I have almost everything planted at least germinating in my grow box. As you may be able to see from the labels I am growing a variety of peppers this year as well as a few different onions and tomatoes. I also have garlic and some onions I overwintered already outside and peas already in the ground. I did successfully grow some peppers in the grow box over the…
Always running out of room in my grow box I needed to expand it some. Though the CFL lights I was using worked great for my 3 square foot space, though by nearly tripling the square footage CFLs wouldn’t scale out anymore. Looking at my other options such as HPS (High Pressure Sodium) or Metal Halide I really didn’t want to deal with ballasts and cooling I decided on…
How many times have you been riding the bus and have been curious what temperature your computer growbox was running and if the plants needed to be watered? Ok maybe never, but I decided to solve this problem anyway. There is also no point in identifying that you may have a problem without having a way to do something about so I also implemented the ability to override…
I recently moved to a new office building and unfortunately I had a lacked a few years at the company to get a window office. With a desire to have some plant life in my office, I grabbed a couple of the basil plants I cloned, dropped them in some potting soil, and positioned a desk lamp with a CFL bulb. I can’t seem to find my lamp timer…
Pepper plants need specific environmental (temperature and humidity) conditions to establish growth and create high yields. If the temperatures get too low it will stunt its growth or not produce blossoms, when the temperatures get too high the plant will drop it blossoms resulting in no or reduce yields. The perfect temperature range for peppers is between 70 and 80 degrees F for Bell peppers and hot peppers can…
I decided to take the day off to catch up on some things at home and as I ended up outside of course I went right to the garden. We have seen a few warm days here in the Northwest and in my area we haven’t dipped under 40 degrees at night so seemed like a good time to plant a few of my tomatoes spending their time this…
Right about now the temperatures outside should be increasing and I should be thinking about start hardening off my summer plants over the next few weeks. Unfortunately we seeing hail the past few days along with some pretty cold nights. Looks like even though I was fairly pessimistic about my last frost date I may have another battle of tomatoes/peppers over taking the growbox or bring them out into…
Currently in the grow box I have some basil and more recently strawberries added as I was “weeding” my garden I found a bunch more starts. Though I have seen basil do well in hydroponic systems mine is turning pretty leggy and quickly loosing lower leaves. The strawberries on the other hand and thriving in the environment. Probably will let them stay in there a little longer until the…
While my existing system was working I decided to make an upgrade to the electronics on my old system for several reasons: I needed to add more automated external controls (heater, fans, water pump) with my existing design this was entirely possible though was starting to get a little clunky. The existing controller (PS2 Controller, parallel port with various wires to control relays) worked but was not exactly compact….
In our family we are not just cheap in the garden we also keep our house pretty cool to save on heating costs. Unfortunately since the LEDs in my grow box do not put out very much heat the inside is only about 68 F degrees even placing it on top of my refrigerator. For most seeds 77 F degrees is a great ball bark number to shoot for…
Now I am playing with hydroponics in my grow box I want to monitor the temperature of my nutrient tank. This is important too hot it can bread disease too cold it can shock your plants. I also want to use the data to identify how ebb/flow cycles affect ambient and solution temperature (for my own nerd curiosity) I have been thoroughly impressed with the Dallas DS18S20 temperature sensor…
Though not my first hydroponic system this is is definitely a little more complicated than my last attempt of an fogger system created last year. This time I decided to go with an Ebb and Flow system, where the concept it pretty simple, flood the planting area with water nutrients and let it drain, wait a defined amount of time and then repeat. For this build I had a…