A couple months ago I posted about my timelapse project. Enough time has elapsed to have some quality content. After doing several videos, several ways, I found that making the video throughout the entire daylight hours, the movement of the sun and shadows is very distracting. I narrowed the time down to between 12h00 and…
Berkeley Tie-Dye Tomato
Earlier this year I ordered 5 varieties of seeds from Wild Boar Farms. I was blown away with the number of distinct, beautiful and unusual tomatoes available. I stumbled onto this breeder’s varieties after looking for a good mix between OSU’s Indigo Rose and a tomato with some more desirable traits. The tomato I found…
Long term, daytime only, timelapse on Android
I’ve had an old Galaxy Nexus repurposed for monitoring the garden while on vacation, but after a while I realized a better project with this setup would be timelapse of the entire season for the garden. Initially I tried the timelapse feature in the Android Camera app, but after viewing the footage, the long night…
Extended reservoir for self-watering plant containers
I have 6 Ikea Nektarin self watering pots that do great for most plants, but when it comes to growing tomatoes, cucumbers, or other water sucking plants that go through a gallon or more of water on a hot day, the included reservoir is insufficient. I tried the ceramic watering cones while on vacation, but sometimes…
Grafting Tomatoes
So far the hardest part of grafting tomatoes is getting germination predictably on time and estimating growth patterns so the stems of the scion and rootstock are roughly the same size. The actual graft and post-graft care are straightforward as long as you follow steps to ensure a gradual exposure to normal conditions. The two…
DIY Collapsible Tomato Cages for Containers
Update: I managed to find a retail solution that is readily available on Amazon: the tomato arm cage support. The structure below still works, is custom tailored to any need, but the tomato arm cages are more flexible in purpose with a smaller footprint when not in use. Couple these tomato arm cage supports with…
Cucumbers
My first trial with growing cucumbers in San Francisco was with Straight Eight. It grew to several inches tall and withered to nothing. The next year I tried the same variety with the self watering RGGS and it grew, very slowly. Over 6 months a total of 7 cucumbers were picked totaling 1.4 kilos. Not very…
Urban Garden 2014
The 2014 balcony and indoor garden has been coming together well so far. Instead of a ton of varieties of tomatoes, we’re adding some variety to see how other stuff grows that we would like to eat. The increase in the quantities of seeds we now posess have necessitated a trip to Daiso to spend…
Potting Soil Recycling
Since I live in an urban area, managing potting soil used for growing vegetables means recycling it in the most efficient way for re-use. My garden consists of eight 3 gallon pots and eight 5 gallon buckets for a total of 64 gallons of volume, which is about 8.5 cubic feet. After a year of…
San Francisco Fog Tomato
Talk about a cold weather tomato. It totally lives up to its namesake. They taste like typical hot-house tomatoes from the grocery store. Medium gel, with a mealy texture. That said, I only rate it 5/10…however, I would consider growing it again. Why? This plant produces loads of tomatoes that after 5-10 seconds in boiling water, the…