Raspberry Pi Pico as a sensor?

[cold niche]

I am planning on building soil moisture sensors for my plants. Now i want to use a raspberry pi pico 2. Will it be powerful enough to power the sensor itself and also a Zigbee module? Is there zidbee modules that don't connect over USB but serial connectors? Also, will they need some additional code to work or are there libraries that enable me to just run my moisture measurement sensor and then send it over zigbee? I have no experience with coding with the zigbee protocol

[marble atlas]

Does it absolutely have to be Zigbee? I've heard it's really quite difficult to build a custom Zigbee device, but wifi is easy. Perhaps you could install ESPHome on the Pico to make it even easier?

I looked a while back and didn't find a single project linking either a Pico or ESP32 to Home Assistant using Zigbee (and for Pico I assume you'd first need to connect it to a zigbee radio chip). I'd be keen to hear if one exists though

[cold niche]

It doesn't HAVE to be zigbee, but I didn't want to clutter my wifi network even more. Although modern routers should be able to handle dozens of connected devices...

Would be a cool challenge to make it work with zigbee, but I'd have to learn everything about the protocol first...

[crisp harness]

Why reinvent the wheel? There's https://a.co/d/ar1BQjO or if you want an alternative you can do https://a.co/d/8RenRhx with https://a.co/d/efyaSXD and do the ecowitt integrations within HA