Days 50 - 56
Last week, I had a major lockout issue with my plants, so I’ve started monitoring both the irrigation and runoff water closely. I had to do three rounds of flushing, but after that, my lady started to recover, which was a relief!
Since I'm going on vacation for the next 10 days, I’ve been working on setting up an autonomous irrigation system, which I successfully implemented and built yesterday. It uses three 12V water pumps controller by Arduino Uno via H-Bridge motor drivers, each dedicated to one plant. The system runs from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m., delivering around 250 mL of water per plant per session. This means each plant will get approximately 2.5 liters of water per day.
I’ve mixed all the nutrients in advance. I know the ideal scenario would be to add the fertilizers just before each irrigation session, but unfortunately, that’s not possible. Still, it’s better than nothing. The system has been running smoothly since this morning, and so far, the cycle works fine. I’ll improve it further when I get back from vacation.
To prevent any future lockout issues, I’ve extended the irrigation cycles throughout the day to ensure the coco stays consistently moist.