Monthly Archives: May 2015

Gardening Intro: Seed Germination Using Peat Pucks

I got married 3 weeks ago! I’m not going to go on about it too much right now, except to say that it was wonderful,  everyone had a great time, and I’m enjoying how much more free my brain is without trying to remember tons of planning details. The reason I mention the wedding is because there were a few gardening themed aspects and, long story short, I promised various gardening tutorials to people.  For the first of  these, I’ll be starting at the very beginning: how to start plants from seeds.2015-05-24 16.19.46 (Medium)

In the guests’ favours, we included some seeds and peat pucks to inspire people to test out their green thumbs, so this tutorial will explain how to use them to raise your own seedlings.

There are a few different ways to sow seeds, but I’m just going to use seeds, Jiffy peat pucks, some water, and a dish that’s about 3 inches deep and large enough to hold all the peat pucks in one layer with space between them.  My Wal-Mart sells the peat pucks in packs of 36 for a little more than $3.

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IFTTT: Making the internet work for you

IFTTT
Screenshot from here

IFTTT is an internet service whose name stands for ‘if this then that’.  The idea is that IFTTT lets you hook up two different internet services in an action-reaction manner: it watches service A waiting for some signal, and if it sees the signal then it is triggered to automatically take some action with service B. As an example, you could set it up so that being tagged in a Facebook photo will trigger that photo to be downloaded automatically to your Dropbox, or you could make it so that approaching your usual grocery store will trigger a text message reminding you to buy healthy food, or so on. The list of ‘channels’, meaning services which can be used as triggers or actions, is formidable: 183 in all ranging from communication and social media to Android and iOS to cloud backup, shopping, entertainment, business, and more. I’ve been hearing about IFTTT for a while, but I guess I always assumed that it would need a lot of work to do anything cool with it.  I’m happy to report that I was wrong about that, IFTTT is actually very easy to use!
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