We’ve been discussing at work about how one would automate some of their garden maintenance. My yard isn’t really supportive of a automated mower as the majority of it is front facing, and I don;t really want one to get stolen.

Instead, I thought I’d look at what i could do regarding watering and monitoring. So far i only have the monitoring part in place – but the electronics for a watering system have been shipped.

I have two mi flora / flower care modules that I’ve hooked into my home assistant platform using a miflora-mqtt. It’s running on a raspberry pi that I’ve put in the corner of my house near the front and side yards. But the range seems good. The modules are easily a good 5-10m from the sensor and they are reporting in every 30 minutes as needed.

Ill probably push the report time out shortly to hourly or longer because I don’t need 30 minute updates on the status of the lawn, but hopefully it will be useful when the watering system is added.

The homeassistant configuration required was pretty minimal – I’ve committed back my config to git.

I also changed the miflora-mqtt daemon to force_update the last updated date to always send the current date, even if nothing has changed. This way i can monitor that the sensor is actually reporting in as needed.