<![CDATA[Sustained environmental monitoring of horticultural crops in open fields is difficult to perform manually, and single-link wireless sensor networks confine coverage to the range of one radio hop. This study developed and evaluated a mesh-based Internet of Things system for multi-point monitoring and controlled irrigation. The system comprises five ESP32-C3 Mini nodes carrying DHT22, BH1750 and capacitive soil moisture sensors, and one ESP32 WROOM-32U gateway driving a 12 V relay and pump. Measurements are relayed through painlessMesh, timestamped at the gateway, stored in Firebase Realtime Database and presented on a web dashboard. Network performance was measured over 15 field sessions comprising 1,500 packets, with nodes placed 6.2 to 18.1 m from the gateway. The system achieved a packet delivery ratio of 96.2% and a mean round-trip delay of 398.5 ms; one-hop nodes reached 97.3% and 333.7 ms whereas two-hop nodes reached 94.5% and 495.7 ms. Hop count rather than distance or signal strength governed performance, since two-hop nodes recorded an 11 dB stronger first-hop signal yet delivered fewer packets. Relay nodes drew 71.00 mA against 3.07 mA for leaf nodes, and irrigation operated in both manual and automatic modes.]]>
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