Grow box during the summertime – UPDATE
Jul 29, 2009 computer, indoor growbox
UPDATE: With weather climbing my grow box got up to 111.5 degrees today with the lights off. If I was using one of those fancy computers with temperature sensors it would have turned itself off by now. Turning off computer so I will have something working this winter…
[July 25, 2009] I was planning on growing my jalapeno peppers in my grow box this summer, but given the higher than average weather we have been having.
With the weather being in the 90’s 100’s and given the CFLs on average increase the temperature by around 10 degrees the grow box has not been great place to grow plants unless I was thinking of growing cacti. Looking at my historical data the highest temperature this summer was 107.6 111.5 degrees.
As you can see above I have been making some progress on the computerized grow box, which I will plan on writing it up soon…
Tags: cheap, grow lights, growbox, outdoor plants, pepper plants, vegetables
And the GrowVeg subscription goes to…
Mar 31, 2009 computer, free, garden planning, giveaway
There were 57 entries so I had my kids pick a number between 1 and 57 and they decided on 51. So the winner is Robj98168 the 51st commenter, please send me an email using the “Contact” link at the top of the page and I will send you the information to activate your one year subscription.
Thank you for everyone that participated and hope to have more contests in the future.
First ever CVG giveaway – Free one year subscription to GrowVeg.com
Mar 27, 2009 computer, free, garden planning, giveaway
GrowVeg.com has graciously offered us a free one year subscription to their site ($25 value) to give away. To enter simply enter a comment to this post and a name will be randomly selected using some sort of complicated means.
We will pick a winner in a few weeks but if you can’t wait to get started planning your garden go ahead and sign up for the free 30 day trial and if you are lucky you can continue using it for free. Good luck.
UPDATE: Just for some shameless self promotion, if you mention this contest on your site you are free to add a second comment to double your chances to win.
UPDATE #2: Drawing will be on 03/31/09, so if you have not entered time is running out.
Hardening off plants in the grow box
Mar 22, 2009 computer, computer power control, cucumbers, electronics, indoor growbox, tomato
When you have seedlings growing indoors or a greenhouse during their life they have had the opportunity spending it in a near perfect environment with controlled temperatures, consistent lighting, no wind, etc. If you take this happy plant and move it directly into the wild (your garden) it can, and probably will, go into shock leading to its sudden death. The solution to this problem is to hardening off the plant. This is a process of slowly getting the plant accustomed to the real world environment a couple hours at a time.
You start by bringing the plant outside for two hours in the late evening or early morning hours. If the plant begins to wilt let it recover indoors until it appears healthy again. Each day increasing the amount of time it is exposed to the outdoors over 1-2 weeks period, or until the plant can survive a full day/night outside. At this time it is ready to get its permanent home in your garden.
This process takes a lot of patience, which as they say is a virtue. Unfortunately I believe I am missing this virtue. My history of hardening off plants follows a similar pattern; bring out a plant in the evening with the full intentions of bringing it back in after a few hours, unfortunately I forget and it spends its first day out in the cold all night which normally the demise of my summer plants.
This year I am using my grow box to harden off my plants. Normally the grow box runs at about 68-72 degrees which is a great environment for my seedlings. By allowing some hot air to vent and lowering the maximum temperature setting in the software I am able to bump the temperature down to a range of 57-65 degrees. After a few days I will drop the temperature a few degrees until it has similar low temperature to the outdoors, while still staying at a safe temperature for the plants.
Given today using an unknown neighbor’s weather station we had a high of 48.2F and low of 35.1F I still have some time before I can safely bring my tomatoes/cucumbers outside but they should be toughened (hardening) up and ready to go when it is.
Tags: cheap, garden seeds, growbox, led, outdoor plants, tomato plants, vegetables
Tending your garden with am army of robots
Mar 21, 2009 computer, electronics, garden maintenance
I must say gardening and robotics are a couple of non relating interests, well at least until now. Fortunately some smart students at MIT have joined these two areas into one. I am a little skeptical about the real world implementation of this, I guess if production cost was low enough and you had a large enough green house; a little army of plant tending robots would be a cool site to see.
Either way, this a really cool academic project. See the video below for the robots watering and harvesting some tomatoes.
“The idea for the project came from work done by Nikolaus Correll, a postdoctoral assistant working in Professor Daniela Rus’ Distributed Robotics Lab. Correll, who came to CSAIL in 2007, saw the possible applications of swarm robotics to an agricultural environment. In the long view, the researchers hope to develop a fully autonomous greenhouse, complete with robots, pots and plants connected via computation, sensing and communication. Each robot is outfitted with a robotic arm and a watering pump, while the plants themselves are equipped with local soil sensing, networking, and computation. This affords them the ability to communicate: plants can request water or nutrients and keep track of their conditions, including fruit produced; robots are able to minister to their charges, locate and pick a specific tomato, and even pollinate the plants.”
[via MIT via Make via Gizmodo]
Tags: outdoor plants, tomato plants
Gardening Gadget – EasyBloom review
Mar 18, 2009 EasyBloom, computer, electronics, gadget, garden planning, product review
I will admit, I have a weakness for electronic gadgets, when I got wind of the EasyBloom I just had to try it out. The EasyBloom is a device that has built-in sensors to measure light intensity, humidity, temperature, and moisture content in your soil. It has three basic modes: Recommend, Monitor, and Water.
With the Recommend setting you place the EasyBloom into a location you want to grow something, let it sit there for at least 24 hours, plug it into your computer, and it will provide a detailed analysis of your planting area and provide a list of plants that would thrive in that location.
The Monitor setting allows you to diagnose problems with a particular plant. You first define the type of plant you want to monitor, turn on the device and place it next to the not so healthy plant, water, return 24 hours later, and plug it again into your computer. It will use the data stored in the sensors to give you a diagnosis to what the plant’s ailment might be.. Of course, this will not diagnose various pest or disease issue but can let you know if you have planted a little too early, in the wrong location, or are not watering enough (or too much) based on your soil structure.
Finally it has the water setting which the name should imply, will notify you when you need to water your plants.
To test this thing out I had three locations in mind to take measurements, each of which would provide a huge diversity of readings.
First, I put the EasyBloom in my grow box in the Recommend mode. I have complete control over the temperature and lighting I definitely could confirm the devices accuracy and I expected to see decent diversity of plants recommended. After placing the device in my grow box for almost 24 hours (see missing results below)
Overall the readings were nearly exactly what I expected though I was hoping to get a full sun rating, guess I may need to add an extra bulb to the box. Even with my conditions it did recommend 176 plants that I could grow inside it to maturity, though I am going to demand a rematch after adding a little more light
Second, I brought the sensor and set it up next to my office window. Currently I am growing Lemon Verbena I transplanted from my garden. I wasn’t concerned about moisture content so for this reading I didn’t include the moisture sensor and here were the results that were returned.
After this result I felt a little better about my grow box since it at least it was beating of an eastern facing window sill. With this result the program recommended 92 shade loving plants with Lemon Verbena not being one of them, though I have been providing some supplemental light to the plants.
Finally, I used the EasyBloom on my southern facing fence line plot (where I normally grow my cucumbers and tomatoes) This is where I wondered of the usefulness of EasyBloom to actually give good information about planning a garden in the offseason. Though I can not grow tomatoes outside right now due to cold, would it still let me know that it was still possible. Well here are the readings:
When I put the sensor outside it was raining pretty hard so passed the “weather proof” test. Though it did clear up the next day which is reflected in the “Full Sun” light reading. This was the obvious winner with 3458 plants recommended with the over 5000 in their database.
In conclusion, I will be the first to admit that the EasyBloom would not be on the necessity list for gardening tools, but for a beginning gardener it could provide some valuable incites to help your first few years be much more successful. For nerds/geeks like me it is a pretty cool toy, that I will be sure to be using in testing new lighting and grow box designs in the future.
Tags: cheap, growbox, led, outdoor plants, tomato plants, vegetables
