Minimum Viable Product

For me, whose idea of gardening is to throw gobs of native plant wildflower seeds around the yard and see what sticks, implementing permaculture is daunting. I experimented for a few years in replacing our grass with clover as an environmentally friendlier alternative. However, clover doesn’t grow well in shady areas. I also noticed that the raspberries I planted in the sun thrived in comparison to those in the shade.

I decided that sunlight was the most important data for improving the plant health in the backyard. The minimum viable product, then, will be a small set of sensors in the backyard that tracks the amount of sunlight in different areas. That way I can find the sunniest parts of the yard and take full advantage of their growth potential, while choosing plants that tolerate shade for the rest of the yard.

In the future, we can add sensors for temperature and humidity, and larger numbers of sensors, but this will be a good minimum viable product for the end-to-end flow of data.