It's been forever! (But I actually have stuff to write about today)

Wow it's been a long time since I posted anything but with good reason I think. It's been a rough couple of years and I haven't been feeling very "bloggish" so to speak. Finally though I have motivation and things I want to blog about!

First things first, garden report. It's winter but here in Florida that just means it is time to plant Broccoli and  did! The plants have been out in the raised bed now since some time in November and they are now on their way to producing with little inch-wide florets showing on the healthy looking plants. I specify that because I had quite a few failed plants this time around. It could be because the soil has been poorly cared for over the past year or just bad luck with sprouting because some of the sprouts were pretty leggy. No worries, the blame lies on the less then prompt actions of the gardener in this situation but just growing this single crop has really renewed my gardening motivation and a full well cared for garden is in the works for late February which is the last day of frost around here. I'm feeing motivated and seeds are about to be ordered.

OK the second thing going on that I'm pretty excited about and incidently also the cause of the less attentive start to a winter garden is a project I have been thinking about for years, an automated mini-greenhouse.  I finally started the project way back in February of last year and last night was the official first planting of a crop of Spinach.

So what is a mini-greenhouse? Well in one sentence it's an electronically maintained greenhouse which can be maintained indoors and monitored from your web browser.

This is my mini-greenhouse which I am calling The Garden Droid (you know like garden gnome?)

So what you see up there is my Garden Droid which boasts a whopping 3 sq. ft. of well lit gardening space, soil moisture monitoring, temperature logging, LED grow lights and wireless transmission of data to my computer. Coming soon it will also be self watering, monitor humidity and ambient light as well as have an upgraded wireless protocol so it can transmit small pictures of the plant growth. And I mentioned the website where I can monitor everything going on? Below is a quick snap of the web application which is used to monitor not just the Garden Droid plants but your whole garden.

The whole project is open source and built on free software with open hardware that anyone can buy and build. I will be trickling out technical details and how to's in the following weeks for anyone interested and heck if my plants grow well I might even sell kits but first lets see if I can get spinach to grow well.

Part of my motivation for this project was to be able to grow salads year round but here in FL most of the summer is not kind to regular spinach and other leafy greens, its just too darn hot and all my efforts have been a failure. I figured that since I am keeping my house artificially cool all summer and the temps would be great for growing greens, why not give it  ago? I plan to eventually get this little box powered by a solar panel collecting dust int he garage as well then there will be a net gain of energy savings though just growing at home saves oil I would think.

Anyway I am really excited about version 1 coming together and I am looking forward to the next version with the enhanced capabilities. I'll also be producing technical details which I might post here or perhaps only on my technical blog, lees2bytes not sure yet on where it belongs.