funkboxing

I’ve tried a few more nutrient cocktails and so far the clear winner seems to be boiled dirt. Just dirt works too but then you have little critters zooming around eating the watermeal, boiling first puts a stop to all the zooming. I’ve tried most of the easy DIY fertilizer suggestions I’ve found online plus some additives to try to capitalize on the mixotrophy, not that I know how to do that or anything, by why not. I can’t tell if adding sugar helps the watermeal any yet since mold seems to eat it all first. Still really curious about the sucrose angle and I’m supposed to pick up a bucket of ‘sugar press mud’ from a sugar mill next week so we’ll see how that goes.

Since a lot of learning to grow watermeal means leaving it alone I’m spending a lot of time thinking about and fussing with the little grow boxes. That’s probably become the real reason for all this. I’ve had a bizarre affinity for boxes since I was a child and somehow making and fussing with these is just tremendously satisfying.

So I got some more 80\20 and built a second one and I have most of a third but ran out of parts to attach the light. I removed the pi controls for now since I’ve already decided that needs an overhaul. For now it’s all just on a power strip toggle.

The cardboard panels leak light quite a bit but I’m going to add some foil baffles at some point. The foil lining on the inside probably helps a lot with the light but I haven’t metered it yet. One box has a 50W and the other has a 20W LED.

This is the kitchen-lab-garden at present. You’ll notice one box has actual potted plants- those are two jimacas and something that’s growing where I planted a muscodine seed, but doesn’t really look like what I thought a muscodine looked like. I have two more jimacas outside. Of 20 jimaca beans only 4 germinated so I’m pretty proud of these little guys. Not sure what’s up with muscodine guy but we’ll see. Since there are 4 jimacas and another thing I’ve named them Terry, Korvo, Yumulack, Jesse, and Pupa.

I switched up the BlueBox to be sort of a macro-time-lapse thing to give me imaging data to figure out how to maybe visually quantify growth.

So new theory- Wolffia Arrhiza aren’t just people-free soylent-green… they’re also teeny-tiny Audrey II’s.

I didn’t get what mixotroph meant at first and I still probably don’t, but apparently it means they can eat sugar and grow in the dark. That seems distinctly unplantlike to me, but plants eat bugs and sadistic dentists- so why not? Anyway it’s pretty freaking amazing. I was thinking these things were just solar powered but turns out you can run them on gas in a pinch. Not that you’d want to carry a big supply of sugar to space to feed to your plants but I’m guessing there are other organic carbon sources it can use. Guessing is definitely the word though.

So I’m still getting my head wrapped around the sugar thing but I played with a few other nutrient combos and let them grow for a week in the light cube 12on/12off. Here’s the super-scientific recipies:

Cocktail-A – 1 cup H20, 1tsp white vinegar, pinch epsom salt, pinch baking soda, pinch gelatin.
Cocktail-B – 1 cup H20, green tea, coffee grounds
Cocktail-C – 1 cup H20, 1 pump miracle grow indoor plant food
JAR5 – 1/4Cup Cocktail-A + 2 drops glycerine
JAR6 – 1/2Cup Cocktail-A + 2 drops glycerine
JAR7 – 1/4Cup Cocktail-A
JAR8 – Cocktail-B less
JAR9 – Cocktail-B more
JAR10 – 1/4Cup Cocktail-C
JAR11 – 1/4Cup Cocktail-C + pinch hydroxyethyl cellulose
JAR12 – 1/2Cup Cocktail-C
*filled all jars to flange with H20 and dropped ~20-30 watermeal pods in. Refilled about 50ml H20 per jar twice over 7 days.

Yeah- I don’t know what I was thinking with the cellulose and glycerine, but I had some left from LED\Silicone projects so somehow that justifies poisoning a bunch of plants?

JAR5 – No growth, few survivors, crusty maybe mold or something on top.
JAR6 – No growth, fewer survivors, definitely mold on top.
JAR7 – Probably some growth.
JAR8 – No survivors, gross swamp.
JAR9 – No survivors, grosser swamp.
JAR10 – Maybe some growth.
JAR11 – Maybe some growth, but probably not.
JAR12 – Probably no growth.

The results were kind of nasty, lot of dead plants and funk. My takeaway is very no on the glycerine and cellulose. But possibly yes on cocktail-A, and sort of yes on cocktail-C. And hold-up on the green tea and coffee, but still curious. I suspect the green tea has eggs in it. I think that may actually be how those critters from chapter 2 got in there, not dirt like I thought. I left the light cube alone most of the week so I didn’t see the hellscape form again, but the aftermath in J8-9 looks very similar. So I may try that again after boiling the tea.

I think the small containers are their own problem. Too deep for their opening so it’s really stagnant and not much gas exchange maybe. Nutrient levels varying wildly with evaporation. Also I’m not sterilizing anything so life is finding ways. Still thinking about how I’m going to manage all that.

So I’d like to say I’m slowly learning to grow watermeal, but I think all I can really claim is that I’m slowly learning how to do less watermeal mass-murder. But considering this is widely regarded as a weed to be controlled or eradicated- I think starting from mass-murder and working backwards might actually make sense.

I reached out the LSU AgCenter and got pointed towards ‘Azolla’, which was an excellent hint for finding how people actually grow little alien plants like this. And Azolla actually shares a lot of watermeal’s awesomeness. I’m especially curious about how Azolla restricts mosquito breeding- which I thought would be a challenge to growing watermeal outdoors, so I wonder if watermeal can do that too or maybe growing it with Azolla could protect the watermeal.

Also want to give a shout out to the little jimaca and muscodine seeds- they’re trying their best to germinate despite me not knowing what I’m doing so I just want to show them some love. Also big ups to turnip and onion- those are some champs.

So very predictably I’m discovering that I’ve been doing everything completely wrong. I vastly overestimated the light requirements and I think I sort of bleached a lot of them to death with 50W 24/7. I changed to a 20W LED about 6 hours a day and they seem to like that a lot more. Also I’ve been reading more about what nutrients they need and a little bottle of miracle grow seems to keep them happy for now. At this point I’m still just trying to make sure I can maintain a population of these things at all- then I can get into testing out some variations.

Also apparently I introduced pests in one jar by dropping some dirt in it. Turned into a delightful little hellscape of micro monsters eating each other and the pods and then everything died. I took some video in a USB microscope because it was interesting but not sure what exactly happened there. I like to think it was the plot of Pacific Rim but the trans-dimensional aliens are bacteria and a Class-5 Kaiju is about 2mm tall.

And I got enough 80/20 parts in to put together an aluminum frame box so I can get rid of the wood frame monstrosity. I ordered a MakersLED fixture but it’s been stuck in transit for a few weeks so I just used another heatsink I had and it does okay with a fan on it.

The raspi just controls a relay for the light and a USB webcam for now. Apparently I’m too dumb to correctly wire a dallas 1-wire module so not taking temperature readings yet.

I’ve been doing more causal ‘research’ and I’m pleased to find out I’m way, way behind on discovering how awesome this plant is. And though my assumptions on how to grow it were painfully misguided- apparently my assumptions about its potential value are shared- and actually pretty well proven.

http://cfb.unh.edu/phycokey/Choices/Anomalous_Items/Aquatic_macrophytes/floating_leaves/WOLFFIA/Wolffia_key.html

This article in particular says “A closed plant and animal system has been tested with Wolffia Arhiza because of its rapid rate of biomass production. The system is designed to function for a period of two years” which basically says everything I wanted to do with this plant has already been done. But- if some goon with no expertise in any relevant field can do some of it in their apartment- that’s probably a positive step too so I’ll just do that. I actually haven’t looked up the reference for that claim yet- but I’ll probably get to it eventually after enough failures.

Here are some other links I’ve found about watermeal that I only vaguely understand but seem cool and interesting.

FEED\FOODSOURCE
https://www.nature.com/articles/232495a0
https://scialert.net/abstract/?doi=pjbs.2001.618.620
https://www.entomoljournal.com/archives/2018/vol6issue3/PartB/6-2-286-965.pdf

TOXIC ABSORBTION
https://hero.epa.gov/hero/index.cfm/reference/details/reference_id/510993

SOMETHING ABOUT USING WA AS A GENETIC FACTORY THING – BIOPHARMA STUFF
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fchem.2018.00304/full
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11240-015-0834-z
https://www.longdom.org/proceedings/callus-induction-regeneration-and-agrobacteriummediated-transformation-of-wolffia-arrhiza-to-obtain-plantproducer-of-therapeutic-proteins-4740.html

ALL KINDS OF SCIENCEY ARTICLES
https://www.science.gov/topicpages/p/plant+wolffia+arrhiza

UNDER A SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPE
https://ejournal.sinica.edu.tw/bbas/content/1979/2/bot202-01.PDF

GAS CHROMATOGRAPH
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.2478/s13545-013-0072-0/html

NITRATE AND NITRITE REDUCTION
http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/47/2/189

PATENT FOR CULTIVATION MEDIUM
https://patents.google.com/patent/RU2472338C1/en
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/d3/bb/e8/997bb1b065efda/RU2472338C1.pdf (MOSTLY RUSSIAN)