Hydroponics Tuesday

Collapsing Eggplants & Dissected Timers
3/18/2008 7:10:52 AM

I learned an important lesson this week:  Provide your plants with more support than they require.  Sadly, this lesson was learned in retrospect. The large eggplant has a branch collapse under it's own weight.  Eggplants really aren't self-supporting, not even the dwarf "Bambino" variety that we're growing at the moment.  Add support lines are you plant grows.  This is the reason that we always make cage-style lightstands... They give plenty of places to attach support lines.

Also... 

I've just posted another writeup in the reviews section of the website.  It's possibly everything you've ever wanted to know about those inexpensive timers you always see at the hydroponics store.  They're slightly more interesting than you'd think.  I ended up opening up one of mine in a failed experiment.  I was trying to find an inexpensive way to create a aeroponic cycle timer.  I had hoped to find a way to "speed up" the timing mechanism of the timer.  Sadly, these timers are totally analog.  Circuits are so much easier to play with than pesky gears.  Ah, well.

We should be ready to start our side-by-side study next week.  More details on that later. 

I'm still working on a new way to photograph things.  Here's the new angle this week:

Hydro-2008-03-18a.jpg

#12Bambino Baby EggplantThe Bambino is really producing.  It's become so heavy with fruit that it cannot support itself (even on the peripheral branches).  Sadly, I may need to remove it, just to make room for the soon-to-arrive Fort Laramie strawberries.
#18Black Beauty Eggplant
This sprouting has been transplanted into a 6" net pot (with hydroton).  Roots have started to protrude outside the pot.  I'll really need to move it soon.  However, space is limited, as we have a study starting soon.
#20-#25Alexandria Alpine StrawberriesA young batch of seedlings.  I'm not sure their destiny at this point.
Unnumbered Seedlings
Black Beauty Eggplant
We've planted 12 seeds for plants that will be used in an upcoming experiment.  Planting date: 02/08/2008.  They are at different stages of growth.  Some have sprouted, others not.  We'll be choosing the two that are the most "equal" for our experiment.
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Comments (2)
Posted By Red Icculus, Tuesday, March 18, 2008 4:51:11 PM
I learned the hard way about plant support when I added humic acid to my Megagarden. All of my pepper plants looked like they were on steroids and began collapsing under their own weight.

Also, you are taking the picture directly into the light. What sort of color correction are you doing for such nice balance?
Posted By Ben (Hydroponics Tuesday), Tuesday, March 18, 2008 5:19:32 PM
My other obsessive hobby is photography. I spend a lot of time with my cameras. For the website, I shoot all the photos in raw, and I manually set the color temperature to 2500K in post-processing. The growing room has an odd mix of light colors, but the 400HPS really overpowers everything into the "orange" spectrum (which usually causes things to look bad). After some experimentation, I've found that 2500K is the best "natural" balance. The photos on the website look different then the room looks in "real life", as "real life" isn't color-corrected.