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…
One problem with growing plants indoors is you don’t always get the benefits of beneficial insects, but as you can see above it doesn’t always have to be that way. At least one little lady bug snuck into the grow box and seems to have found some snacks on a basil plant. If anyone is curious I also have one of my jalapeno pepper plants in the grow box…
I actually thought I already posted about this bad boy which unfortunately is only a design concept from Philips. For those that are not familiar: Aquaponics is the symbiotic cultivation of plants and aquatic animals in a recirculating environment. Aquatic animal effluent (for example fish waste) accumulates in water as a by-product of keeping them in a closed system or tank (for example a recirculating aquaculture system). The effluent-rich…
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…
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…
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…
Currently it is 16 degrees outside and given my grow box containing jalapeno peppers is in my unheated detached garage, which can bring some challenges. Like most plants, peppers will continue to grow in the range of 60 to 90 degrees, but thrive in 70 to 90 degrees. With the lights on the grow box gets to about 60 degrees but drips to the 50’s at night. This will…
Well this is pretty much clichéd nerdiness but given it only required a couple of lines of C# I couldn’t resist. I have updated my grow box software to “tweet” some sort of semi-humorous and not really witty comment appropriate to its current state and share its current temperature and moisture content every 2.5 hours. For those who want to do something similar, this is how I did it. …
Though I have made some significant changes to the grow box controller, the actual grow box has undergone some minor but important changes over the past few months. Automated watering Now I must say this one is pretty darn simple. Though I will be planning on a slightly more complicated hydroponic setup later I decided to start with a very easy bottom watering technique. Just take a regular old…
Well slightly more exciting than watching grass grow but for something that takes several weeks to complete is definitely worth a watch. If you watch carefully you can even see the automatic watering in action. Joining the sprouts is a mature pepper plant which has been flowering and daisy seedling my 7 year old planted hoping it will flower as well.
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…