On Sunday mornings houseplants receive extra care and attention. Here, they’re lining up to take a gentle shower. All the plants happily survived six weeks of drip irrigation while we were in California.
Category: City Gardening
Remote Plant Watering
In Minneapolis I lay on the couch, grouchy, nursing a cold, periodically flushing out radiation. From Palm Springs Dwight remotely watered our apartment garden. The plants look good to me, but doubtless he’ll see issues when we both return to Minneapolis at the end of the month.
Apartment Garden at Sunset
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.
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.