Show HN: Vegetable Gardening for Engineers
jrcpl.us
jrcpl.us
An engineer might analyse the soil and the plant water needs. Inject water to right levels, or set a timer. These settings need to be readjusted constantly without a hydrometer.
I found an ancient solution that worked incredibly efficient and required no electricity and far cheaper than spending hundreds on electronics. Ollas. The science is called capillary action.
I went a step further as an engineer, and did DIY terracotta pots + silicone. Added a testing stage, of course. Filled pots and sealed it over night. If leaking from seal, more silicone. For filling them up, I used irrigation fittings hooked up to a tank. If I wanted to, I could use rain water into tank (with overflow). That way watering is a fully automated pipeline.
I don't have a picture on hand but others have done it like this: https://www.abc.net.au/gardening/how-to/olla-watering-pots/1...
Other fun topics I looked into:
- Companion plants (avoid spending on pesticides)
- Crop rotation (avoid spending on fertilisers)
- Composting (for compost)
Those are not easy to automate but other topics to make it far cheaper to grow crops without trips to nurseries.
But you can add a lot of variations depending on the crop. A few don't mind to have their feet submerged permanently. Other are from dry climates and can be watered once in a blue moon.
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A big point is economics. As space, seeds, pots and materials are expensive, home growing vegetables are expected to be more expensive than mass produced market vegetables. Sun space is specially valuable in a city. Too much shadowing.
The newbie strategy will be to grow the easiest crops, but these are also the cheapest. A better objective could be to grow the most productive and expensive product possible instead to waste your precious balcony space culturing 100 pots of lettuce
It should be also organic. Because chemicals make the bill skyrocket, and because if you want vegetables with pesticides the market is plenty of the same, but bigger and for less money so eating good food without plastics and poisons is what make the effort worth it
Secondary goals should be to save time and gas (less travels to the supermarket), and to have full control over the process so you know what you ear, and to enjoy the process of having vegetable "pets" at home. In that sense lettuce can be competitive again, because the success ratio is high and can be used daily. Just don't spend 3 dollars in stuff to obtain a 1 dollar lettuce. Is 90% water.
Your goal should be to produce good food without the added waxes, plastic envelop, and pesticides, not to grow the biggest and most perfect vegetable in the planet.
And another thing to consider is that some crops taste much better when fresh harvested. Freshly picked sweet peas or baby carrots taste much better than those put in a fridge or left for hours in a market. Apples or tomatoes are a totally different world also.
In a balcony use the vertical space with climbers (zucchini, scarlet beans). Pumpkins will grow well also, but some are very heavy and you must assure that none grow in a way that can't fall to the street, over somebody. Tiny pots give tiny crops.
A couple points of feedback that I noticed so far:
1. I wrote a comment here in response to what you said about the tradeoff between growth rate and growth quality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50415982
2. In your section on photoperiodism (https://jrcpl.us/contrib/2020/gardening-for-engineers/#photo...), it seems the examples are backwards. Ie, lettuce is a long-day plant that flowers when days are long, mung bean is a short-day plant that flowers when days are short.
Consider adding in some info about vapor pressure deficit (VPD). It's basically the effect of temp and humidity on the leaf surface. Engineers will love it.
If it helps, here's a calculator I made a while back: https://globalgarden.co/calculators/advanced-vapor-pressure-...
Hydro (indoor growing) was my life for 15 years.
On a more serious note, I have found that choosing good easy to grow crops for your area makes a lot of difference. For example, sweet potatoes grow well here, the leaves go great in salads, they are relatively pest free and hardly need watering at all. You are flexible in terms of when you harvest the tubers and, and the tubers keep well over winter in the house.
>Crucially, there is a tradeoff between growth rate and growth quality. Higher temperatures can result in faster growth but also thinner stems, weaker roots, and less flavor.
In my own experience (quite a bit over the last ~8 years), if high temperatures (T_opt, not T_max) are accompanied by longer and more intense daylight as well as adequate water and nutrition, it will consistently result in thicker stems, stronger roots, and better flavor. And since higher temperatures in the summer typically coincide with longer days and more intense sunlight, this is the most common outcome. Lacking water or nutrition under these conditions, plants will usually stall their growth rather than grow thinner or weaker.
The only times I can think of that the quoted statement is true is with, eg, indoor seed starts that are given a warm environment with plenty of water and nutrition, but that lack sunlight or artificial light, or light-adapted plants grown outdoors in too much shade.
The clearest counter example that comes to mind is tomatoes, which IMO taste their best, and are by no means thin or weak, when they are growing the fastest.
Can you expand on this?
I'm no expert, and I fully agree that growing food at scale can be difficult. It also requires a lot of space.
But what do you mean by saying it's "too complex for our brains"?
What do you mean by that?
> If we don't work on this correctly, in the end, we will end up in a dead end
We have over 10.000 years of agriculture already behind us so I think that's proof that it works well enough to support small communities in a sustainable fashion. It's simply not necessary to understand all the microbes etc..
If you are hinting on optimization so we can feed all of humanity, then I mean we are definitely not resource and knowledge limited but rather by more mundane things. I'd wager just the US defense budget is enough to feed to world without a problem.
Meanwhile there are forests that were forest (and other ecosystems as well) 10s of thousands of years ago and just as lush and fertile (if not moreso) than they were to begin with.
Sustainable generally means we can maintain the fertility of the land indefinitely without mined inputs. Whether or not it's a completely achievable goal, it makes good sense to strive for it... Mines will become spent, theres only so much land to degrade, etc.
Often when people talk about sustainable agriculture they are talking about systems that mimic biological systems that keep those forests lush for millennia. These types of agricultural systems frequently look similar to agricultural systems of the past with more human labor involved, but less damaging waste products and fewer externalities. (Reducing pollution of the water downstream and minimizing ecosystem impact).
Totally but I'd argue nowadays it's not because we are missing the knowledge but rather ignorance and short-term economic gains.
Imo sustainability goes hand in hand with population (and lifestyle). We want a diverse ecosyaystem, this simply doesn't work if there are 10 billion people wanting to eat meat or produce tons of plastic. Our problem is not knowledge in agriculture that prevents us from sustainable living.
You've AI generated an application. How are you executing your mission statement?
That's some hubris you got there.
There are millions of farmers around the world that use traditional/regenerative farming techniques because they don't have access to the "current support systems" that make modern farming possible, and thousand in the U.S. and Europe that do so because they can.
And worse...you couldn't actually be bothered to build the website yourself so you outsourced it to an AI....
> I am currently exhibiting overwhelming stress from deeply technical work being part of my every day life, and feel I am missing the 'nature' element of life. What should I do?
The brain responds:
> Gardening! A wonderfully complex system that will just 'live' without me! A delightful escape!
The brain asks:
> Yes, gardening! But how? There are so many variables! What are the parameters? Where is the specification outlining the success criteria? What defines a living organic system?
Standard veggie gardening has very low ROI. Basically you need land (hyper expensive in cities), time, patience, and when you do get a crop it's in peak season and ~free at the shops. That's not to discount the experience or the cleanliness or the taste benefits of organic home grown veg: but from an engineering standpoint, you're better off not bothering. Hydroponics are a completely different beast. We're all lucky our society is no longer agrarian in nature. Hunter gatherers lived far better lives than agrarian peasantry.
It's still humbling: it missed caterpillars on the broccoli until I made it look at full-resolution photos. Wrote it up here: https://jatorre.github.io/garden/