resources. The climate where I live is considered arid and irrigation is necessary for optimum growth of most food plants. With a growing population and diminishing availability of fresh water it is vitally important that we use available resources as efficiently as possible.

With that goal in mind I have been exploring techniques in automated drip irrigation to which I will be adding weather based irrigation scheduling. Imagine a system that could irrigate your garden with just the right amount of water for optimum growth based on the weather conditions. We’re not there yet but it is an exciting challenge.

I have long been interested in computer programming and even spent a year learning to program IBM system 360 mainframes back in 1969. At one point I even entered a short program I wrote by typing it directly into a keypunch machine which output a stack of punch cards. Lately I have been working in the Python programming language to develop a customizable open source irrigation control system.

There will certainly be many side branches to this blog as time goes on. I hope you will find something of interest and maybe even something useful.

Dan K.