9:30 a.m., Salema, Portugal: Dwight watered all the houseplants in Minneapolis where it was still night. Misters are on autopilot, but he prefers to run watering zones manually. The system has been reliable, but I find myself imagining additional fault-tolerant features to minimize the possibility of returning from a trip to racks of dead plants.… Continue reading Time to Water the Plants
Category: Apartment Gardening
View From Space
Spent the morning mapping and logging issues for each of eight irrigation zones on a rooftop deck on our building. Used a Google Maps satellite image that shows every garden bed and planter.
Time of Flight
I love the name of this device: Time-of-Flight sensor. It measures distance by bouncing a laser beam off a surface. Today I started figuring out how to use it to measure water depth in a tank for our indoor garden. As always, software is the challenge. I’ve previously used ultrasound for this application, but stray… Continue reading Time of Flight
Converging Parts
Upgraded the water supply line to an industrial pallet, part of our “garden on wheels.” It doesn’t look like much, but it brought together disparate parts. The line is flexible, tough silicone tubing (sold for beer production) threaded through a PET mesh sleeve for protection. The line assembly passes through a grommet then a rigid… Continue reading Converging Parts
Avoiding Kink Puns
After exploring just about every other possibility, finally figured out why water wasn’t reaching one set of drippers in a planter in our building. Stayed away from kink puns.
As the Apartment Garden Evolves
Over the past three years, while Dwight has been happily tending to plants in our apartment garden, I’ve been regularly upgrading the technology. This is mainly my side of the story.
Another Misting Zone
Added a 4th misting zone (M4) to our apartment garden. All the tech in the photo sits in a large, slide-out disaster pan. Normally it’s out-of-sight. Misting keeps plants happy and greatly reduces the population of spider mites. You can see how the garden has evolved in a new post: As the Apartment Garden Evolves.
Drip Irrigation
Dwight and I have become the “Drip Irrigation Mavens” for our building’s gardening club. We built dripper harnesses (6 drippers per planter, tubing, manifold) for two planters as a demonstration, and plan to roll out to six more planters this week.
Beneficial Insects
Sunday morning: While listening to BBC’s Gardeners’ Question Time, Dwight misted plants to highlight cobwebs. He found none thanks to two types of beneficial insects he’d ordered online. Thursdays: He volunteers at a teaching/research greenhouse at the University of Minnesota.
Growing Food
It was another warm, sunny day for microgreens in our apartment garden. Outside, it was a different story.