A FarmBot waters a bed of herbs and vegetables.
Courtesy FarmBot

Plot an Edible Home Garden With This Automated, Open-Source Bot

By Aileen Kwun
April 25, 2020
1 minute read

Between homeschooling, working from home, and/or cooking at home more than ever, many of us are spending our days staying put. But that doesn’t necessarily mean there are more hours in the day. If you’re fortunate enough to have a garden or a plot of outdoor space at your disposal, the task of starting an edible home garden might be a more manageable prospect than you think, thanks to an automated, open-source system called FarmBot that’s been slowly cultivating a fan base of users online. Controlled using an app, and assembled from a kit of parts, the CNC bot uses a series of tools to perform a range of functions—it can seed, weed, and even measure the soil’s moisture content, as well as factor in the weather forecast as it waters on a programmed schedule. Describing it as “a really big 3-D printer, but for plants,” creator Rory Aronson, who began designing FarmBot while taking an organic agriculture class at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, has said that he hopes that his contraption might one day become as ubiquitous as any other home and kitchen appliance. “Just like everyone has a refrigerator and a washing machine and a dryer, maybe you have a Farmbot, too... You turn on your faucet and water comes out; you go out into your backyard and there’s food that’s been grown for you.”