Aeration for the roots
Roots all in water with no air => drowned plant
Roots in air without high humidity => those roots turn brown, die
Three ways to plan a system with aeration
It’s important to think about the materials which will be in contact with your nutrient solution. Some concerns are:
Continue reading Hydroponics workshop: Plastics and alternatives
WARNING: This will be totally uninteresting unless you use iPython, and even then no promises!
Lately I’ve taken to developing code in iPython notebooks whenever possible. One thing I love about iPython is that you can turn your code into a sort of interactive guided tour, a structured and documented sequence of code snippets that a viewer can execute anew as they follow along. This makes them great for meetings and (dare I say it) live demos, because you can demonstrate the code without typing a single keystroke, removing the biggest potential for human error. Continue reading Recovering an unopenable iPython notebook
This year I have a ton of gardening projects going on, both in my apartment and out on the balcony. There are just so many things I want to try growing and the summer is never long enough for all of them. I’ve also learned that I really can’t be cool about my gardening hobby. I make every guest to the apartment take the tour of my gardening projects while I tell elaborate tales of each plant’s path from germination through troubled youth to fruitful adulthood. My guests of course look at me like I’m a crazy cat plant lady, and they’re not wrong. Anyway, I want to feature some of my projects in later posts, so I thought I’d lay a bit of groundwork by introducing all my main projects. Continue reading Summer 2015 gardening project rundown!
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.
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.
Continue reading Gardening Intro: Seed Germination Using Peat Pucks