Make Your Own Elegantly-Designed Smart Indoor Herb Garden

Apartment dwelling and gardening tend to be mutually exclusive. Unless you’re particularly lucky, there isn’t going to be a small plot of land available for you to plant your vegetables in. But you can get house plants and even grow herbs inside. You can put many kinds of herbs in a small planter by a window that gets sunlight, but it’s easier to use an herb garden. There are many indoor herb gardens on the market that feature some kind of artificial light source so you don’t need to make space by a window. But if you’re crafty, you can follow Sunyecz22’s tutorial to build your own elegant smart indoor herb garden.

This smart herb garden has plenty of great features, but I’ll just be honest and tell you that the reason I’m writing this article is because the design really appeals to me. It’s minimalist in the best kind of way, without sliding into the Apple-esque design territory that most of the indoor herb gardens on the market seem to occupy. The planter area is sectioned off into four quadrants, and each has its own moisture sensor to monitor the soil. A large grow light sits over the plants and provides artificial sunlight. You can program that light to turn on and off at the optimal cycle for your herbs, and the planter will tell you when you need to do some watering.

This herb garden’s “smart” capabilities are handled by an Arduino Mega board. That was only chosen because Sunyecz22 had it on hand, and just about any Arduino board would probably work. The display is a 2.8” TFT touchscreen Arduino Shield from Adafruit. A DS3231 RTC module keeps accurate time. The light comes from a simple strip of LEDs. The soil moisture sensors are common LM393-based models. Interestingly, the enclosure was 3D-printed and then covered in a red oak wood veneer — a technique we haven’t seen in this context before. The top where the LEDs are housed is made from thin aluminum sheet that was bent into shape. The Arduino code to get the smart features working is provided, so you should have no trouble setting this up in a day once you have all of the components. Then you’ll have herbs growing indoors in no time!