Thursday 19 April 2012

Growdrobe v1

It's been a while since my last update, so here's an awesome update to make up for it.
The first version of the growdrobe is complete :) It will be upgraded eventually with more lights, possibly being split into more levels and getting some fans in there, but for now it's working nicely.

It took a lot of fiddling around with cardboard boxes and planks of wood to get all of the plants up towards the top of the wardrobe so they'd be in the warmest area, but I think I've sorted it now.
A couple of days after I'd spent ages putting new door hinges on and  getting them lined up perfectly, something's gone wrong so now the door on the right doesn't open up properly. I'll try to fix that some time soon.
The wiring was a pain too, having to cut holes out of the shelves and walls of the wardrobe to run wires through, but the drill wasn't working properly so I ended up stabbing holes in the wood, then using the blade from a coping saw (without the coping saw, I had to hold the ends in my hands and move it side to side, really hurt my fingers) to widen the hole enough that I could fit the jigsaw in it. It took hours. The hard work paid off though. The area with the plants is the perfect temperature for them, and the heat rises up to warm up the propagators and pots in the top shelf area.

I have 4 propagators in the top area at the moment, I'm really trying to boost the amount of plants that I have because I'll be giving some of them away/possibly selling them soon. The propagators have giant tomatoes, various lettuces and black hungarian, ring of fire, hungarian hot wax and habanero chillies.

There have been a couple of problems along the way though. The picture on the right shows a plant that I have named Burny after it fell over during the night and his poor leaves were rested against a hot light bulb. He's only got 2 real leaves left, I'm hoping that's enough to keep him alive long enough to grow new leaves.

The other plants are doing good though, and are all covered in preflowers, so hopefully I'll have lots of pretty flowers soon so I can experiment with cross pollination and things and then get some lovely chillies :)
Also, check out the mutant melon seedling on the bottom left.

In other news, I've planted a few potatoes and onions. I did try writing a post about it with pictures of the whole process, but I bored myself just writing it, so I didn't think anyone would be interesting.
Oh, and I think I might be buying a greenhouse today, so the plants can go outside into the lovely sunlight and make room for the new seedlings.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm incredibly jealous of your patience.

Daniel said...

Haha, I'm pretty patient, but I still get impatient a lot with my plants. My plants are growing really quickly (as far as plants go), but I still get bored and plant new seeds, which is why I have over 100 due to sprout in the next few days.

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