"Real" Spinach & Arugula - Aero Garden

"Real" Spinach & Arugula

Part 2 - The Grow



New Problems

  1. Root Sensitivity

    • I knew spinach, arugula and the like don't transplant well and are recommended started in the ground, but regardless of technique, all plants experienced some stress and shock on moving to the aero 

      • I ended up using two site for starting seeds right in the aero and two sites for mature plants. The plants grow so vigorously there wasn't room for four full grown plants anyhow

  2. Poor Choices?

    • Rocky (Diplotaxis tenuifolia)

      •  Has turned out to be sloooooooooooooooooooow growing. In picture below, the tiny plant closest is Rocky, which was started at the same time as the spinach (back) and Astros (left and right)

    • Spinach and arugula preferences

      • Arugula wants lots more ammonium than spinach, and making one happy caused the other issues

    • Bad sensors

      • I had a SparkFun Environmental Combo Breakout - CCS811/BME280 sensor that came with the Qwiic kit, but as other note, the CO2 sensor heater throws off the humidity and temperature

  • Bad sensor preparation

    • I fried my initial Qwiic SCD41 CO₂ Humidity and Temperature Sensor when it got wet! This was easily fixed with a liberal application of silicone conformal coating on it's replacement

 Successes 

  1. Astro is incredibly fast and large yielding, and seems to never bolt!

    • I've started growing four Astro. It lacking in variety, but each plant yields a small salad each week, sprout in days, and mature in about two weeks

  2. Lots of delicious Rocky flowers!

    • While very slow growing, it was quick to bolt and produced spicy delicious flowers for a two weeks

  3. ESP32 Thing Plus, Qwiic accessories, and Cayenne made monitoring a breeze

    • More below!




Aeroponic Sensor Upgrade 

The Arduino Wifi Rev2 was good enough for temperature monitoring but lacked Qwiic and was large..

Enter the ESP32 Thing Plus! Small, efficient WiFi and Qwiic enabled module from SparkFun!

Full details and example code on my GitHub 

 

Up Next: The Garden

It's spring! Time to take my grow experiments to the backyard!!


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