Category Archives: gardening

Amalgamate is the Internet of Compost

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A lot of people are scared of composting. After all, if the temperatures or humidity go badly wrong, you can end up with dried-out trash or a stinking soup. Getting the balance right is a secret known to the ancients: toss it in a big pile in your backyard. But what if you don’t have a big backyard?

Amalgamate is a composting setup for the urban dweller, or for people who just don’t like bugs. [Jamie] built it as her first Raspberry Pi project, and that makes it a great entrée into the world of things. But it’s no lightweight: …read more

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Add Robotic Farming to Your Backyard with Farmbot Genesis

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Growing your own food is a fun hobby and generally as rewarding as people say it is. However, it does have its quirks and it definitely equires quite the time input. That’s why it was so satisfying to watch Farmbot push a weed underground. Take that!

Farmbot is a project that has been going on for a few years now, it was a semifinalist in the Hackaday Prize 2014, and that development time shows in the project documented on their website. The robot can plant, water, analyze, and weed a garden filled with arbitrarily chosen plant life. It’s low power …read more

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Solar Powered Hydroponics

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[Dan Bowen] describes the construction of a backyard hydroponics set-up in an angry third person tirade. While his friends assume more nefarious, breaking, and bad purposes behind [Dan]’s interest in hydroponics; he’d just like some herbs to mix into the occasional pasta sauce.

Feel particularly inspired one day after work, he stopped by the local hardware store and hydroponics supply. He purchases some PVC piping, hoses, fittings, pumps, accessories, and most importantly, a deck box to hide all the ugly stuff from his wife.

The design is pretty neat. He has an open vertical spot that gets a lot of …read more

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Lettuce For Life!

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If you take a head of romaine lettuce and eat all but the bottom 25mm/1inch, then place the cut-off stem in a bowl of water and leave it in the sun, something surprising happens. The lettuce slowly regrows. Give it a few nutrients and pay close attention to optimum growing conditions, and it regrows rather well.

This phenomenon caught the attention of [Evandromiami], who developed a home-made deep water culture hydroponic system to optimise his lettuce yield. The lettuce grows atop a plastic bucket of water under full spectrum grow lights, while an Intel Curie based Arduino 101 monitors and …read more

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