Introduction

Last autumn, I took apart my old wooden picnic table. This year I used it to create a slightly elevated 2×2 m² vegetable garden. To monitor its growth, I used the rest of the wood to create a crane that hangs over the garden. On that crane I installed a Raspberry Pi 3 computer and a webcam. Four times a day, at 9, 12, 15, and 18 o’clock, a picture of this garden is taken. As the wood I used for the crane was old and warped, the pictures taken are a bit out of whack. Furthermore, often they seem to be overexposed as well.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how the vegetable garden is doing over time.

The 2×2 m² garden elevated vegetable garden

I am growing the following vegetables in my vegetable garden:

• A mix of six leafy lettuce
• Nut lettuce
• Chives
• Carrots (Napoli F1)
• Radishes
• Green beans, which are yellow

They are grown in the square garden according to the following schema:

Rest of the garden

In the rest of the garden I grow:

• Potatoes (13 plants)
• Onions (about 5 m²)
• Raspberries, both red and golden variety (about 13 m²)
• Strawberries (about 9 m²)
• Blackberries (about 6 m²)
• Redcurrant (3 bushes)
• White currant (2 bushes)
• Goose berries (2 bushes)
• Plums (1 tree)
• Apples (2 trees)
• Some herbs

And I’ve got a grassy patch I let naturalize to see what happens.

Setting up the monitoring system

Setting up the garden monitoring system was relatively easy. I use the following bash script (take_picture.sh) to take a picture:

#!/bin/bash
fswebcam -q -r 1920x1080 --no-banner ~/garden/`date +%F@%H:%M`.jpg

This script takes a picture and saves it with a name like 2016-05-28@15:00.jpg. By putting in my crontab,

0 9,12,15,18 * * * /home/pi/bin/take_picture.sh 

it is run automatically four times a day. Unfortunately, I found that the webcam driver would crash now and then, which meant I had to restart the computer to get it to take pictures again. As a quick fix, I added the following line to the root crontab:

35 8,11,14,17 * * *  /sbin/shutdown -r now

Now, after taking a picture and pushing it to my server, it will restart the computer to be ready to take the next picture. I push the photos taken to my server using rsync.