In the hope of helping everyone grow organic vegetables at home in a more convenient and easy manner, students Nguyen Dang Minh Hung and Pham Hong Sang, both aged 22 and from Da Nang’s Duy Tan University, have developed the ‘Smart Garden’ project. 

A ‘Smart Garden’ model

The project aims to help gardeners monitor their vegetable gardens, anywhere and at anytime, over the Internet through the use of IT applications on laptops, smart phones, tablets and computers.  It is especially useful if they are away from their homes.

The ‘Smart Garden’ project won first prize at the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2016 which took place in Ho Chi Minh City in April, and it represented Viet Nam in the final round of the Imagine Cup for the Asia-Pacific region the same month. 

The national winning project was also on display at an exhibition within the framework of the StartUp Unitour 2 which was held in Da Nang in August.

Student Sang remarked that ‘Smart Garden’ has been developed on the base of the Universal Windows Platform, integrating Azure Machine Learning, Power BI, and other sensors. 

Using the ‘Smart Garden’ software to monitor the garden (Photo: m.duytan.edu.vn)

After gathering and monitoring gardening data, the software offers suggestions about which types of vegetables are most suited to specific environments, and then advises novice gardeners, or ones that are too busy to conduct horticultural research themselves, how to fertilise and care for them.  There is also horticultural information on fertilisation, temperature, humidity and lighting requirements which have been drawn from reliable sources.  

In particular, the system also gives warnings when issues arise, and allows the users to choose the best possible ways to deal with them.  Meanwhile, it automatically waters and fertilises the vegetables when they reach established threshold values. 

‘Smart Garden’ can be used at home or on farms to improve the quality of the vegetables being grown.  Most notably, no pesticides are used in the garden, but the majority of the vegetables are unlikely to be affected by pests anyway thanks to the efficiency of the garden monitoring apps.

The project’s developers happily say that they will deploy their project on an area of 100m² in the months ahead.  They will also help local residents set up organic vegetable gardens at their homes using hydroponic growing methods.  In the near future, these talented students will develop more useful agricultural projects.