If you liked my time lapsed videos in my how box like the ones below. Here is an easy way to do the same in your garden. For just the mere price of $159.95 this weatherproof camera will take 1280×1024 resolution photos at an interval of 5 seconds to 24 hours. Via Hammacher Schlemmer, Via Oh Gizmo
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…
As you can see they are starting to take over the even larger box and the camera.
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…
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 plant sensor is a device with 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…
Well I have been talking about the financial benefits of vegetable gardening for quite some time now and looks like US News and World Report agrees with me. They have given “Home Gardening” the number one winner of the recession. They tout statistics such as Park Seeds and Burpee showing 20-25% sales growths and the Burpee research that found $50 worth of seeds and fertilizer can yield $1,250 worth…
There was a discussion in comments on my previous average last frost post on how to determine an accurate last frost. A great point was made by Daphne where every garden can have its own microclimate so the date you find online or in a book could be many weeks off for your microclimate in neighborhood. To be able to predict your last frost date accurately it takes some…
There has been some major changes since I started the plants above in my cheap DIY hydroponic setup about a month ago. Since then I have added a couple of pepper plants I saved from thinning. I must say the plants are doing better than I expected. I am still using the same homemade nutrient solution, 2 pumps of liquid plant fertilizer and half a teaspoon of Epsom Salts. …
I never got a round to making a hydroponic system out of my Cafe Steamer, but I did use part of it to create a supplemental red LED light. The construction of this was very easy and you can do the same thing with an old string of LED Christmas lights and some soft plastic (margarine or frozen dinner container) from your recycling bin. Take the plastic and drill…
It came to my attention it seemed every time I see my average last frost date it comes up as a different date. Average Frost Date (Seattle, WA) Location 3/10 The Old Farmer’s Almanac 4/20 Victory Seed Company 3/22 Ed Hume’s Seeds 4/15 USDA Zones 5/14 USA Gardener 3/25 Clyde’s Garden Planner 3/24 Garden Web Now the humorous part of this is…
If you want to get some free tomato seeds head over to Campbell’s Help Grow Your Soup site. After simply entering some numbers on the bottom of a can of soup they will send you a free packet of tomato seeds. Seems like a pretty good deal to me, as an added bonus they donate 100 seeds to the National FFA Organization just for making your request. Be sure…
Last year over at The Genteel Recessionista their trellis made of twine rotted away. This year they chose to use wire salvaged from some old CAT-5 Ethernet cables to create a new one. They were able to create two trellises for about a dollar each which in my opinion look great.