Category: Learning Project (Page 1 of 2)

Well a semester has gone by, and I have to say, I am really happy with the progress I’ve made on my Learning Project!

I have taken my Tower Garden from assembly to full bloom with a ton of homegrown veg. It has been a cool journey that has been a tonne of fun. Here is a summary of what I did…

Learning Project Intro

Here I introduced the concept of what a Tower Garden is. I included the story of how my wife had bought this Tower used for a huge deal. The previous owner had never even set it up! I vowed not to let that happen to me and I am proud to say mission accomplished!

Starting Seedlings for Tower Garden

This week I started growing seedlings for my Tower. The video I decided to use was from the Tower Garden YouTube Channel. I wanted to start with info right from the manufacture to start. I have to say, I am not a fan of the official Tower Garden videos as they usually don’t have any voice over, just written instructions with music playing.

Tower Set Up

The 3rd week, I got my Tower set up. Out of curiosity, I took a look at the Tower Garden instructions on YouTube, and it also had no voice over instructions, and flew through things really fast. Instead, I found this video (also on YouTube) that I found much more helpful. It was great having a human who had experience setting these Towers up explain the process step by step.

Filling Reservoir and Adding Nutrients

This week, I tried out TikTok as a source of information! I had never used TikTok in any capacity, so it was a bit of an adventure! I actually found that the short format of TikTok actually worked well for instructional steps that are relatively small like this one.

Transplanting Tomato Plant

I had some tomato plants that had been growing outside in my garden. I had planted them late and they weren’t going to survive to fruit before winter. I had brought them inside to live in my grow tent, but had seen people growing tomatoes on their Tower Gardens. In the spirit of using social media for info like TikTok last week, I tried out using Facebook Reels and found this Reel that was a perfect, quick explanation of the transplant process. It ended up working great and my tomato plant is thriving!

Harvesting Lettuce

By this point I was getting tempted my the yummy green lettuce growing on my Tower, so I decided it was time to try harvest some! Since I didn’t want to just start pulling veg out of the Tower without knowing how, I took the time to read this resource of when and how to harvest. Since it wasn’t as detailed on removal as I wanted, I also checked out the Tower Garden video on the subject for extra guidance.

Fan Installation 

After having the chance to actually taste my lettuce, I was feeling a little down. The lettuce as good, but was pretty limp. I looked up explanations on why this might be, and found recommendations of adding a fan to the Tower to simulate the affect of wind on the plants. This is supposed to make the lettuce leaves grow firmer to resist the blowing wind. I am not sure if its the wind or just having more time to grow, but my lettuce has firmed up!

Strawberry Transplant

This week, I had the inspiration to transplant one of my strawberry plants that had survived late into November outside in my garden !I found an awesome resource on growing strawberries hydroponically on YouTube that covered transplanting and caring for strawberries.  It was a successful transplant, and I am almost getting a berry on the plant now!

Checking and Adjusting pH

After transplanting the strawberry from my garden, I noticed that there was a few of the leaves that had been turning brown. I looking into reasons this might be using the resource from last week, and found out that the pH of the water should be close to 5.5 for strawberries. I hadn’t even checked the pH since filling the reservoir, so I found this useful instructions on pH testing from Keep It Watered that I used to test and adjust the pH.

Refilling Reservoir 

After about a month and a half of growing, my Tower was in need of a refill. Inspired by our class on AI, I used Googles AI assistant Gemini to ask for directions refilling the reservoir. I was pretty impressed with the results!

So here I am, a semester later, and I have a constant source of fresh veg in my home. I am so happy to have had this opportunity to do this project. I discovered some things about online learning in the process. I still think that YouTube reigns supreme for content on how to do anything, but I would keep an open mind to learning from short form videos from social media sites too! I had success finding quality info from Instagram, Facebook Reels, and even TikTok.

Again, I am happy and grateful to have had the opportunity to do this project. it hadn’t been part of my classes, I don’t know how or when I would have found the time and motivation to make this happen! I would recommend a Tower Garden for anyone with a bit of green thumb and wanting fresh veg all year round!

Now most of that was solid advice! In fact I only notice small details that were wrong that really aren’t important. The first was, there is no screw to for the reservoir, just a cover lid. The second was there isn’t tubing you can see the water flowing through, it rains down from the top and the tubing is all concealed. But other than those minor details, I think this is a perfectly fine set of instructions! I am pretty impressed.

Unfortunately I don’t have a garden hose running anymore since its finally full on winter, so I will be hand bombing about 6 milk jugs full of water into the tower from the sink. Oh well, small price to pay for all the fresh veg!

Cheers,

Jerome

Hi everybody!

So last week, right before we got a big dump of snow, I noticed some strawberries still growing in my strawberry patch outside. They were even starting to flower, so I thought, why not try transplant them?

One week later, and they are still alive!

I noticed some brown spots on some leaves though, so I wanted to see if I could optimize my Tower to be a little nicer to my strawberries. When reviewing the resource I used last week on transplanting strawberries, they mentioned I should have my water pH between 5.5 and 6.5, preferably closer to 5.5. This made me realized I hadn’t even checked the pH since I first got to the Tower filled with water over a month ago. So I looked up some resources on how to check and adjust the pH!

I found this website called Keep It Watered that had some useful information on it not only for checking/adjusting the pH, but also on weekly maintenance (that I will do starting now!). I liked this website. The explanation was a short and sweet explanation with links to further information on how pH affects your plants. The website suggested to “Use the pH test kit to test the pH of the water in the tub. Put 5 ml of water from the Tower Garden into the vial. Drip 5 drops of the solution into the vial and compare the color with the test strip.”

So I grabbed 5ml in my little vial, added the drops and waited a few seconds. I was close to 7.5, so pretty far from 5.5. Luckily I can adjust!

I added 10ml of the acid that comes with the Tower Garden set up. I wanted to do as suggested by the Keep It Watered website and start with 10 ml and measure the pH again before adding more.

I’ll let that mix overnight and check it again in the morning!

Cheers,

Jerome

Hey all,

So I was in our backyard this past weekend playing with our daughter. We were enjoying our unseasonably warm November when I noticed that some of our strawberries in our strawberry patch were not only still growing, but still fruiting!

I had seen people online growing strawberries on their Tower Gardens, and knew from experience I could transplant a seedling (my tomato plant is still thriving btw). So I looked for some info on how to transplant and care for strawberries, and found this great video on my old favorite, YouTube! It is a video by the channel Green Food Solutions that details how to not online transplant strawberry seedlings, but also goes into care for the plants. It wasn’t the most slickly produced video I have ever seen, but all the info was great and they had good visuals! Very lucky to have found it.

Anyways, I got my strawberry cleaned up and soaked it and a cube of rockwool in some water.

Then I cut the cube to wrap the seedling. The video specified that I needed to place the rockwool up over the roots to give them the best chance of staying moist, so that is what I aimed for.

Now I get to fill in one of the empty lettuce spots on my tower!

Cheers!

Jerome

Limp… When has that every been used to describe something desirable? But that is where I am at with my lettuce. Despite my lettuce looking super green and tasty growing on my Tower Garden, now that I’ve started eating it I have found that it has been lacking much of any crunch that I usually like from my lettuce. I mean, this seems like a small complaint, given that I already have fresh lettuce to eat whenever I want now, but that doesn’t mean I can’t optimize the experience!

So I started looking for reasons my lettuce would be wimpy and any solutions that I might be able to do for that. I went to my old faithful source for everything, YouTube, and found this video from the channel IGWorks . They use a different hydroponics system then the Tower Garden but the advice still applies!

I took the suggestion to add a fan to my Tower Garden like this video advised to simulate wind for my tower. The idea is that the wind will make the plant grow firmer to steady itself against to wind, making firmer lettuce! If that does work, they suggested I can always give me lettuce an ice bath before using it to crisp it up that way.

I found another Short video on YouTube that had a great idea for the fan, which was to plug it into the time that comes with the Tower Garden. This is an outlet that has 2 plugs, one for you pump to make it turn on every hour or so, and the other for whatever you need, so why not plug the fan in there so it will run an the same timer as the pump?

And here is the final  set up! I might try get another fan to blow on the other side because there isn’t much flow there, but I think its a good start!

Cheers!

Jerome

Hey there!

Well this week, I decided it was time for me to start tasting the fruits of my labour! Most of my lettuce and herbs are still a bit small to harvest, but I’ve had my eyes on this one big bunch of lettuce for the past couple days now!

So I found this PDF resource posted by Tennessee Urban Farm which said I could harvest lettuces around 45 days after planting (or whenever they are big enough for your needs). They described two harvest methods, either plucking individual leaves and letting the lettuce regrow, or pulling up the entire plant. My plants are too far along for the plucking method, so I’ll be taking the whole head. I liked the document, but wanted more info before I ripped anything out of the tower, so I looked up this video on YouTube  that was on the Tower Garden channel. It had great visuals and  voiced over instructions, which is exactly what I want our of my instructions!

I pulled out the whole plant by the net-pot and snipped the roots away from the net-pot to allow for easy removal of the lettuce head. It looked great and smells so fresh! I thought it was really cool seeing how long to roots got too. Can’t wait for this in some salad tonight!

Cheers!

Jerome

Hi everybody!

So last week after filling my Tower Garden, I had a change  to put in all of the seedlings I had grown. They have mostly been doing great over the last week. There were a few seedlings that were a little flimsy, I’m thinking they weren’t planted deep enough so their roots weren’t deep enough to support the plant. I managed to gently push those seedlings deeper into their rockwool media and they anchored enough to get a tower full of healthy plants… All except one spot that the seedling ended up dying!

I couldn’t bare the look of having this one empty spot of my tower, but I didn’t have any more lettuce or herb seedlings started, so I was on the hunt for what I could do to fill it.

Since I had tried out TikTok last week for my info, I decided to keep trying to find information on social media sites, and this time I went for the old classic Facebook. I was able to find this video in their Facebook Reels that quickly went over the process of taking plants from soil and putting them into the rockwool media used for growing in the tower.

The video had an interesting format, where it played the footage of the person prepping the plant for transplant over some upbeat music. Normally I wouldn’t care for the lack of voice over very much, but they also had the step by step instructions available in the comments that you could overlay over top of the video as you watched. I actually really liked that since I could read through the step as I was watching it done.

This was another short video like the one I found on TikTok, but I think for such a small step in the overall process, this again worked well for what I needed. I went to work soaking and cutting apart of rockwool, and they pulled out some tomato saplings I had saved from my garden this year to fit it into place.

And voila! Tower Garden filled in with a tomato plant. I needed to tap it to the tower for support, but I am optimistic it will take well to its new home!

Can’t wait to start eating these guys!

Jerome Schmeiser

Hey there!

For my project this week I decided to step outside my comfort zone and try out TikTok! Yes TikTok, the app I have been blissfully ignoring these past 6 or however many years it has been around. I have been vaguely aware of how it works, but have never used it myself.  I will  admit, I have been heavily influenced by traditional forms of media to view TikTok as something bad that is destroying “the youth”, but I like to be an optimist, so I want to see what good I can find on TikTok.

So I signed up for an account and started inputting my interests so they could show me some content, I made about 15 choices and then got into it.

I will say, it was pretty jarring to have videos instantly start playing for me when it took me to the home screen. I started swiping through some of the videos that had popped up for me, and I was like, ok, I guess these somewhat relate to the interests I chose. Maybe it is because I am a new user and the almighty algorithm hasn’t scoped me out yet. I hated that it was just a stream of videos with no real indication of what the content was going to be about. I realized I could swipe to the right and look at the authors page to get more context, so that was helpful.

I decided I had had enough of random swiping and wanted to try out their search feature… and oh boy. The boldly misogynistic  pre-generated search results pained me and made me lose hope in this app and humanity at large.

But hey, at least they were willing to listen to feedback! Anywho, after that walk down uncomfortable lane, I went ahead and searched up Tower Gardens to see what they had to offer, and I have to say, there actually was a ton of content on the subject. I found a video by a smaller creator named Jenny.Grows that was about step in the process I am at with setting up my tower (filling the reservoir and transferring seedlings). She demonstrated the filling process, she didn’t speak, just played chilling music, but she had clear written instructions on the screen that I appreciated. For such a simple step in the process, I think this video worked perfectly. Did I love the platform that I found it on? No, but I am willing to keep  an open mind about it!

Here is a TikTok video I made of me filling up the reservoir of my Tower Garden!

@jay273101

Edtc300 Learning project

♬ original sound – Jay

Cheers!

Jerome Schmeiser

Hello everyone,

So last week I left off with having my seedlings started for my Tower Garden, and they have been doing pretty…well not too great actually. This picture is after 2 weeks of growth. 

A lot of the seeds haven’t come up and many that have of pretty flimsy. But I am still optimistic I will have seedlings to move into my tower. But first I need a tower to put them in! So on to assembly time…

I wanted to check the instructions from the manufacture again, just too see since I knew I would need a new source after. Last week when I used the instruction video from the manufacture on seedling starting, I found it very quick and short on details. And wouldn’t you know it, the video breezed through the process again, except this time I thought the task was way more complicated. It might just be me, but I don’t find these” fast paced show you had its done with no voiced instructions just soothing elevator music” style of videos very helpful.

I set to work on the set up, but knew right away I need help with the instructions. So I found this awesome video on the True Garden YouTube channel that gave great visual cues to work off. The video’s author walks you through the setup in real time while talking you through the process. They had a lot of helpful tips that someone who has built a few of these units would find out, so I was happy to find this source before I got too far into assembly! Honestly, it wasn’t that difficult to get assembled once I got to have someone walk me through it.

And here we go! Set up and almost ready to grow! I managed to squeeze it into a corner in our living room and I think it looks pretty good, my cat Luna isn’t too sure about it though…

This week, I am going to get this thing filled up and ready to accept some seedlings. Also, I’m going to look into why my seedlings didn’t do so hot. Lots left to learn!

Jerome

This week I was taking my first steps to getting my Tower Garden going! Now, the manufacturer recommends step one is getting your tower set up, but that is a pretty big job and I wanted to  start with something smaller. So I decided to skip to step two and start getting my seedlings growing. I figured that since these seeds take a few weeks to mature enough to make into the tower, I was have time while waiting for them to mature to set up my tower. This, by the way, is  the same order the previous owner of this Tower Garden tried, and they never got past the seed growing phase, so hopefully I can do a bit better!

So step one was getting some of the resources I needed. my new to me garden tower didn’t quite come with all the pieces. I needed to order some new rock wool  growing media. There were some seeds for lettuces left from the pervious owner, but I ordered some new herbs as well. Since I wanted to start using manufacturer available online information, I went to the Tower Garden website’s resource page and they had a guide on what kind of seeds to grow that I went off of. It was pretty much just leafy greens and herbs, but I have seen other people online growing things not on this list like strawberries and tomatoes. But I thought I would stick to the leafy greens and herbs for now.

The website also had  a link on growing seedlings that took me to a video on the Tower Garden Youtube Channel.

It was a helpful video, but super short and really breezed through the process. I had to watch it over a couple of times to get all the info I needed. I think a longer, for detailed video would have really helped here, but I was still able to get things started!

These are my seedlings after a week! I am not sure every one of them is going to sprout and/or survive, but I feel like they is enough going that I will have something to transfer to the tower.

Cheers!

Jerome Schmeiser