Vegetable Gardening for Engineers - Data-driven guide for urban indoor growing
Vegetable Gardening for Engineers is an open-source document that turns home vegetable growing into a systematic, measurable discipline. Frustrated by vague gardening books and clickbait-heavy social media, its creator synthesized knowledge from agricultural university extension programs, commercial seed and fertilizer guides, biology courses, farmer training, and even indoor cannabis cultivation techniques. The guide covers environmental parameters like DLI, EC, pH, and dissolved oxygen, plus growth stages, light, temperature, nutrition, growing media, water, and pests, along with crop data tables and economics. It currently focuses on hydroponics and container gardening for urban apartments and balconies, and welcomes pull requests and feedback.
I created this document out of dissatisfaction with popular gardening books (too little detail) and social media (too much talking and clickbait).
- Joakal
Watering is easy but one can overcomplicate it. Each plant has different water needs. Screw it up, you get likely get root rot or dry soil.
An engineer might analyse the soil and the plant water needs. Inject water to right levels, or set a timer. These settings need to be readjusted constantly without a hydrometer.
I found an ancient solution that worked incredibly efficient and required no electricity and far cheaper than spending hundreds on electronics. Ollas. The science is called capillary action.
I went a step further as an engineer, and did DIY terracotta pots + silicone. Added a testing stage, of course. Filled pots and sealed it over night. If leaking from seal, more silicone. For filling them up, I used irrigation fittings hooked up to a tank. If I wanted to, I could use rain water into tank (with overflow). That way watering is a fully automated pipeline.
I don't have a picture on hand but others have done it like this: https://www.abc.net.au/gardening/how-to/olla-watering-pots/1...
Other fun topics I looked into:
- Companion plants (avoid spending on pesticides)
- Crop rotation (avoid spending on fertilisers)
- Composting (for compost)
Those are not easy to automate but other topics to make it far cheaper to grow crops without trips to nurseries.
- johnthedebs
Gardening is near and dear to me, so I love to see it show up on HN. Thanks for sharing :).
A couple points of feedback that I noticed so far:
1. I wrote a comment here in response to what you said about the tradeoff between growth rate and growth quality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50415982
2. In your section on photoperiodism (https://jrcpl.us/contrib/2020/gardening-for-engineers/#photo...), it seems the examples are backwards. Ie, lettuce is a long-day plant that flowers when days are long, mung bean is a short-day plant that flowers when days are short.
- khalidahmad
every engineers loves gardening for the end of career
- schiffern
https://jrcpl.us/contrib/2020/gardening-for-engineers/img/te...
>Crucially, there is a tradeoff between growth rate and growth quality. Higher temperatures can result in faster growth but also thinner stems, weaker roots, and less flavor.
Doing the calculus graphically, we should expect this "quality optimum" lies just uphill of the inflection point of the curve (between T_base and T_opt), yes?
- naejin
Growing food is very complex, probably too complex for our brains. And I believe we will have to learn again how to grow food without our current support systems one day. I'm building projectcanopi.com toward that goal.