Garden is getting dry. April 21, 2016
Posted by dvgibson in Uncategorized.add a comment
This is turning out to be another spring like last year, very dry when we most expect lots of moisture. Makes me anxious to get back to my soil moisture measuring project.
Today I took Loki’s Grass monitor out to the garden and made a number of measurements. I still need to adjust the range on it but have been very busy on The House at Kittery Point. I find the simple moisture meter from the garden store hard to trust. It depends on currents created by dissimilar metals on the probe and it hard to keep them in contact if the soil is at all loose. It goes from nothing, or negative to something depending on how you wiggle it. On the other hand the conductivity probe seems to be very consistent. I just need to find the range of conductivity that is interesting. Neither 0 or max is interesting. One is air, the other is soaking wet. And get going on an array of these that can be left permanently in place.
Right now I have it as a percentage range, 0 to 100%. The garden is averaging around 81%.
Deep Ocean to Deep Space 