Tag: garden

The teaching garden

Like lots of other folks, I found new ways to occupy my time during the pandemic. One of the more unique things I tried was hydroponic gardening. This is not my first post on this activity, but I am declaring today the end of my initial experiment. Today marks 183 days since I first planted the garden.

The tomatoes (left) have been growing this entire time. I am on my third crop of lettuce and I started some new tomatoes (right) to replace those on the left. Indeterminate tomatoes just keep on growing, but I wanted to try a different variety that would bear fruit before my outside plants start to reach maturity.

The tomatoes I produce are cherry tomatoes and I wanted to try something a little larger. The issue inside is supporting the plants as they mature. The plants I have now have matted down into this thick layer and finding the ripe fruit can be a challenge. More pruning and rigging some type of trellis system would have made sense. I kept a spreadsheet to record my harvest – 309 to this point. I will take the original plants out this weekend and replace them with four new plants I have started.

I have had a long-term interest in school gardens and this most recent exploration was partly an effort to evaluate hydroponics as an option. One of the problems with outside school gardens in this area is most of the work and the reward in produce comes over the summer. Hydroponics would offer a version with unique learning opportunities and suited to an option for the winter months. We had intended to purchase a couple of comparable gardens to donate to local schools, but the pandemic pretty much meant the students would not be present to experience the process. Maybe next year.

Hydroponics (the approach I take) and aquaponics (a setting using waste from aquaculture to provide nutrients) are well established as science projects for classrooms. Online searches should generate plenty of background material. I encountered this detailed explanation of aquaponics that prompted another post focused on my own project. Search on the tag “garden” at the end of this post to find earlier content on this topic.

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Garden Update

I started my hydroponic garden in early December and decided it was time for an update. The garden is 96 days old and just starting to provide cherry tomatoes. We have been eating the lettuce for some time now and I decided it was time to replant the side of the garden dedicated to lettuce. I am preparing my own lettuce “plugs” this time as I continue to experiment with modifying various components of the stock system. I decided I will keep a tally of the number of cherry tomatoes I harvest and I added a meter to measure the amount of power consumed. I am not under an impression that growing your own vegetables indoors is cost-effective, but some estimate of the on-going cost would be interesting.

The following images show the lettuce/herb side of the garden before replacement, the new setup, and the first cherry tomatoes.

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Time-lapse video with iMotion

I am considering this to be the third contribution to my series on Classroom Gardens. It is related to the other two posts which concern indoor hydroponic gardening only in that time-lapse video is an interesting way to demonstrate plant growth and variations of such a project would be easy to implement

This is my setup for capturing the video of plant growth. The equipment toward the back of the image is the hydroponic garden and you can also see some young plants. Positioned in front and to the right of this garden is an iPad.

Time-lapse video requires a fixed location for the camera and steady control of the focus of the camera. This device (I wish I knew the name) holds an iPad. The video I provide was taken over a couple of weeks so you need to consider how you will create an environment allowing careful positioning of the camera. As long as no one bumps the iPad, this holder does the trick. A traditional tripod serves a similar purpose when time-lapse video is taken with a camera. It is also necessary to plug the iPad into a power source as the iPad remains active during this entire process so it would have run down the battery without being plugged in.

The app used for this process was iMotion for Schools. In the video tutorial that follows I incorrectly claim iMotion for Schools is the same price as iMotion Pro. I find different prices. I paid $3.99, but the iMotion for Schools page says $5.99

iMotion for Schools Tutorial

Here is the video created with iMotion.

The video you see here has been altered. The original video contained segments of black frames generated during the night when the lights for the hydroponic garden were off. One thing I do not explain in the tutorial which was already getting a little long was the opportunity to edit the video with the app (see tools when the completed video is open). There are tools for adding and removing individual frames. I used the delete frame tool to remove the blank frames. In the video, you see phases of smooth growth and then jumps. The jumps are caused by the growth that occurred during the night when the darkness prevented the recording of these changes.

One hint – you have to do this on the fly so I slowed during the frame rate to 1 frame per second to delete frames and speeded it back up to 16 frames per second before exporting the video. I don’t have an explanation for the flickering you see in the first section of the video. Because the growing lettuce fills the screen toward the end of the video and the flickering is no longer present, I assume the flickering was caused by the exposed lighting.

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Class Gardens – 2

As I explained in my first post in this series, I first became interested in hydroponics more than fifty years ago. A high school acquaintance and I generated a science fair project based on some recipes I had discovered for growing plants without certain key nutrients and we grew corn (I grew up in Iowa) comparing a control group and three treatment groups each without a key nutrient. 

My next experience with school gardens came many years later when I was a young professor interested in how schools might use technology to encourage student interest in science. My undergrad training had focused on biology and high school teaching, but my education also included research experiences focused on learning and eventually this combination led to a career as an educational psychologist. My interests led to some unusual activities for an academic. At one point, I became acquainted with a couple of individuals who were responsible for the educational outreach efforts of North Dakota Game and Fish. They had a program that interested me and I thought I could make a contribution to the program through the use of technology. The program was called OWLS (outdoor wildlife learning sites) and it involved the Game and Fish Department offering small grants to schools to start gardens originally intended to focus on native plants and animals.  Most of these projects were small, but in some rural areas where more land might be available could involve several acres. My idea was to create a website participant schools could use to share their experiences in developing these sites. Game and Fish bought me a server and with the dedicated IP the University provided to my office, I started serving web content. I went on to offer other content from Game and Fish online that had potential educational value (e.g., the NDWild clipart collection – https://learningaloud.com/clipart/), but it is the OWLS sites that are relevant here. 

I learned a lot from the OWLS project and not all of the experiences were positive. For example, gardens seem like a great idea, but a good part of the growing season does not overlap with the time students are in school and this poses some issues. Too many of the OWLS turned into weed patches (most were botanical learning gardens and not vegetable gardens) over the summers. 

As a thought I tried the Wayback Machine to see if anything from this effort had been saved and I did find some content from 1997. It is unfortunate that the photos of the various gardens are no longer available, but some of the text information still remains. 

I have written about school gardens on other occasions. In this post from 2013 I question why gardens are so seldom mentioned in the trendy focus on other STEM topics. 

School gardens are not necessarily hydroponic. I used classroom gardens purposefully to bring attention to this unique approach. This approach to production allows a year-round opportunity which means students will have better access during the school year. Hydroponic agriculture has some unique advantages to traditional agriculture 

School/Community Connections

Students who live in urban areas may have little understanding of where their food comes from or how it is produced. This lack of understanding is even greater in poor, minority communities. Access to good food can also be a justice issue as markets with fresh food move to affluent areas leaving those with low incomes less able to purchase healthy food. Protests after George Floyd’s death closed the only full-service grocery store for a 3-mile radius of North Minneapolis. This challenge is sometimes described as a food desert. Community gardens and school gardens offer a response to this need. 

School garden lesson plans

Climate change education

Science fair projects

  Project ideas

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Classroom Gardens

This is the first of a three-post series focused on the potential of classroom gardens. I have had a long-standing interest in school gardens as a category of maker space with potential for learning outcomes across the curriculum. This interest has been rekindled because of a recent purchase intended to get me through the Minnesota winter.

Since retirement, we have been spending the worst part of midwest winters in a warmer climate. You may have viewed some of my pictures from Kauai or the Big Island on my travel blog. Because of the pandemic, we will not be spending time on the road this winter. Maybe next year.

Looking for interesting things to do while spending lots of time indoors, Cindy game me an indoor hydroponic garden as a present (birthday, Christmas, extra money set aside for Hawaii, etc.). As I got it set up, I started to connect the experience with my long term interest in school gardens.

This is the AeroGarden Farm.

This is a pretty fancy setup with sensors, wifi connection, timers, pumps, etc. There are less expensive versions and related products from other companies. The iPad is there because I am doing a time-lapse of plant growth which I will write about in a later post.

The system uses hydroponics which is the growing of plants without soil. The two tubs at the base of the garden contain water and nutrients with a motor to circulate the solution. You add water and fertilizer every couple of weeks and prune plants to keep them within whatever space you are willing to allocate. The first group consists of several varieties of lettuce, cherry tomatoes, and several different herbs. I may have too much going on for my first attempt, but this is about learning.

My experiences with hydroponics go way back – more than 50 years back. Members of my family get tired of hearing this story, but I will offer a short version because it is new to you. When I was a freshman in high school, a classmate and I placed third in a regional science fair with an experiment growing corn hydroponically. I had found some “recipes” for hydroponic solutions that provided plants a nutrient source weak in one of the three major macronutrients of fertilizer (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium). We grew corn in four mason jars with a control group and a group deficient in one of the macronutrients. We charted growth and displayed the actual plants as part of our booth for the competitions. I had no idea of the chemistry involved, but the visual display was impressive and we were only 9th graders. I have an old black and white photo of the display but I could not find it for this post.

I have come across hydroponics on other occasions. Some of you have probably seen the hydroponics display at EPCOT. You ride past in on one of those boat rides. We have visited a couple of times and paid the fee to get the behind the scenes tour. Here is a post with some pictures from our visit in 2014. I see I was thinking about the potential for school gardens in reaction to this visit. My present experience offers a more practical approach.

So, I see opportunities for having a unit such as this in classrooms. More on school gardens in my next post.

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