I enjoy hobbies, and this one seems fun—I can combine my interest in resiliency, my love of cooking, and my pleasure in experimenting with code and hardware.
Thai basil seedling in expanded clay medium
I set up the garden kit this evening and transplanted three seedlings: rosemary, chive, and Thai basil. I’m using this system to begin with (I’m not a good gardener, so I needed all the startup help I could get) but the plan is to use this setup to learn the processes and then make a larger-scale, more complete system when I have more room.
The current system is smaller than most—especially if I were to try to add the aquaculture element now. Murray Hallam, who seems to know what he is doing, says that smaller systems are much less stable, prone to large swings in state. Part of the reason I’m going to try to monitor and automate this process is to get faster, more precise access to the state of the system.
Are you doing worm composting as well? That would only touch on resiliency (I’m trying to figure out how to get coding / cooking to work with it), but it’s a big one. I’ve had a worm bin under my sink for a little over a month now and it’s very satisfying. No bad smell (if you do it right) and a lot of nutrient-rich soil that works as fertilizer for weaker plants that can’t take the awesome and grow medium for hardier ones that can.
I’m so impressed you’re doing worm stuff! I was really interested in that but I haven’t started yet (partially because all my worldly goods are in storage for a month). I’m glad to hear it’s working out.
I thought a lot about composting and am not sure how to start up. Right now I’m in an apartment with few soil-based plants, so there’s not a good endgame right now for where my newly-made compost will go. Everyone’s favorite Central Australian has an interesting worm+aquaponics approach that I’m likely to copy once everything else is in place. Because I’m such an inept gardener, I’m trying to take everything very slowly; I probably won’t add fish to the loop for 18 months or so, after which I would hope to add worms…
Somerville and Brooklyn are both pretty famously post-industrial areas, which means none of the soil I might find outside is likely to be very safe for vegetable cultivation (all the more reason to stop using soil). I’m also interested in trying out a couple bioremediation projects if I can find good sites and other interested collaborators (wouldn’t it be cool to find a way to have living plants visualize for passers-by how much good they were doing? As in, “wow, the flowers here are really red, I can see that means they’re getting a lot of cadmium!” etc.)