The Cheap Vegetable Gardener

WetCircuits water resistant power strip giveaway

13.6 years ago free, giveaway, indoor growbox, wet circuits 31 Comments

I previously reviewed the WetCircuits water resistant power strip and risked death by electrocution to prove the products worth.  In acknowledgement of my valiant bravery they have agreed to provide another power strip for me to giveaway to the great readers of CheapVegetableGardener.com

If you haven’t heard of the WetCircuits power strip it built to be shock resistant so pouring water on it, pushing tweezers into the outlets will not shock you.  This may seem like a pointless feature but if you have ever spilled coffee (or dumped a watering can of water) on an outlet you will appreciate these features greatly.  Now I must say it is much more entertaining to see this in action so check out the video from WetCircuits.

If you think their video was done with camera angles and expensive video editing, here is my own independent recreation of one of their experiments.

So if you are in the continental United States, just enter a comment below and I will pick a winner at random on 04/23/2011 Midnight PST.

There are multiple ways to enter:

• 1. Add a comment to this post
• 2. Like CheapVegetableGardener on Facebook (add an additional comment to the post)
• 3. Like this contest in facebook (add an additional comment to the post)
• 4. Mention this giveaway on your site/Twitter (add an additional comment to the post)

Gardening Gadget Deal of the Day

15.4 years ago cheap, EasyBloom 1 Comment

Want a EasyBloom but $59.95 is a little out of your price range?  Well good news, right now it is on sale for $20 off so you can have this little gardening gadget for the low price of only $39.95 with free shipping through Amazon.com.  I have no idea how long it will stay at this price so if you were thinking about picking one of these up, now is the time.

If you have no idea what I am talking about, check out my full review of the EasyBloom Plant Sensor.

Controlling my growbox with a mobile phone

14.1 years ago computer, electronics, indoor growbox, Uncategorized, windows phone 14 Comments

How many times have you been riding the bus and have been curious what temperature your computer growbox was running and if the plants needed to be watered?  Ok maybe never, but I decided to solve this problem anyway.  There is also no point in identifying that you may have a problem without having a way to do something about so I also implemented the ability to override the controls on the growbox by using a Windows Phone 7 application on your new T-Mobile cell phone or any other cool Windows phone.

Design

I made the design for this pretty simple, unfortunately I could not connect with my growbox directly using a mobile device because the computer is behind a firewall (which is a good thing) so I used machine that both the mobile phone and growbox can contact cheapvegetablegardener.com.  After creating a quick web service with the following methods the growbox and mobile device could now talk to each other:

• SetStatus(StatusInfo) – GrowBox sets this status every minute
• SetOverride(OverrideInfo) – Mobile sets override to default functionality
• GetStatus() – Mobile Phone gets status
• GetOverride() – GrowBox checks for potential overrides requested by Mobile device

Mobile UI

Now I have the two devices talking here is the basic UI.  The top half of the screen shows the growbox temperature, cpu temperature, and the moisture content. All of these statues change color (to yellow and red) as their values get to critical levels (too hot, too cold, too dry)

The middle section shows the current state of the growbox letting me know if the lights, heater, exhaust fan, and/or water pump are on or off.  If a situation occurs where you want to override this state you can do this by simply clicking the status indicator.

The bottom part of the screen shows temperature and moisture levels over the past 24 hours.  The graphs are rendered using Google Charts for simplicity though am thinking about creating my own custom solution to get the graphs just right.  It also displays a current screenshot inside the grow box and you can transition between views with a finger swipe.

Screenshots

Temperature history graph	Moisture saturation history graph
Overriding the heater setting	Status screen following heater override

Though this covers most of my required functionality, I still need to add some cool transition animations and some additional analytics, but thought I would share my current version.

Gard’n Gro Garden Filter review and giveaway

14.2 years ago giveaway, water 25 Comments

As I have mentioned on my post on watering, I like to dechlorinate my water by filling 5 gallon buckets with water and letting them sit overnight.  Though this year I always seemed to not have enough time (or foresight) to be diligent about this and ended up just dragging the hose out and watering the plants chlorine at all.

Fortunately our friends at AllFilters have a solution to this problem with the Gard’n Grow Garden Filter, by simply adding this small inline filter it can remove at least 85% of the chlorine in your water without needing to prefill or carry around heavy buckets.

After opening the package the installation process was a piece of cake.  You simply attach one end of the hose to your outdoor faucet and the other end to the filter.  Attach your garden hose to the other end of the filter and turn on the water.

Now to test this thing out, unfortunately I don’t have any equipment to test for chlorine, but given I am under city water I can smell the chlorine pretty easily.  So for my first test I went with the very scientific smell test and confirmed a huge difference between using the Gard’n Grow Garden Filter.

To try to redeem myself a little more, given I had two cups of water I was sniffing anyway, I put my TDS meter (which for non hydroponic readers measures the total dissolved solids in the water) and though this does not measure chlorine specifically it does pick up various salts in the water.  Actually to my surprise there was a significant difference between the filtered water and the water straight out of the tap, given this benefit was not mentioned in the Gard’n Grow’s literature.  With the tap water the reading was 38ppm and the filtered water 33ppm.

Tap Water                                                        Filtered Water

Last the instructions mentioned that you may have a slight reduction in pressure after installing the filter.  Now this is definitely expected, but I needed to confirm how “slight” we are talking here.  For this I did the 5 gallon fill test.  For the unfiltered test I was able to fill the bucket in 71.6 seconds or 4.18 GPM and the filtered test finished in 79.9 seconds or 3.76 GPM.  Though this is a reduction of volume of about 10%, given my small garden I don’t think I would notice the extra 8.3 seconds I would spend watering.

Overall I was very impressed with this filter and am looking forward to using it to fill my reservoirs for my hydroponic experiments this winter and my garden next spring/summer.

AllFilters has graciously offered to sponsor a giveaway for one of these filters, so as in our other giveaways just leave a comment and a winner will be picked at random on 9/20/2010 Midnight Pacific Time.  If you haven’t already became a fan of CheapVegetableGardener.com on Facebook add us and you can enter an additional comment for a second chance to win.

How to investigate the pests/diseases attacking your plants

14.3 years ago aphids, disease, free, pests 7 Comments

Though there are many sites that contain this information, my experience in the past you have to go through a series of detail on colors and attributes of the insect/fungus and without a degree in botany or Entomology I really have little idea what they are asking for.  Gardeners.com’s “Pest and Disease Detective” on the other hand allows you to simply select the specific plant and the area that is being attacked (leaves. stems, flowers, fruit, roots) and it will show you thumbnails to quickly identify the pest/disease that is harming your plant.  With a simple click you go right into the description and details how to terminate the problem. 

Simple but effective just the way I like it…

1st Blog-Iversary

15.8 years ago Uncategorized 9 Comments

Exactly one year ago I wrote the first post for The Cheap Vegetable Gardener.  Over this short time I have had a tremendous response, more than I ever had ever imagined.  I wish the January spike (below) would continue into 2009 but much of this was traffic was significantly elevated my the following honorable mentions:

• Hack-a-day (PS2 controller thermometer)
• Hack-a-day (Automated plant growing)
• Top listing on reddit.com/frugal for a few days
• MAKE: Blog: LED light grow box

Thank you to everyone who has read the blog this past year and actively participated with your kind comments.  Without your feedback I probably would have gotten bored and stopped writing many months ago.

Thanks,
The Cheap Vegetable Gardener