And if this works well, I might scale things up a bit for next season’s greenhouse project. It would save me some electronics in pumps and stuff to water the vegetables and fruits. Homegrown.org has a nice idea to upscale this (voila: http://homegrown.org/blog/2010/06/homegrown-how-to-cards-how-to-make-a-self-watering-planter/) , as do many other sites if you google “diy sub irrigation planter” or “self watering container”

A quick picture of one of the bottle:

ps: in the background you see the sort-of-greenhouse and vegetable box… isn’t it amazing to see how everything sprung to life?!

The grid structure is based on the square foot gardening method, by Mel Bartholomew. Since I do not have a huge garden to grow vegetables, I heard about square foot gardening and decided to give that a try.

I bought this book to get to know a bit about it:

And with the box ready to go, it was time to plant the first seeds. Actually, I made two boxes: one in the open air, one for use as a small green house.

And so we ended up with two boxes filled with different kinds of vegetables and some fruit: brocolli, cauliflower, carrots, lettuce, rocket salad, onions, radish, beets, tomato’s, two different types of strawberry, red peppers and bell peppers. And for fun, we also put some seeds in a propagator: cucumber, melon, aubergine and some beans.

The G3H project electronics, will focus on the greenhouse first. The idea is to monitor conditions in the greenhouse, such as temperature, soil moisture levels, amount of light. And with the information, eventually control a watering system as well as opening and closing doors. A sensor unit in or on the greenhouse will wirelessly transit sensor readings to a receiver in the house which will publish data online. Services like twitter and pachube come to mind

I have ordered additional (arduino) hardware and started work on a prototype. Also, a sensor tube to use inside the greenhouse is in the making. More about that later

See here the progress after only 4 days:

That was on March 2, and look at the progress two days after that:

This looks very promising. Some of the earth is already being pushed out by the developing roots of the seeds, so I will have to put them in a larger pot this weekend. It is beautiful to see the seed-shells still hanging on one of the leaves. Beautiful to see these germinate and grow so fast! It is also evident, one of the six pots is not doing anything.

Unfortunately, the herb-kit and the lavender have not shown any progress yet

I got myself a few different kits to see how good they are (or probably, how good I am). I bought one with sunflowers, one with lavender and one kit with six different herbs; Parsley, Chives, Marjoran, Thym, Celery and Basil. They cost between 2,5 and 4 euro per kit. Besides these little greenhouses, I also bought a little bonsai tree kit.

The kits come in little plastic greenhouses:

When opening the kit, you will find six small pots, a description and a bag containing the earth. In this kit the pots were clay, which gives it a solid feel. The sunflower kit as well as the lavender kit contained plastic pots, which was a bit of a disappointment. Clay seems so much more cute.

The whole thing is pretty easy to put together. Put the earth in the pots, put the seeds in the earth, make sure the earth is moist and compact it a little bit, and put the pots back in the little greenhouse.

A tip for those that do not have green fingers normally (much like me): When you start a kit with six different herbs, you probably won’t know what herb is in which pot once you put it all together, so mark the pots

Once all is in the greenhouse, you just put it in a spot with natural light in your house and keep it at room temperature (around 20 degrees Celsius). Make sure you keep the soil moist, but do not drown the seeds.

Depending on the kit you bought, the instructions may be a bit different. These herbs are to be in a light spot. So do the sunflowers. But a little bonsai kit I bought (more on that in later posts), needs the shade.

In a bout 4 to 10 weeks, these should germinate and start showing us some life. When they have grown to be about 3 to 4 cm, they have to be put in separate, larger pots of about 10 cm diameter. The sunflowers I plan to put in one big pot, and probably the lavender too.

Once the sunflowers start growing, it will be important to turn around the greenhouse every day, to prevent the flowers from growing to the light on one side only.

First impressions are: fun! This is simple fun and feels a bit like having a pet. You will need to take good care of these in order for it to grow. However, the plastic greenhouses are flimsy and do not work very well. I am probably going to look for something nicer to grow them in.

But for now let’s see how this goes. I plan to show you photo’s here of the progress on a regular basis, but it will be a few weeks before anything will start to show.