Let's see if this works...

Hello there, and welcome to the blog I made to go with my garden cams.

In may of 2007, I planted some morning glory vines in planters on the side of my apartment's balcony. The goal was partly to provide a screening wall between myself and the noisy neighbors, dog-walking area, and air conditioning units down below, and partly to shade the large sliding glass door from the afternoon sun and keep things a little bit cooler in the summertime. For the most part, it worked on both counts. The morning glory vines grew enthusiastically, with plenty of large green leaves to provide some privacy, and once they got tall enough, they did throw a shadow on the window, keeping things shady and relatively cool. It's winter now, and the vines have died off, and been taken down. They made lots of flowers during the summer, which became hundreds of seeds, so I've got plenty to use for this year's screening wall. For the time being, there isn't a lot to see on the balcony camera, other than maybe being able to tell if it's raining or snowing in back of my apartment.

A recent addition to the gardencam setup is the Hydrocam. This is pointing at a small AeroGarden hydroponic unit set up with some cherry tomato seed pods. With any luck, it will be looking at some small sprouts soon, which will hopefully grow into little tomato plants and produce red and yellow cherry tomatoes. At the moment, images captured after the timer turns off the lights (at around 11:00 PM) have a bright glare from the reflection of the low-light illumination off of the light hood, but I'm working on a solution for that. If nothing else, the hood is designed to be raised as the plants grow, so it will eventually be moved into a position where the glare won't be a problem anymore.

Initially, I made periodic entries and notes about what was going on with the vines on the camera's page. the addition of the second camera made it difficult to keep notes on two cameras at once, so I'm experimenting with using this blog for keeping track of things as they develop.

We'll see how it works out.