Transmutable Explorations

Category: Projects

  • Warming My Mycology Grow Room

    Warming My Mycology Grow Room

    In the last issue of Fermenting Solutions, I mentioned that trying to keep my mycology grow room warm was becoming an issue.  Each month, the arrival of my electric bills was starting to induce sticker shock.  When I decided to have a year round mushroom growing setup it was only natural to put it in the warmest room in my house.  My indoor gardening setup was already there.  So why not add mushrooms? The increase in costs to maintain the temperature was making it obvious that this wasn’t going to work all year round.  What could I do to make warming a mycology grow room easier?

    Warming My Mycology Grow Room

    This area of my house just happens to be the laundry room and I initially choose it because it is where my hot water heater and furnace were already located.  Even so, during winter, this room tends to still be almost 10 degrees too cold for the most demanding varieties of mushrooms that I enjoy growing.  Up until this point, I was basically just using an electric radiant heater to supplement the heat.

    Mushrooms also demand a high humidity environment.  Even though this was also the most humid room in the house, the climate conditions aren’t perfect in this regard either.  I kept a humidifier running constantly in this room as well.  Ultimately, this resulted in a lot of wasted electricity.  I didn’t have fine grained control based on feedback in the room.  The heater and humidifier often battled each other, requiring both devices to work harder.  Having been down the path of automating my gardening setup already, every day that went by watching this battle just continued to annoy me.  The increasing electric bills were just icing on the cake.

    Making Space

    The first major problem was that all of the closets/nooks and crannies in the rooms were already preoccupied by my indoor garden.  I wanted the ability to have mushroom grows and plants going at the same time and not be forced to stop one hobby during a prime time for the other.  Reusing the existing space was not an option.  I also wanted to minimize the area that I need to heat and humidify.  This would allow me to maintain several different ‘climates’ in this room while minimizing the energy that went into doing so.  I had an inexpensive 5 shelf plastic green house lying around that I used to use for my gardening setup and decided to try using that as the foundation for creating my mycology microclimate.

    Containing the Humidity

    This green house had no bottom and I wanted to protect the floor of the laundry room.  I found a hard plastic tray that is used for performing oil changes.  This just so happened to be the perfect size to snugly fit the base of the green house.  To add additional protection, I wrapped the entire bottom of the tray and greenhouse in a standard camping tarp.  I wasn’t sure how effective all of this was going to be for holding in the humidity and temperature and not continuing to just control the climate of the entire room as before.

    Raising the Temperature

    The idea of putting an electric radiant heater inside of this humid greenhouse didn’t seem like the best idea, so I started investigating alternate ways of providing heat.  After doing a ton of research online, I opted to build a contraption that used a ceramic infrared heating unit to heat a tray full of water and lava rocks.  My thinking was, that if the greenhouse was effective at holding the heat, this should result in less electricity use without decreasing the humidity the way my prior heater did.  I had a spare temperature controller so I used this to turn this contraption on/off based on the actual temperature in the middle of the green house.

    Automating Humidity

    At this point, I just put my existing humidifier inside the green house and put it on a timer.  I hoped that it would more or less keep things around 90% humidity for most of the day.  I started monitoring this with a hygrometer that displayed the current humidity and stored the past 24 hour high and low.  Checking it frequently over the course of a few days, I determined that it was holding heat better than I expected and subjectively, it seemed that the heater was running less frequently than the whole room one had in the past.  The room also didn’t feel like a sauna every time I walked in to check on my garden.  Things were starting to look promising.

    Fixing Some Obvious Annoyances

    After a few days, refilling the humidifier inside the green house started to become a painful chore.  It was also clear that having it on a timer would definitely lead to swings in humidity.  Since I was investing so much time into this, I decided to find a different solution.  I thought about putting the humidifier outside the green house, but the thought of creating a tubing solution to getting the humidity inside didn’t seem like a good investment of time.  First I ordered a combined temperature/humidity controller to replace the timer I was using to control the humidifier and the original temperature controller.  I also knew through my research that many others were using pond foggers instead of humidifiers.  This had the added benefit that if I combined it with an aerator, I could also pump fresh air into the green house.

    Not everyone is aware that mushrooms need to take in oxygen and produce Carbone Dioxide just like animals do.  This was an eventual issue I was going to need to deal with any way.  I put an aerator outside and ran tubing from it into a large honey jar filled with water.  This jar also contained the pond fogger.  The jar was still inside the green house, but I discovered that when I needed to refill it, I could just remove the aerator and pump water into the jar using the same tubing.  Brilliant!  I ran another tube out the top of the jar.  The aerator/fogger combined pushes the fog through that tube to the top of the green house.  Currently the aerator runs 24/7 and the fogger is controlled by the humidity controller.

    Testing Everything Out

    I tested fruiting some mushrooms at this point.  Even though I didn’t have a means of measuring the CO2 levels directly.  My gut felt that they were a bit high based on the outcome.  I finally added a small USB fan in the bottom of the greenhouse to move air around more.  Additionally, I punctured a few holes in the greenhouse that I covered with microfilters in order to allow a bit more free air exchange.  I’m currently waiting for the results of the next fruiting (and for my next electric bill)!

    Future Iterations

    Anyone else gone down this path?  I’m curious what solutions worked for you.  I plan on iterating on this plan and over time will upgrade and swap out equipment based on future experiments.  Some ideas:  More precise control over temperature/humidity in different areas within the greenhouse.  I’d like to have the ability to fruit and grow multiple species using optimal conditions at once.  Same with being able to produce agar and liquid cultures.  I’m also curious to see how all of this works out during the next winter.  I have ideas for how I can better insulate and isolate this environment from the surrounding room.  Time will tell if I need to alter my approach.

     

     

  • Can’t Quoit for Summer

    Can’t Quoit for Summer

    I can’t remember too many summer time outings as a kid where the game of Quoits wasn’t nearby.  It was such a naturally expected feature of any outdoor event that I found it shocking when no one seemed to even know the game when I moved to the Philadelphia area.  I love to play the game and it was one of the first things I setup as soon as I moved into my current house. Having covered quoit boxes and a lighted area to play was always a dream!

    The origins of quoits

    What is Quoits?

    Many of my local friends have never played the game quoits before I rope them into playing, but just about everyone has played something similar.  The basic gist of the game is that you are throwing a round disc with a hole in the middle and trying to get it to land on (or as close as possible) to a metal peg in the ground.

    A friend of mine from Kentucky and a handful of others that grew up around Pennsylvania Dutch areas were already familiar with quoits.  I always thought of quoits as a “PA Dutch” thing. I’ve seen and purchased sets in places traditionally known for large Mennonite populations. I was definitely surprised when I learned that historically it had been a predominantly English game.

    Wikipedia describes several different varieties of quoits, but in my mind the only real version is the Traditional American 4 lb.  If you’re not throwing a piece of heavy metal at another piece of metal, I’m not interested. I’ve played some of the others, but nothing compares to the variant that I played all my life.  For this game, you need proper pits that are more or less a permanent fixture wherever you want to play.

    The Pitch

    So I hear you… a bunch of people hanging around with beers in one hand and throwing 4 lb metal discs at pins stuck in the ground doesn’t sound like something you want in the same backyard that your kids and their friends play in.  I didn’t either, so that became a prime motivator for me in this project.  What made this problem even worse is that I wanted the ability to keep the game going until after the sun went down.  This meant that the pit location had to get closer to the house or I had to run supplemental lighting.

    I opted to go closer to the house since I already have some pretty powerful flood lights in a more or less perfect spot.  This also solved some other minor concerns of mine like the ability to be in close earshot of my outdoor speakers and having more options for putting your beverage of choice down to rest while you’re throwing. I also built a spot under my deck for storing the quoits in between games. Speaking of this deck, it also offers a great spot for spectators for when the quoit matches get interesting.

    This really underscored the need for a good solution to my number one concern.  Anyone who’s tripped over one at night can tell you all about the dangers of open pits and exposed pins.  Plus who wants to mow grass around either of them?

    measuring twice before I cut once

    Recessed Covered Quoit Boxes

    I found a design for constructing recessed covered pits and decided to give it a try.  The design pretty much met all of my requirements, and it looked like a fun little project as well.  Unfortunately, the site that held these original plans no longer exists. The basic structure consisted of a 36 inch inside square made from 2 x 6s, topped with a sheet of ply wood mounted on a square made from 2 x 4s that is just under 36 inches outside with two reinforcing pieces to prevent the plywood from sagging. I used wood meant for the outdoors, but also painted each box for added protection and a more interesting look.

    finished assembled quoit box

    The most difficult part of this project was digging the holes in my shale filled front yard to put the pit boxes in! After getting the boxes in place, I filled each with about 9 yards of baseball infield clay to get the hob at regulation height. Overall I ended up with a great set of covered quoit boxes that keeps the clay pristine and I can drive my lawn mower right over top!

  • 3D Printing Perfection

    Ty 10 year old kids have finally caught the Gloomhaven bug. For anyone who hasn’t played this game (or doesn’t play with 10 year olds), let’s just say keeping things on the level andorganized during a scenario and across a campaign can pose a challenge. I started looking around for things I could 3D print to ease this burden. There were a few existing models for player dashboards and box organization that looked promising. I started making some rough prototypes and quickly realized that I needed 3D printing perfection if I wanted everything to be as dimensionally accurate as possible.  This was a requirement in order to make sure that everything fit back in the box perfectly.

    Achieving 3D Printing Perfection

    I will describe my steps in terms of my printer… a heavily customized Printrbot Simple Metal. Printrbot is sadly no longer in business.  Despite this, the reasonably open nature of this printer has allowed it to live on. Even though I’ll be describing everything in terms of this printer, I’ll summarize with high level steps that should be applicable to any printer/slicer combination.

    Test Prints

    I started off printing lots of test cubes of known dimensions. These guys print fast and then I measure them with a digital caliper. If the dimensions aren’t near perfect, it’s time to make some adjustments and print again. Assuming your printer isn’t completely out of whack, this model will mostly help you perfect your hot end and heated bed temperatures for the filament that you are using. The goal here is to perfect the balance of adhesion to the build surface without making the part difficult to remove or squashing things in the Z-axis.

    First Layer Issues

    No matter what I did, I couldn’t really get my Z height to be perfect. It was always smaller than it should be.  I kept adjusting my Z Offset using the G-code M212 ZXXX where XXX was some Z probe Offset adjusted over and over again in .1 mm increments. No matter what value I used, I could not get this perfect before reaching an offset that negatively impacted the first layer adhesion. I noticed that at a certain Z offset, where there was no possibility of the hotend smashing the first layer.  Even so, the discrepancy in the Z height always remained the same.

    To see if the issue with Z dimension accuracy was an issue with every layer, I decided to print a taller model.  In theory, I should see a larger discrepancy with a larger model.  Instead, if it was purely a first layer problem, the Z height discrepancy should be about the same no matter the model height.  I moved to printing a pyramid calibration print that was taller and would also allow me to test stacking dimensional accuracy in the X/Y axes. The first print proved that the Z height dimensional problems were absolutely a first layer issue.

    3D Printing Software

    I recently switched my preferred slicer from Simplify3d back to Cura.  I did this due to an issue I had where Simplify3d’s overaggressive license protection scheme kept locking me out of being able to use the software.  This required me to wait on their customer support (sometimes for days) to unlock my legitimate copy so that I could use it again. When this initially happened, I was in a hurry to continue printing a project that I was working on and I breezed through the Cura setup mostly accepting the defaults for my printer.

    Z Dimension Accuracy

    Up until this point, extreme accuracy in the Z dimension wasn’t a high priority and I didn’t really notice any issues until diving into this project. I did some digging in Cura and noticed that a default setting was to do about an 80% extrusion on the first layer. I changed this to be 100%.  After adjusting some hotend and heated bed temperatures on a few more cubes and my Z height was perfect!

    By now, I had tons of little cubes in all sorts of colors littering my printing area. They might print fast, but they’re fairly useless. I decided to look for a test print that had at least some utility. Eventually, I found a jenga block that took about 20 minutes to print and decided to go for it. I thought that since my printer was fairly dialed in now, I could use this to print when making subtle slicer changes or swapping filament to see how overall printing would be impacted. My kids saw a few of these in different colors and wanted a ‘giant’ jenga set so I scaled up the model and went to work.

    Cooling Prints

    Within a few minutes of printing a jenga block that pushed the limits of my build area in the X direction, I noticed some obvious warping in the corners. How could this be when everything was dialed in? Initially, I blamed the cooling fan. I felt maybe it was cooling the PLA to fast which was killing edge adhesion. I modified my slicer settings to turn the cooling fan off completely for the first two layers and then gradually ramp up to 100% over the next 5 layers. This seemed to fix the warping for the jenga blocks.

    Splitting Models

    I finally got back to what originally led me down this path… printing inserts to organize GloomHaven. I unfortunately couldn’t print everything in a single piece since the largest inserts needed a 285 mm print surface in one direction.  My franken bot maxed out at 250 mm in all directions 🙁 . I contemplated putting everything on hold and figuring out how to enlarge my print surface. Then I recalled what that process was like when I upgraded from my original 150 mm axes to my current 250 mm. It took forever to iron out the kinks. I decided to just split up the models to make them print using my constraints. To do this, I added tabs so they could then be glued together.  For most of my PLA based projects I use this craft adhesive.

    Even by splitting the models, some of these pieces still pushed me almost to the limits of my build area in at least one direction. I continued to notice warping.  In some cases, failed adhesion in the extreme ranges of both the X and Y axis was still occurring. This was perplexing at first.  After doing some research with several additional test prints it appeared that I had an issue with my bed not being level. One of the reasons I favored the Printrbot early on was because it had an auto bed leveling capability. This was supposed to correct for minor imperfections in the bed’s levelness by modifying the gcode sent to the printer to compensate.

    Bed Auto Leveling

    The printrbot uses a metallic sensor to determine where the bed is. Before each print, it probes the bed in 3 places in order to get an idea of how it needs to compensate for any slant in the bed. I started by taking apart everything and recalibrating this sensor thinking that was the problem. Of course after doing this, I pretty much had to walk back through everything I had just done to dial in my printer.  A few days later, I was back in the same place.  I was still having issues in the extreme X/Y regions of my build area.

    I started reading more about the auto bed leveling procedure.  This made me recall a former co-worker (who did not have an auto bed leveling feature) telling me about Simplify3d’s bed leveling wizard. I decided to give this a shot and record the results. This process basically moves the print head around to many points in the X and Y axis at a Z of 0.  It then probes the actual Z offset. It immediately became obvious that the problem was related to the 3 points probing that my auto bed level probe used. Everything within those points was fine, but there were several areas outside that were noticeably off in the Z offset compared to the probing points. These points that get probed are baked into the firmware.  I started digging around to see how I could change that.

    Modern Firmware

    I still use the original Printrbot firmware.  This is no longer maintained and it’s based on a fairly old version of the Marlin firmware. This version does not really support much modification in terms of how the auto leveling procedure works. While becoming knowledgable on the Marlin firmware, I discovered that newer versions of Marlin support a much more robust bed leveling procedure that arose out of the needs of SLA printers but was then modified for FDM printers. This procedure, called skewness compensation, allows you to define a ‘bed skew’ matrix that is applied before the auto bed level procedure is run. This sounded like the exact solution that I needed. Unfortunately, there isn’t an official printrbot firmware that supports this.  I did find a project to get the Printrbot Simple series running on a modern Marlin based firmware.

    My initial investigation suggested that using this firmware is still experimental. I was also concerned about sacrificing other behaviors that haven’t been implemented yet in order to get bed skew compensation. Being that I have a bit of a print backlog, I didn’t want this printer to be out of commission.  Especially since it prints things that are smaller and centered on the build plate perfectly.  I decided to hold off on a firmware upgrade for now, but I am actively watching this project and plan to upgrade at some point. (Note: I have since done this and now maintain a Printrbot RevF Marlin github repository).

    Hardware Bed Leveling… The Key to 3D Printing Perfection?

    I needed another solution.  So I spent tons of filament and time tweaking the z-offset and generated g-code manually.  The purpose of this was to be able to print at the extremes.  Unfortunately, this resulted in a return of Z dimension accuracy issues when printing items that don’t expand beyond 75 mm from the bed center in the X or Y axis.

    Custom G-Code

    I treat custom G-Code and firmware changes like a software project and keep meticulous records about what I changed.  I used this changelog to define an ideal ‘profile’ for printing things within a 75 mm square centered on the build plate and another ‘profile’ for printing outside of this square. This got me close enough for just about every use case I was immediately working on. I printed for a few days swapping out firmware profiles depending on whether the model I was printing crossed this imaginary boundary or not.

    All the time I was doing this, I still had this nagging item in the back of my head.  How do people who don’t have auto bed leveling deal with this issue? This led me down the path of an area I forgot all about from my early 3D printing days using home made rep raps… hardware bed leveling. To be honest, I probably more blocked this out of my mind.  It was so nightmarish in the early days.  This was one of the reasons I insisted on a printer with auto bed level feature when I upgraded.

    I ultimately found someone who added hardware bed leveling to their Printrbot Simple Metal. I had to mess around a bit to get this working with my hardware modifications.  Doing this finally allowed me to dial in the printer reasonably well for the remaining part of this project.

  • Indoor Gardening Setup

    I’ve always been a fan of gardening.  It probably has something to do with spending all that time out in the sun with my great grandmother digging in the dirt as a kid and enjoying the great things that came from it when it was ultimately time for harvest. I lost touch with this joy for a bit in my 20’s.  There was nothing like the mind-numbing contrast of the cubicled office to make me want to get back outside and get my hands dirty. After buying my first home with some property, doing some real gardening was high on my list.  It was inevitable that I would eventually create an indoor gardening setup.

    One problem living in the part of Pennsylvania that I do is that the outdoor growing season doesn’t last all year long.  Year after year, this was noted when I was planning for my upcoming gardening season.  I eventually started focusing on container gardening just so I could bring things like peppers and herbs inside over the winter. This was mainly in order to get a jump on the next season.  Assuming of course that they got enough sunlight… I didn’t forget to water them or it didn’t get too cold where I was keeping them.  Some of my failures here made having a dedicated indoor space for gardening a high priority when looking for my current home.

    My Indoor Gardening Setup

    My indoor “gardening space” started out as just a small shelf in a closet in my laundry room. The early intention was to set it up as a staging area for starting seeds and growing transplants indoors.  This would allow me to plant them outside as soon as conditions allowed. My laundry room was perfect for this.  It was by far the most humid room in the house and also the warmest due to its placement right next to my furnace. Both conditions being ideal for starting most seeds.

    Seed Starting Setup

    I started with a pretty simple germination station and a supplemental heating mat. Many of the things I wanted to get a head start on require warm germination temperatures and high humidity. Most do not require being started in ‘dirt’.

    I mostly use peat pellets as my seed starting medium. There are cheaper ways to do this, but these are very effective in my experience.  Peat pellets are not that messy and help with adding some much needed organic material on a regular basis to my shale and clay rich soil. They also help with transplanting the plants which I’ll get to later. You soak the peat pellets in water until they expand a bit. At this point, you can add your seeds and continue to mist them as needed.  Make sure that you don’t make conditions so wet that mold starts growing on the pellets. In a few days, you should have some sprouts which you can then transplant from your indoor gardening setup.

    Let there be Light

    Most seeds don’t require light to germinate, so this basic indoor gardening setup works great as long as you are on the ball about getting germinated seeds out of the station before the sprouts start to require light. Since this requires transplanting, which can take some time, I eventually added a small LED setup. This helps in three distinct ways. It buys me more time before I NEED to transplant. It gives me the ability to work with seeds that do require light to germinate and it also allows the sprouts to become much hardier before transplanting since they can use the light to continue growing. I don’t have the best finesse when transplanting sprouts, so any help I can get in having seedlings that can take some abuse during transplanting is always helpful.

    My current seed germination setup towards the end of germination round with only the ‘stragglers’ remaining.

    Switches and Outlets

    Some of you might be wondering about the tech involved at this point. There’s already one light and a heating pad involved, neither of which you’d really want to run 24/7. Suffice it to say that like everything, I started out small just using power strips and manually turning things on and off. Eventually, I moved to using timers and then automated, programmable outlets/switches since the manual management became annoying and unreliable. It’s really amazing how much you can do with these COTS products and things like IFTTT and the Google Assistant.

    I still use much of this basic hardware, but have supplemented with some custom hardware based on the raspberry pi and software that I wrote using Android Things and Actions on Google. If people are interested, I can document this in another post. It’s another thing that I hope to make available to others at some point after working out most of the kinks and documenting it more thoroughly, so let me know if you’re interested!

    Transplants

    No matter how you start your seeds, eventually you’re going to need to transplant them. You could attempt to take them right from the seed starting area to the outdoors, but if you’re not doing this under the utmost growing conditions, you’re likely not going to have the best of luck. This means you need some capability to handle this phase indoors as well. Assuming your intention is to ultimately put these plants outside in a garden, this phase differs from the germination stage in a few notable areas:

    • You will need a space for growing plants.
    • You will need light; ideally adjustable to accommodate your growing plants.
    • You will need an effective strategy for watering around all of these electrical systems that prevents over/under watering.
    • You will need actual soil for the plants to put down a root system.
    • You need ways of strengthening your plants so that they don’t become too weak to survive outside.
    Some recent transplants on an elevated platform getting them closer to the light

    Space is the Place

    Even when I carved out that initial shelf in my laundry room closet to start my seeds, I knew that eventually I wanted to take over the entire closet. The first shelf started about 4 feet above the ground which gave me some serious growing space underneath. This height was also perfect for installing an adjustable grow light system. In order to maximize the effect of the lights, I first covered all of the surfaces below this shelf with aluminum foil to reflect all light back at the plants. I chose a fluorescent system since I wanted it to be reasonably economical and didn’t need the added heat from the more energy consuming lights.

    At the time that I installed this, LEDs weren’t really viable due to their cost and questions regarding their effectiveness for growing plants. This latter concern has been addressed with newer models and I’ve since supplemented the base install with programmable LED arrays that allow me to tune the light wavelengths in order to optimize it for my plants and goals. Blue wavelengths encourage growth while reds encourage flowering/fruit production. You can see in many of the photos that the light is either skewed to red or blue or a mix depending on what I’m trying to accomplish.

    Electricity and Water don’t mix

    Obviously, after adding a few lights, heating elements and other controls, thinking about how to route power to everything becomes a concern… Especially when you factor in the need to water everything on a regular basis and deal with the inevitable situation where the water spills or goes someplace unintentional.

    It didn’t take me long to build catch basins beneath every spot where I place my plants in containers. There are a lot of benefits to this and I just found the largest plastic containers with lids available and use the lids. This depth is effective enough at keeping any over watering inside the lids. This has the added benefit of allowing you to water your plants ‘from the roots’ if you use containers that have holes in the bottom (which I would definitely recommend to prevent both under and over watering). These lids also allow you to route the power along the outskirts.

    No matter what, you definitely want to use GFCI outlets EVERYWHERE. I still do most of my watering by hand, mostly because I spend a bunch of time inspecting anything I’m growing on a regular basis anyway, but I’ve been experimenting with automating the watering in various ways.

    Put Roots Down

    The main goal of the ‘indoor transplant’ stage is to create plants that are hardy enough to put outside. One of the most fundamental things at this point is to provide everything the transplants need to create a healthy root system. This starts with using the peat pots mentioned earlier. They allow you to easily move the sprouts into a secondary container without disturbing any of the roots that have started at this point.

    Choice of container is the next step. I already mentioned that having a container with holes in the bottom and watering from the bottom of the container encourages healthy root growth but forcing roots to grow deeper in order to find water, but the size of the container also matters. Think about your timeline for moving the plants outdoors and the growth rate of your plants and adjust accordingly. If you’re moving them outdoors within a few days or a week, you can get by with a small container, but if it’s a plant that’s destined to stay in a container, or spend weeks inside first, you’ll want something much bigger. You can do multiple rounds of transplanting, but I like to think ahead about this and reduce the number of times I need to move the plants.

    No matter what container you decide on, you’ll need to fill it with good soil. Fill the container about 3/4 of the way.  Then take your sprout in its peat pod, tear the webbing on one side to make it easier for the roots to push through and place it in the center of the container. Add more soil around the plant and then water it deeply. Transplant complete!

    Strong Plants

    At this point, you’ve almost replicated a safe environment to reasonably approximate the conditions for preparing your plants for the outdoors. One thing you’re missing is stressors on the plant caused by weather conditions and inquisitive insects and animals. You can prep your plants for this by adding an adjustable, oscillating fan to the mix. I like to avoid directly blowing air on my plants.  Instead, have the fan face a wall so that the breeze ricochets back onto the plants.

    Get Gardening Outside

    What I’ve described here is a pretty effective way to get the jump on your growing season. Before putting your plants outside permanently, you’ll want to put them out during the day for a few days to ‘harden’ them. This is another area where having a system of trays makes things easier! I’ve been able to harvest weeks ahead of my neighbors when I get cooperative weather using this method for seed starting.  I’ve been able to improve even more using techniques to create micro-climates outdoors (definitely another post).

    Continue Gardening Inside

    Pruned multi year pepper plants that are fruiting/flowering indoors!

    If you have enough space, it’s easy to tweak this indoor gardening setup to create an all year round indoor growing environment. I do this mainly with peppers, greens and herbs. I’ll plant in permanent containers. When the weather is right for the plants, I’ll move them outside. Then, when it starts to get cold, prune the plants back and bring them indoors. I can create an environment to make the plants mostly dormant until the next growing season. If needed, I can adjust things to continue flowering and fruiting while inside. I have some pepper plants that are several years old at this point!

    Interested in your own indoor gardening setup? Have you built something similar? What’s holding you back? I’d like to hear more from you!

  • Fermenting Solutions

    My email newsletter is entitled Fermenting Solutions. It started years ago as an effort to ‘dog food’ AWeber’s Curate mobile app. It’s a semi regular chronicle of a current project that I’m spending time on… the trials, tribulations and the interesting beverages I’ve had to drink while trying to work through them. You can read past issues here. If you’re interested in getting all new issues in your inbox, you can sign up using the form below.