We are having a pumpking growing competition at work and I live in an apartment, so I'm working with what I have 😆
The plant already produced many male flowers. From what I have read, the male flowers usually come out 10 - 14 days before the female flowers. They open up for a single day and then they close and fall off.
I found out that tey are edible, so I stuffed a few of them with some left overs as a culinary experiment.
Yeah, I have three moisture-in-soil sensors inserted around the plant. The idea was to use to them to control the irrigation, but they did not work out.
The sensors are from AZDelivery, these ones. They are connected to an arduino nano which reads the capacitance values and sends them over to a raspberry pi 5. The raspberry pi 5 is connected to a few other sensors (CO2, particle counter, air humidity and temperature all from Sensirion), and there is a 7-inch raspberry pi display that the pi writes images to. I was making a home air quality station but I decided to place everything around the pumpkin instead for now, to see if I could get something interesting out of that. But, so far most of them have not been practically useful.