On Sundays, Dwight makes sure all the plants are properly watered. Most of these plants have automated watering and misting. Plants in other areas are watered manually and get rotated through this area.
Category: City Gardening
Quality Control
Walked around roof decks with Dwight giving planters the finger test to verify they’re getting enough water. Plants are thriving, thanks to our building’s gardening club.
Shrub in an Ocean of Mulch and Lawn
Admired a modest shrub Dwight had transplanted for our building’s gardening club. We support replacing some lawns and mulch with native grasses and other plantings, but many of our neighbors probably prefer things as they are.
Time to Water the Plants
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
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.