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Conditions

Conditions is your garden’s live environment in one place: what each bed is doing right now from its sensors, what the weather is about to do, and which beds need attention. It joins the weather forecast we already pull from Open-Meteo with the readings your sensors push through Home Assistant, so you can see at a glance whether a bed is dry or a frost is coming.

What you see

The page is summary-first, top to bottom:

  • The summary strip — average soil moisture across your beds, a count of beds needing attention, average soil temperature, and the current weather. The attention tile turns amber when something needs you.
  • Needs attention — a short list of the actual problems: a bed reading below its alert band (“Bed 3 soil moisture low, 18%”) and weather risks from the forecast (frost, heat, heavy rain, high wind). Frost is the headline. When everything is in range, it says so.
  • Per-bed cards — one card per bed that has sensors, showing each reading’s value, a status dot, and a light 24-hour trend (up, down, or steady). Beds that need attention sort to the top.
  • 5-day weather — the forecast for your garden’s location, kept as context.
  • Your garden now — with a connected weather station, your station’s live air temperature, humidity, wind, and rain, plus how your garden compares to the region right now (“your garden runs 2°F warmer than the region”). Without a direct connection, this is the microclimate readout from a Home Assistant station, if you have one.

Status and thresholds

Each reading is judged against optimal and alert bands. A reading inside its band is ok (green); below its alert floor or above its alert ceiling is a breach (red) and shows up in the needs-attention list.

GardenOS ships sensible defaults per sensor type so this works the moment a sensor reports:

  • Soil moisture: ideal 40 to 70%, alerts below 25% or above 90%.
  • Soil temperature: ideal 50 to 85°F, alerts below 40°F or above 95°F.
  • Soil pH: ideal 6.0 to 7.0, alerts below 5.5 or above 7.5.
  • Air humidity: ideal 40 to 70%.
  • Air temperature, rainfall, wind, solar, and EC are shown for information, with no default alert band.

You can override any of these per sensor in Garden settings → Sensors. Your override wins; anything you leave unset falls back to the default.

The weather risks use these defaults: frost when the overnight low is at or below 36°F, heat at or above 90°F, heavy rain at or above 1 inch in a day, high wind at or above 25 mph.

Stale readings

A reading older than six hours is marked stale and shows its age. Stale readings are kept off the averages and out of the attention list, so a sensor that stopped reporting overnight does not quietly skew your morning summary or raise a false alarm.

No sensors yet

With no sensors connected, Conditions still shows the weather and points you to Garden settings → Sensors to set them up. Sensors are configured there and push readings through Home Assistant to the ingest endpoint; once they report, beds appear here automatically.

Connecting a weather station

On the Advanced plan you can connect your own home weather station directly, without Home Assistant. GardenOS supports Ambient Weather stations today.

In Garden settings → Sensors, open the Weather station card, enter your Ambient API key and application key, then pick the station for this garden. Your keys are encrypted and stored server-side; they are never shown again or sent back to your browser. Once connected, Conditions shows your garden’s live conditions, the microclimate comparison, and a frost-now or heat-now alert in the needs-attention list when your station’s own reading crosses the threshold. That live reading is more accurate than the regional forecast because it is your garden’s air right now.

GardenOS reads your station when the Conditions page loads, at most once every ten minutes, so it stays well under the provider’s rate limit. If the station is unreachable or the keys stop working, Conditions keeps showing the last reading with an “as of” time and falls back to the regional weather; the connection’s health shows in the Weather station card. Disconnecting removes the connection and your stored keys.

A direct connection and a Home Assistant station can coexist. The direct station is used for your garden’s current conditions.

Setting your garden’s location

Location is set per garden in Garden settings → Garden → Location / growing zone. Enter your city or postcode and GardenOS resolves it to coordinates. The weather and the microclimate comparison both use it. If location is missing, the weather panel prompts you to add it.

Tips

  • Check Conditions before planning a heavy workload week. A run of rain or a heat spike should change what you prioritise.
  • Frost is the anchor for the season planner and AI proposals. If suggestions feel off for your season, confirm your growing zone and location are set correctly.
  • The attention list flags what is wrong; it does not act on it. Turning a dry bed into a watering task stays with the task proposer, which reads the same readings.
  • Conditions is as-of-page-load. Reload to pull the latest readings and forecast.