Gardens are amazing things. Most people think of a garden as a small-to-modest sized space in which to grow vegetables in their back yard. Gardeners improve their soil with compost, fertilizer, tilling, and weeding. They plant seeds in the spring and watch them sprout an grow. Their care continues until the harvest is ready and fresh fruits and vegetables make it to the dinner table.
This is certainly ONE type of garden. But there are others too. For the purpose of this blog, a garden is a purposeful effort to control an environment so desirable living things will grow. While fruits and vegetables are still important, our garden list now includes everything from microbes to mammals!
But, as a gardener of any type can tell you, this can take a lot of time. And, if your environment needs fine control, it can be a full time job - just ask a research microbiologist! So, why not automate some of the more mundane, time consuming tasks? Instead of laboring over fruits, enjoy the fruits of your machine's labor.
This seems like a noble goal (and it's probably a theme in any Utopian science fiction story). The problem is it takes an enormous amount of time to automate any task. And, when you add in maintenance on the machines, small-scale automation doesn't often save time. But, sometimes it makes a particular garden possible. And, for me, it makes gardening that much more fun.
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