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.