Nowadays, the impact of agricultural inputs on the environment, especially in surface and groundwater resources is a critical aspect of current and future agricultural practices. At the same time, the economic sustainability of modern farming demands an ever more efficient use of agricultural inputs. In addition, the potential challenges imposed by climate change on agricultural production are also a major concern. As a consequence, in recent years, many organizations such as The United Nations are promoting the concept of Climate-Smart Agriculture as agriculture that sustainably increases productivity, enhances adaptation through increasing resilience, enhances mitigation through reducing or removing greenhouse gases  where and when possible, and enhances achievement of national food security and development goals. In order to achieve agricultural systems that are socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable, it is imperative that water resources and other agricultural inputs are used efficiently. This will require the development and adoption among growers of affordable and effective precision agricultural and irrigation technologies to enable farmers to apply water and other inputs when, where, and in the amount needed to increase profits and protect the environment. Soil moisture sensing is one of the technologies farmers can adopt to properly schedule irrigation, which has been shown to potentially increase profits while protecting the environment. Although many systems are commercially available for soil moisture monitoring, a number of factors still limit their adoption for irrigation scheduling among commercial growers. Consequently, irrigation scheduling decisions in most commercial farming operations are still based on “the condition of the crop”.

For example, found that around 95% of growers in South Carolina used “the condition of the crop” to decide when to irrigate, which exceeded the national average of around 80%. The factthat most farmers are basing irrigation scheduling decisions mainly on “the condition of the crop” could potentially create considerable production, profitability, and environmental problems. In recent years, however, there has been considerable development in open-source electronics, wireless data communication and Internet-Of-Things technologies that provide opportunities for making soil moisture sensing technologies more accessible and more affordable for commercial growers. Our objective in this study was,indoor garden therefore, to develop and test an affordable wireless communication system for monitoring soil moisture using Decagon EC-5 sensors.The new system was developed to measure soil volumetric water content  from four depths using Decagon EC-5 sensors. The EC-5 sensors were selected for this study because of their affordability and because they had been tested in previous lab and field studies and have been shown to have a fast response that linearly relates to VWC. The EC-5 sensors measure VWC by measuring the dielectric constant of the media using capacitance/frequency domain technology. They need 2.5 – 3.6 VDC  as input and their output voltage is proportional to the VWC and to the input voltage. The sensors were designed to work in the temperature range of −40˚C to +50˚C, requiring a measurement time of 10 ms. Several commercial data loggers are capable of sampling and recording data from the Decagon EC-5 sensors. A portable manual readout  is also available from the manufacturer to manually read the EC-5 sensors. A laboratory calibration experiment was conducted to be able to convert the output of the Decagon EC-5 sensors to VWC . Calibrations equations were derived by correlating the outputs of the sensors measured using the microcontroller against the readings measured with the ProCheck readout. Measurements were taken with four Decagon EC-5 sensors covering a wide range of VWC, from air-dried to saturated soil. The sensors were read using both the microcontroller and ProCheck, with the sensors exposed to six different media. These media included air, water, and four soil samples with different water contents. The soil samples included an air-dried soil, a saturated soil, and two moist soils with different water contents. Each of the four soil samples was first placed in a large container, water was added as needed, the sample was vigorously mixed to obtain a uniform water content, and placed in a 400 mL beaker . In this process, knowing the amount of water added to the soil was not critical, since the target was just to create a range of water contents among the four soil samples, and it was already known from previous work that the sensor’s output was linearly related to changes in VWC.The four sensors were first connected to the micro-controller and readings were taken by alternatively immersing each sensor into the appropriate media.

The sensors were then disconnected from the micro-controller and readings were taken using the ProCheck manual readout. This calibration process was possible since the Decagon EC-5 sensors respond almost instantaneously to changes in soil water status in contact with the sensor, and there is no need to allow for the readings to stabilize for a long time.Women are more susceptible to depression postpartum . The incidence and prevalence of postpartum depression are about 10%, respectively . Many women who have postpartum depression often hesitate to consult a specialist due to the difficulty of going to the hospital with an infant or having trouble with medication while breastfeeding . Postpartum depression, if left untreated, may increase the risk of severe or chronic illness  and may lead to child neglect , so measures are needed to reduce the physical and psychological burden on mothers after childbirth. There are many efforts to improve postpartum depression . Much of the support for postpartum mothers comes in the form of attending support events held at support centers and other agencies. If mothers themselves are reluctant to go out, or if their homes are too far away from the support center, they may feel too lazy to go out with their infants and toddlers; the support they get will not reach them if they are not willing to do so. Postpartum women with infants can feel more comfortable taking care of themselves if they have ways to take care of their moods at home right away, before their mood swings and stress levels worsen. We focused on horticultural activity as a way to care for ourselves at home.However, the effects of horticultural activity on postpartum women who are susceptible to significant temporary stress have not studied. This study was an exploratory study to determine what psychological changes postpartum women felt through gardening by asking them to fill out an open-ended questionnaire about how they felt through horticultural activity.The present study was an exploratory pilot study. The Research Ethics Committee of Iwate Medical University approved all procedures. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants. The Helsinki Declaration performed all procedures. This study recruited 15 women  of about one year after childbirth. The women had no experience in the habitual horticultural activity. They planted and nurtured plants, weeded, and gathered the flowers they grew in their horticultural activities. This activity was guided by a facilitator with experience in horticultural activities. The women asked to fill in their free description after the horticultural activity. Text mining was used as data analysis, and the analysis software used KH Coder 3 . First, the components were extracted by text mining to check the frequency distribution of occurrence.

The constructs were counted above the threshold of 2 . Next, a stratified cluster analysis was performed to attempt to organize the categories that comprise it. Additionally, to summarize the frequency of occurrence of extracted words and the relationship between extracted words, a co-occurrence network diagram was drawn. The co-occurrence network diagram shows the strength of co-occurrence between words with similar patterns. The circles’ size indicates the frequency of the words, and the distance of the lines connecting the circles indicates the depth of the association. In the present analysis, the Jaccard coefficient was used to calculate the co-occurrence relation, which indicates the association’s strength, and the analysis was conducted with the minimum number of occurrences of the extracted words as two and the number of drawings as 75.A stratified cluster analysis before the activity is shown in Figure 1. The analysis results showed that the descriptions are divided into six categories of time and plants in life: emotional experiences with plants, active involvement with plants, hydroponic farming growing flowers, enjoyment of touching the soil, and everyday emotions. The results of the stratified cluster analysis after the activity are shown in Figure 2. The analysis revealed five categories of emotional experiences related to flowers, feeling, active engagement with plants, movements, and parenting similarities. Figure 3 shows the co-occurrence network diagram of the first free-standing. The co-occurrence network diagram shows six subgraphs before the onset of horticultural activity. The first group includes extraction words such as “increase”, “bloom”, “water”, “time”, “color”, and “green”, which can be summarized as related to the horticultural activity itself. Similarly, the word connections extracted for each group revealed that the second and third groups could be grouped into “feelings of touching the soil” and “visual experience of plants”. The co-occurrence network diagram of the post-activity descriptions is shown in Figure 4. The co-occurrence network diagram after the horticultural activity shows four subgraphs. The first group containing the most frequently occurring extraction words contains the keywords “flower” and “bloom”, which can be summarized as “flowers”. Similarly, looking at the connections between the words extracted for each group, it was found that the second group can be summarized as “an emotional experience through plants”. Other groupings were “parenting” and “visual experience of plants”.This study was an exploratory study using text mining to examine how postpartum women’s moods changed before and after engaging in the horticultural activity. Consequently, before the start of gardening activity, phrases related to theplants themselves were heavily used, but after the horticultural activity, phrases related to the positive emotional experience through the plants were increasingly used.

In the present study, the most frequent word that frequently appeared before horticultural activities was “growing” , and it was clear that they had an image of growing plants. The next most frequently occurring words were “flower”  and “plant” , which were common nouns for plants. On the other hand, the word that appeared most frequently after horticultural activities was “flower” , which was a common noun that indicated familiarity with flowers and the next most common words that appeared were “growing” and “fun” , indicating active involvement and emotional experience. There has been no study of the extraction of emotional experiences using text mining for horticultural activity. As a close area of study, Koga and Iwasaki examine the healing effects of greenery using text mining . In their study, they asked to write freely about their green usage patterns and their emotional experiences, and text mining was used to extract frequent words. As a result, the most frequent word was “flower”, followed by “looking”, and most respondents were familiar with flowers and had many visual experiences with plants . In the case of our study participants, they had no daily gardening experience, and the words that came up before they started horticultural activity were words to describe “growing” and the plants themselves. By engaging in horticultural activity, not only words related to plants such as “flower” and “growing” and “bloom” but also words such as “fun” and “think” were increased in number, indicating that positive emotions were increased by horticultural activity. Regarding the co-occurrence network of the present study, before the horticultural activity, the groupings were “horticultural activity itself”, “feeling of touching the soil”, and “visual experience of plants”. Free descriptions also indicated that before horticultural activities, “It’s good to have more greenery in my life” and “I try my best to water the plants”. The statements “I enjoy touching the soil” and “touching the soil makes me feel calm” extracted that touching the soil was healing to them. After the horticultural activity, they were grouped as “flowers”, “emotional experience through plants”, “parenting”, and “visual experience of plants”. Slightly different from before the horticultural activity, many felt happy and joyful when the flowers were bloom, as in “it feels good to have flowers in bloom” and “it’s fun to see the flowers bloom one after another”.