Getting started with outdoor soil automation
From hand-watering to hands-off
Our 27.87 m² garden in Pilisvörösvár grows napa cabbage and carrots — and for the first season it ran itself. Here is exactly how the outdoor soil setup is automated with Verdalio, from the soil-moisture sensors in the ground to the weather-aware irrigation schedule that decides when the valves open.
The hardware
The bed is split into two irrigation zones, each with a Zigbee soil-moisture probe buried at root depth and a 12 V solenoid valve on the drip line. A single Sonoff ZBDongle-P coordinator on the Raspberry Pi 5 hub pairs all of it — no gateway app, no cloud account, no vendor lock-in.
- 2× Zigbee soil-moisture probes (cheap, ML-calibrated on the hub)
- 2× solenoid valves on the drip manifold
- 1× rain/temperature reading pulled from the local weather feed
The recipe
The whole grow is described by a recipe — portable growing instructions that say what the plant needs, not what brand of pump you own. For napa cabbage the recipe keeps soil moisture in a soft band and holds back irrigation when rain is forecast in the next 12 hours. When a probe reads dry and no rain is coming, the matching zone valve opens for a measured pulse, then re-checks.
Local-first, all season
Because the automation runs entirely on the Raspberry Pi, the garden kept watering correctly even on the days our home internet dropped. That is the whole point of local-first: your plants don't die because a server went down. The cloud is optional — it is only there for remote check-ins and push alerts when you are away.
Want to build something similar? Start with the commissioning checklist before you trust any automation with living plants.