• Tag Archives Hydroponics

  • The Hydroponics Are On

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    34  bar rises 29.50 3mph NNW dewpoint 31  Spring

                   First Quarter Moon of Growing

    The calendar says spring; the snow says not yet.  It’s all moisture, though, and if it doesn’t run away to rivers and streams, some of this goes to recharge ground water and aquifers.  A good thing whether it comes chilled or just wet.

    Last night it looked the drive in to the MIA this morning would be a nightmare.  Predictions of 1 foot snow depths and high winds could have lead to blizzard conditions.  The temperatures never dropped far enough.  So, instead of a foot of snow we got about 3 inches of slush, suitable for snow cones if not so oil impregnated.  The drive in was uneventful.

    Sachei Makabe brought her kids from Robbinsdale.  Marilyn Smith and I divided them up and took them through Weber.  Each one of the Japanese language classes I’ve taken through have been attentive, observant and interested.  Can’t ask for more than that.  The diversity in the classes surprise me.  There seem to be far more Asian, Latino and African American students than Caucasian.  This speaks well for the schools and the students but only reinforces the dismal record us white folks have with learning a second language.  I’m one of those who never learned.  Shame on me.

    Came home.  Kate had a great lunch made with fish, green beans and acorn squash.  I added a salad. 

    After the nap I got out the books and handouts for the hydroponics and got started.  The meter I got a couple of weeks ago I handed over to Kate because it required precision and a chemistry background, neither one of which characterizes me.  It will help us quickly diagnose problems and repair them.  It measures ph, temperature and conductivity.  All of these measures have to do with the uptake of nutrients, though I don’t understand the relationships by any means at this point.

    The lettuce seedlings that I started a few weeks ago have started to push roots through the rock wool medium.  This signals the time to transplant them to the hydroponics.  Each planter in the smaller hydroponic system (We have two.) has round lava rocks which hold moisture, but do not interfere with the plants root system reaching the nutrient bath in the reservoir below the planters.  It took 3 gallons of nutrient solution to fill the reservoir to the 2 1/2″ depth recommended.

    The nutrient goes into the reservoir through the planters.  This charges the lava rocks.  Then I got a pair of forceps (Adson’s, Kate says.) and plucked the rock well medium out of the seedling beds one at a time.  With a soup ladel I scooped lava rocks out and let them sit in the left over nutrient solution while I positioned the small cube of rock wool and its single lettuce plant.  When I had it where I wanted, one per planter, I scooped the lava rocks around the cube.  Planted.  It’s a strange process compared to gardening directly in mother earth, but it’s fun, too.

    After the nutrient solution was in the reservoir, a plastic tub in essence, I plugged the pump into the black tubing that leads inside the reservoir to a plastic tube with two airstones.  Airstones are permeable and the bubbling of oxygen through them creates a nutrient rich mist that reaches the bottom of the planters.  The roots of the lettuce seedlings will head down, through the lava rock to the mist.

    With the small pump sighing the only thing left was to switch on the Halide light.  It’s a big thing, 250 watts, with a ballast that feels like a large rock  in weight.  It now glows about 22 inches above the seedlings.   The distance is necessary while the seedlings are still  young and fragile.  After they become well rooted and mature, I’ll move the lamp down to 6 to 12 inches above them.  It will be on roughly 16 hours a day.

    We’ve begun.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Garden Great Work Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • Plants and a Particular Location + Gardener = Dialogue

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    40  bar falls 30.27  6mph  SSE  dewpoint 24  Spring

              Last Quarter Moon of Winds

    Ah.  Can you feel the sigh?  A weekend with no outside obligations at all.  I plan to do clean up, plant some more seeds, read, maybe watch a bit more of the NCAA.  How about that Davidson, huh?  Took out Wisconsin.  That’s a student body of 1,700 versus one of what, 30,000?  I will read chapter 3 in the Permaculture design book for sure, perhaps polish off a novel or two, maybe start writing one of my own.  I have an idea that’s been bouncing around for some time now.

    Tonight at 5PM I get to celebrate Chinese New Year again with the CIF guides.  I look forward to this each year, this one especially because I’ve done my homework on China and Japan over the last few months.  Saw MingJen, who organizes this event, on Wednesday at the Naomi Kawase film, The Mourning Forest.

    If you can, would you write Hillary and tell her to get out now?  We need a chance to even up with McCain and a bitter end to the Democratic primary race just lets him have the field to himself.  I don’t have anything against Hillary, in fact she and Obama are about a horse apiece politically, but Obama has won the field, has the delegates and deserves his chance.  Hillary will have another shot.  She’s established that a woman can run as a serious candidate, a remarkable and historic achievement in itself.  Nothing in the feminist revolution demands that women win all contests or get all the jobs. 

    Snow continues to retreat in our yard, but slowly.  As in years past, the Perlick’s grass is almost fully visible, while ours remains under 6-8 inches of snow.  They face south, we face north and that makes all the difference.  Spring comes to our property about a week later than theirs, weird as that is. 

    On Thursday I followed the dog tracks in the snow and went out to check on my trees planted last spring.  Some animal, either rabbits or deer, have eaten the tops of them down to the garden hose I put around them as protection from mice.  I didn’t think tall enough up the food chain.   These were the trees I planted nearest the area we call the park.  Further north, also on the eastern edge of our westernmost woods, another group of oaks, white pines and Norway pines look like they’ve done well over the winter. 

    This is the nature of gardening.  Try this and it works.  Try that and it doesn’t.  Listen.  Repeat what worked, change what didn’t.  Plants and a particular location engage the attentive gardener or horticulturist (as I’m beginning to think of myself) in a constant dialogue as shade patterns change, seasonal sun shifts become more understood, rain falls or does not fall and various cultivars and seeds prove well suited to the site or not.  This dialogue is multi-lingual as one party communicates in one language and the other has to translate, but it is true discourse as each can alter the others ideas.      


    📂This entry was posted in Friends Garden General Great Work Our Land and Home Politics 📎and tagged

  • An Everything-0-Meter

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    43  bar falls 30.27 0mph SSW dewpoint 12 Spring

              Last Quarter Moon of Winds

    Had a great time with the two Weber (Japanese special exhibit) tours.  Grace Googin was there for the first one and I had about 15 on the other tour.  Folks seemed to be into it and thanked me a lot after we were done.  This is the first tour in a long time where knowledge accumulated over time has begun to break through in the tours.  I know, for example, the linkage between Chan Buddhism from China and Zen in Japan.  Not like an expert of course, but certainly at a level that helps folks on the tours gain a deeper appreciation for both.

    After the tour I drove over to Interior Gardens where I picked up an everything-o-meter that will make the hydroponic part of the work so easy it will almost grow by itself.  Well, not quite.  It measures electrical conductance, ph and temperature, all three important data points for the reservoir of nutrient solution.  Also picked up 100 more pellets for starting seedlings and three bottoms for the other flats.  We’re in day three of the sprouting process.  Sometime in the next week we should see some shoots.  Fun.

    The woman at Interior Gardens I remembered because she had injured her leg in a running accident.  That was about ten months ago.  During surgery the orthopedist discovered that her cartilage had pulled a divot of bone out of the knee.  This made it difficult of reconnect everything and she’s still not fixed.  She’s a runner, too.  “Oh, well.  If they can’t fix it, I’ll get into biking!”  She has a cryogenic device she puts on it at night that takes the pain right away.

    On the way home I was, unfortunately, really hungry–back to back tours with no food in the middle–so I (you might want to cover your eyes for this part.) stopped at McDonald’s and got a McFish, which, also unfortunately, I like.  By the time I got home I was sleepy, no nap, and feeling guilty.  Guilt won and I just finished 40 minutes of aerobic workout on the treadmill. 


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Garden Great Work 📎and tagged

  • A One-Celled Organism’s Progeny Looks Back in Wonder

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    45  bar steady 30.06  9mph WNW dewpoint 20

           

                  Waning Gibbous Moon of Winds

    There lives more faith in honest doubt, / Believe me, than in half the creeds. -Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poet (1809-1892)

    I’d put the percentage higher than Tennyson, but his general principle strikes me as true.

    The gro-light fluorescents switched on today at 10:00 AM.  At the same time the small electrical heating pads began their function of warming seed mediums bottom layer.  Earlier tiny lettuce seeds went into the small holes in the rock wool seeding mediums, soaked overnight in 5.0 ph water.  Four peat pots, filled with miracle-gro potting soil, received two tomato seeds each.  All the seeds are heritage seeds.  After both trays went into plastic tubs they went under the lights and on the heating pads.  The early phase, sprouting, requires a humid environment so a clear plastic hat went over the lettuce and tomato seeds.  Now we wait, wait, that is, after remembering to turn the lights off after twelve hours and checking periodically to keep the seeding mediums moist, but not so moist that they rot the seedlings.

    This process is still unfamiliar to me, so I don’t know what to expect.   Managing heat, light, water and humidity exceeds by a factor of four  what happens in outside gardening.  Outside you have to plant where the new seeds will get enough light, but you don’t provide the light.  You also have to provide water if there isn’t enough, but again, that’s rare.  Unless you’re over eager and plant too early, you don’t have to worry about heat either.  Humidity is fine here, at least during the crucial seed sprouting time.  Outside, you provide decent soil (if not provided for you by the land) and plant at the proper depth.  That’s it for a while.  In this process you are the sun and the rain, the atmosphere.

    Over the years I’ve tended to plant perennials and of those almost all flowers or shrubs, so working with seeds is something I’ve not done often.  As I picked up the tiny lettuce seeds with the pick-up (a medical device much like tweezers, but with a finer point, great for removing splinters and, it turns out, picking up tiny seeds), I marveled at how something  so small can unfold and develop into edible lettuce.  A lettuce seed is smaller than the inside of an o and not much bigger than the enclosed portion of an e.  The tomato seed is a bit bigger, it would cover a capital O, but again, from something that size and almost flat, a 24″ plus vine and ripe tomatoes for the salad will emerge.  And you don’t believe in miracles?

    This is why proteomics is still the hot new field.  In that seed is the dna for a particular type of lettuce or tomato.  The dna, once the seedling begins to sprout, switches on and off various genes in a finely orchestrated sequence.  The genes, when switched on, express a protein which unfolds, literally, to form, say, part of a stem, or a leaf, or a fruit like the tomato. 

    The same process created you, dear reader, and me, too.  Not only life had to come into being, a miracle when inorganic chemicals combined in such a manner as to respond to their environment rather than submit to it, but that life had to create as well a means of propagating that first miracle.  Without reproduction, no future.  Those twisted twin ladders that constitute our dna developed out of that first dna, in other words, that first one-celled organism somehow managed to propagate itself in such a way that its future included a species that could look back on it and say, Grandpa!  We are life with the ability to reflect on itself and its place in the cosmos.  Pretty wonderful.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Garden 📎and tagged

  • Airlines Not Required to Provide Food, Water, Clean Toilets or Fresh Air

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    42 bar steep rise 29.71 1mph WNW dewpoint 28  Spring

               Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

    We soaked the rock wool seed pellets in 5.0 ph water.  This will neutralize the natural high alkalinity of the rock wool. Tomorrow I’ll sow seeds from a lettuce mixture we got at Seed Saver’s Exchange.  Tomorrow, too, the tomato seeds will got in the peat pots.  Action on the indoor garden and some (the tomato seeds) on the outdoor garden proceeds apace.

    The library provided a couple of books on DVD for Kate and her drive to Nevada, Iowa over the weekend.  She’s doing a sort of homecoming/reunion thing.  Meanwhile I’ll celebrate Chinese New Year’s in Lauderdale.

    The beat goes on.

    In the ongoing journal of outrage at the way things are, this from today’s newswire: 

    A federal appeals court has rejected a law requiring airlines to provide food, water, clean toilets and fresh air to passengers trapped in a plane delayed on the ground.

    The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that New York’s new state law interferes with federal law governing the price, route or service of an air carrier. It was the first law in the nation of its kind.

    The appeals court said the new law was laudable but only the federal government has the authority to enact such a regulation.

    The law was challenged before the appeals court by the Air Transport Association of America, the industry trade group representing leading U.S. airlines.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Garden Politics Travel 📎and tagged

  • Rock Wool Seed Blankies

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    36  bar steep fall 29.84 1mph SSE  Dewpoint 26  Spring

                    Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

    Ah.  Hands back in the soil, thinking and doing with plants.  We bought two stems of yellow Plumeria when we were in Hawai’i and I potted them today.  Just the act of finding a pot, putting in some potting soil and adding water immersed my soul deep in the earth. 

    The hydroponics setup is underway, too.  Seeds don’t grow well in hydroponic growing mediums, so there’s a prior step that involves starting seedlings in small rock wool blankies, then transplanting them, blankie and all, into the large pebble-sized lava rock medium.  

    A seedling needs a couple of critical tools to grow inside.  The first is a warming coil to make sure the temperature underneath the seed pack does not get below 60 degrees or so.  We have those, four of them.  The second is a grow light.  We have those, too. Two of them. 

    Tomorrow lettuce seeds will go into the rock wool seed blankies and some herbs as well.  These are all heritage seeds Kate and I purchased at the Seed Saver’s Exchange outside Decorah, Iowa.  Potting soil will go in some small cubes made of molded peat moss.  In them will go a few heritage tomato seeds and anything else we need to have a jumpstart on for the garden. 

    The lettuce and herbs will make the transfer into the hydroponics.  We’ll learn how to work with the temps, timing of the nutrient solution flows, the nutrient solutions themselves while growing an easy crop.  The tomato seedlings and the other seedlings will get planted in the raised beds we’ve turned over from flowers to vegetables.

    There are still a few more tools we need like an electrical conductance meter, a turkey baster and an aquarium heater or two.  I’ll pick those up on Friday when I go in to do two Weber tours.

    This manual labor balances the intellectual work I do and I’m glad to be back at it.  From now until mid-October the garden and our land will take up more and more of my time and happily so.


    📂This entry was posted in Garden Great Work Our Land and Home 📎and tagged