I came across this great new design and thought I would share. The inspiration is to provide a cheap way of capturing rainwater for developing countries. This would be a great way to prevent some water bottles from going into landfills but also a space saving way to capture some rainwater without requiring the large footprint or cost that rain barrel(s) can take up. No word on these going…
By definition hydroponics is a technique of growing plants (without soil) with water containing dissolved nutrients. No soil is used but in most cases a growing medium is used to support the plant’s root system. A few examples of popular mediums are perlite, vermiculite, Rockwool, coconut coir, clay pellets, peat moss, sand, and even small pebbles. The basic idea behind the medium is to allow water to flow but…
Researchers at Cambridge University have come up with a method to significantly reduce the cost of creating LED light bulbs. LEDs use gallium nitride and requires being grown on sapphire wafers. The new technique allows growth on silicon wafer reducing the cost significantly from $28 to $3 per bulb. The big news for the bulbs is they use 12 times less energy that incandescent bulbs, last for 60 years,…
Today I got my Gardener’s Supply Companycatalog, this particular catalog is dedicated to items to assist you with your gardening habit. You should be able to guess from this site I do my best to resist buying anything for the garden I absolutely need, otherwise I make a cheaper alternative. Well the point of this post is to show what I would like to get if I wasn’t as…
Over at LifeBoat Farm they have created this great DIY Worm Farm out of an old bathtub. What I like about this build is they could have easily taken the bathtub propped it up on some cinder blocks and have been done with it. They took the extra effort with the wood enclosure (with bonus storage shelf) and proper drainage making use of the actual drain it almost appears…
Exactly one year ago I wrote the first post for The Cheap Vegetable Gardener. Over this short time I have had a tremendous response, more than I ever had ever imagined. I wish the January spike (below) would continue into 2009 but much of this was traffic was significantly elevated my the following honorable mentions: Hack-a-day (PS2 controller thermometer) Hack-a-day (Automated plant growing) Top listing on reddit.com/frugal for a…
Here is the strawberries growing after 2 weeks in the grow box. Looks like I may need to get some Q-tips out and do some manual pollination if I want to see berries. I feel so dirty…
My day job is in software development, so of course it came to mind that software/hardware can fail while I was making my computerized grow box. During its inception, I would check on it daily physically or remotely to make sure all was well. After a couple weeks of this it was so stable that I started to not check quite as often. Though in my mind there was…
Other than the “Do you really just grow ‘strawberries’ in your grow box?” question. The most common question I have gotten is why exactly do I have a grow box. Hopefully I will be able to answer this question below, as for the first question the answer is yes (without the fingerquotes) Necessity: I am cheap and don’t want to buy all my plants from local nursery or garden…
Looking at my web logs I have seen the query for “cheap vegetable seeds” a few times so figured would be good to help people find what they are looking for. Being The Cheap Vegetable Gardener, I can do better than “Cheap vegetable seeds” how about some “free vegetable seeds” as well. Cheap Vegetable Seeds Buy online — You can find a much greater selection and some great prices…
My wife was the first to identify the little helper and today I was able to capture him on camera. Looks like it is more than just the breeze helping pollinate those strawberries in the automated computerized grow box. Yet another benefit of having my grow box in my garage.
I noticed some of my daisies were getting a little leggy so added 60 more LEDs (red) to my LED grow box. This time I was a little less calculated about positioning but still fee like I got a decent pattern going. I also decreased the drill size and didn’t even need to use the hot glue gun. As you can see from the pictures below the plants (cucumbers,…