Sorry, no tomatoes this week, just a quick post about Nanny’s public debut. We went to Paris, to a connected things exhibition called Connected Conference. Here I am demoing Nanny to whoever was interested. The demo was simple: I added a bit of potassium hydroxide (pH up) to the nutrient solution of a small hydroponics system [...]
I have been talking about my tomatoes for a few weeks now: seeding, hydroponic system, transplanting and taking root. I just realize that this is starting to look like a really slooooow movie. I do not mind slow, in fact I reckon sometimes we need more slowness in our lives… mmmmh, summer… sorry; calm is [...]
7th of March In the previous posts of the series, I wrote about planting the seeds and transplanting to the hydroponic system. With everything checked and working, I felt pretty confident: what could go wrong? Well, the substrate did: the expanded clay was not acidic enough. As the nutritive solution passes through my cheap [...]
6th March. About 2 weeks after planting the seeds, they already have some leaves, and you can see white roots showing through the jiffy as in the image above. This seedling needs more space for its roots to grow: it is time to transplant them to the growing pot. If you wait too long, you [...]
25th of February. Seedlings. In my last post I started growing hydroponic indoors cherry tomatoes. This is the second of a series on this journey. I am using a General Hydroponics WaterFarm just like the one in this picture. It moves up the water with an air pump, using a clever system that pushes up [...]
I am doing a little project of growing tomatoes indoors, using Nanny as my teacher. I started about 2 months ago and have been writing about it. Now that I have several of these posts ready, I will be publishing them, so you can have a sort of “step motion” fast view of the project. [...]
We have been to Boston! We went to show Nanny and to learn. We did plenty of both, but also had time to meet the guy who runs Corner Stalk. First quality greens We bumped into his hydroponic lettuces in the Boston Public Market. Shawn and his wife Connie Cooney are entrepreneurs. In 2013 they [...]
Three weeks ago we started beta testing Nanny. Almost every pure digital startup launches products while still in beta. That isn't advisable for a hardware company because when things fail you cannot simply release a new version as you would do with a web site. You want everything to work as a charm before selling the [...]
What does Nanny do? It monitors hydroponic cultures. When something is wrong it sends an alarm and tells you what to do. Hydroponics rookie here. How does Nanny help? Farming is a craftsmanship: it requires time to become an expert. Nanny will gently guide you to avoid catastrophic mistakes and to mature as a grower. [...]
Biodiversity is the impressive variety of forms that life takes around us. We use to think of it as the diversity of species, but it gets a bit more complex when experts talk about it. They look at biodiversity at different levels, like ADN, ecosystems, groups, cultural behavior... At a global scale it is [...]
