“The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one.” Malcolm S. Forbes

Category: Learning Project

Its Harvest Time…

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!

Image of lettuce growing in Tower Garden

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!

Picture of lettuce head pulled from Tower Garden (roots visible)

Cheers!

Jerome

Transplant Attempt

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!

Picture of Tower Garden with seedlings growing except in one spot

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!

Tomato sapling in rockwoolPicture of tomato in Tower Garden

Can’t wait to start eating these guys!

Jerome Schmeiser

TikTok Goes the Clock

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.

screen shot of TikTok categories I selected

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.

Screen Shot of pre generated TikTok searches Screen shot of pre generated TikTok Searches

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

A New Source

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. 

Photo of seedlings growing on rock wool media

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…

picture of a Garden Tower set up in a house

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

Starting from the Source

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!

Picture of seedlings in rock well growing mediaPicture of seedlings in rock wool grow media

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

Learning Project Introduction

I wanted to use this learning project as an opportunity to expand a hobby of mine that I have been neglecting for a while. I love to garden and to grow. My first degree was in biology, and I grew up in a family that always had a large garden. I have had a love of nurturing and growing things from a young age. As I grew up and became a home owner of my own, I got a lot of enjoyment in cleaning up our yard, planting flower gardens, trees, and a vegetables garden every year. I’ve also filled out our house with a variety of house plants that I have been tending, some for years! This past year, I even set up a grow tent in my basement so I could have more room for repotted house plants and starting seedlings for the garden!

To encourage my passion, my awesome and lovely wife Alana (a teacher of ten years, and my inspiration to become an educator) found me an hydroponics grow tower. It was used, but never actually used, and Alana found it on Facebook market place. A husband had gotten it for their wife and it ended up sitting in a basement collecting dust for a while before they decided to sell it. Well, now I am in the same predicament where I have been letting this gift gather dust for the last 4 months!

Image displays a hydroponics tower from the Tower Garden company

So my mission, is to get this thing up and running and growing! Hopefully I’ll have some tasty produce to show for it! Step one will be getting some seedlings started, so I will be looking at information on how to use the growing medium that this system uses. Once I have the seeds started, I will have to figure out how to assemble and fill the tower. Then hopefully, I will be able to transplant the seedlings to the tower and grow from there!

I thought this would be a good fit for this project because this thing came with very little in terms of an owners/operators manual, so I am going to be navigating this journey using online resources. I have already check out the Tower Garden website, which has some helpful resources. There is a lot of instructional videos on YouTube too (some directly from the manufacture) I plan on using, especially for complicated stuff like the physically set up. There are also online communities I plan to use for this project too, like the enthusiasts over at Reddit on the the hydroponics subreddit.

I’m excite to get this working! I can’t wait to be able to pick free produce right in my living room!

© 2024 Jerome’s Site

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑