One of my favourite pastimes is gardening, especially realistic environments which would otherwise be too unusual to visit. I am aiming for 100% australian native plants, although I have made concessions for the herb garden and for some plants that mum likes. Currently I have 'implemented':
To manage the boringest aspect of gardening, namely watering, I have designed and built a computer controlled watering system. Ajh has put up a realtime graph of the amount of water available in his rainwater tanks.
I have built 2 seedling houses, one is
insulated with bubblewrap, the other is just sheltered using shade
cloth. There are still issues with keeping them just right. The
insulated one performs a lot better in winter, I suspect in summer I
will have trouble keeping it cool enough, or preventing fungal
growth.
After spending considerable time shuffling plants between one and the
other Charles
Twardy helped me build a new snazzy single greenhouse out of
whatever we could find in the garage, plut 36m of el cheepo PVC
pipe. Later I found out that PVC pipe is bad for the environment,
as is treated pine, leaving me with either radially sawn timber or
salvage timber as possible building materials.
Mark Symonds and I are working on a new
greenhouse monitoring system based on a PIC chip.
