Tomatoes!

After "planting" them in mid-January, my tomatoes are starting to ripen now, and I picked my first batch of them last night. Okay, so it isn't exactly the Happy Valley Produce Co-op, but fresh-off-the-vine tomatoes in the middle of April are pretty yummy, regardless. As you can see from the photo, I still have plenty more to come.

So far, the tomato plants have been relatively low-maintenance. They've grown very compactly, and I've had to trim out a few dead leaves that weren't getting enough light, but for the most part, maintenance consists entirely of keeping the reservoir topped up every couple of days and adding a couple of nutrient tablets every other week when the unit starts flashing its lights at me.

Googling around, there seem to be plenty of people who like to disparage the various AeroGarden units. Most of them seem to be the types who are really into the large-scale hydroponic production systems, and/or the people who sell parts and supplies to those large-scale types. the general opinion seems to be that there's no way that anyone could possibly be satisfied with a relatively tiny, countertop-sized unit that requires only a little bit of water, electricity, and minimal input from the user. As the saying goes, "it takes all types." For someone like me, living in a third-floor apartment with limited space, my little AeroGarden unit is just about right.

A new pump

Right around the two-week mark on my AeroGarden unit, I noticed a huming sound. There is usually a very quiet hum coming from the reservoir, about as loud as a fish tank aerator pump, but this was a lot louder than that. A visit to the AeroGrow website suggested two solutions:

The first was to disassemble and clean the pump, and the second was that it was possible that I had a bad pump, and that they would have to send me a replacement unit. I cleaned the pump, and the humming didn't go away. While I had it open, I took a good look at it, and figured out what was causing the noise problem - it was a design flaw rather than a part failure, so while it looked as though it would continue to make noises, it didn't seem as though it was in any immediate danger of total failure.

Having eliminated the first option, I called the number on the company's website, told them about my problem, and they said they would send me a free replacement pump, no problem. The operator even gave me instructions on watering the plants in case the pump died completely before the replacement got here. Apparently, some number of AeroGarden units were affected by a bad batch of pumps, and they were replacing them as people called in about them.

[ Time passes. ]

After about two weeks, just about the time that I was beginning to wonder when I could expect the replacement pump to arrive, I received a box in the mail from AeroGrow. Inside was my new pump, and a sheet of paper with illustrated instructions for replacing it. These were unnecessary as I had already been through the process with the cleaning, but they were pretty thorough, and would be good for anyone who needed them, I guess.

When I had cleaned the pump at the two-week mark, the tomato plants had hardly been anything more than little sproutlings, a couple of inches high, with three or four inches of roots hanging below the deck of the AeroGarden unit. When I opened it up to replace the pump two weeks later, I saw that things had changed considerably. The plants had bulked up a some, and were still a little bit short and stocky, but that was because they had apparently been putting all of their energy into growing roots. All three plants had a root mass more than a foot long when I pulled them out of the growing deck so that I could get to the base of the support column where the pump lives. Fortunately, it was easy to tease the roots apart and move the plants without causing very much damage to them.

In looking over the new pump while unpacking, I noticed that they had redesigned the pump so that it is now pretty much impossible (or at least very improbable) for it to fail in the same way again. Replacing it was a quick and easy process, and I had the unit disassembled, reassembled, and back in action in well under ten minutes. Ever since then, it's been humming along very quietly, as it should be, and the plants have been growing well.



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Springtime under the lights

There may be snow on the ground outside, but it's springtime indoors under the lights!

The grapefruit trees have suddenly decided that it's time to make more leaves again, and both of them are putting out new clusters of greenery from the ends of their branches. They're really starting to get close to the lights now, so I guess it's time to raise the racks again, and give them a little bit more room. these started out as breakfast one morning a couple of years ago, and have grown to a height of about three feet. My balcony doesn't provide the most ideal environment for them, so they've been living indoors under the lights for the last year or so. From time to time, they spontaneously decide that it's "springtime", and produce new clusters of leaves to add to their "canopy".

My Picotee Blue morning glory vine continues to produce blooms - many of them "double" flowers - and it's probably about time to see about putting it into a new, more permanent container. This one was grown from a seed selected from the "unknown, but probably blue" seeds that I gathered form my balcony morning glories in the fall of last year, and they've been making lots of doubled blooms with distinctly pink-colored throats. It has also produced a handful of normal blooms, which I have hand-pollinated, in hopes of getting more seeds from this blue and pink picotee vine, but nothing has taken so far.

I've also got a few new seedlings that have been sprouting under the lights. This is a pair of convolvulus seeds that I planted a couple of weeks ago, to see how well these relatives of the morning glory vines would do indoors under the lights. As you can see, they've been growing fairly well. From the description, they should be "dwarf morning glory" plants, which produce flowers like the vines, but on short little bushy plants. These sprouts are vary compact so far, so that may well be exactly what I end up getting.

Finally, I have a pair of giant moonflower (Ipomoea alba) sprouts. The first of these got a little bit burned by peroxide while I was germinating it. Both of its cotyledons were damaged in the seed, and once they opened up, about two thirds of one was bleached out, and one third of the other. I didn't have high hopes for its survival, so I started a second seed without peroxide. Not only did the second seed germinate and sprout normally, but the original one bounced back, and is growing normally now. Once it had a "normal" leaf open and soaking up the artificial sunlight, it started making a vine and more leaves just fine. It's grown a couple of inches just in the last few days, so it's well on its way to becoming the 15-foot vine that the package said it would produce. The second sprout is just a pair of cotyledons so far, but they've turned a nice, healthy dark green with some purple in the veins, and a growing tip has appeared in the crook between them, so it isn't very far behind the first one.

Sprouts!

Well, I guess something must be working - today, I have tomato sprouts in all three positions.

This makes it a little less than a week from the initial "planting" to the sprouts reaching the top of the cardboard discs, so they're pretty much right on track, as compared to tomato seeds that I've grown before.

They're still inside their little plastic domes, so they won't show up too well on the camera for a while, but they're still very small, and wouldn't look like much more than just specks, anyway.

It's good to see them making progress, and hopefully, they'll outgrow their domes before long, and there will actually be something to look at, rather than just spots of condensation on plastic.

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.