What Preps are you doing this week? Part 9

[Frnc]

Sorry to hear about the Covid Arzosah, hope it's not too bad.

Re seed sprouting, I've done that a few times. Should get back into it. I have two glass jars that sit at 45° for growing seed sprouts. You can also get plastic trays that go in layers.
These are what I got, but I only paid half what they are charging here. You just add some water, give it a shake, drain the excess and put it back down. Easy peasy. If you look at "customers also bought" you will see various seeds. Keep them moist but make sure they don't go mouldy. You can have fresh salad on tap. Bag of seeds lasts ages.
Oh, I just realised Arzosah was talking about something different to this. This is just like growing cress. You put these on a window ledge. No feed, growing medium nothing. Seeds, water, sunlight and a few days is all. Also scroll to "products related to this item" for similar sprouters.
https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00DELSHZ2/

[GillyBee]

I use supermarket dried green peas (Morrisons) for pea shoots. They are pretty easy treated like mustard and cress. I also realised that buying seed for sprouting got me a LOT more kale and chard seed than buying the exact same variety from the same supplier as a vegetable seed.

[Frnc]

I use supermarket dried green peas (Morrisons) for pea shoots. They are pretty easy treated like mustard and cress. I also realised that buying seed for sprouting got me a LOT more kale and chard seed than buying the exact same variety from the same supplier as a vegetable seed.

Massive difference. Like 100 x more.

[pseudonym]

And on a personal note, I just tested positive for covid - 2nd pink line arrived after 2 minutes. I'm not a happy bunny, and I'm off to bed, taking my electric fan, my kettle, my phone and my mug and a couple of teabags with me. I may be gone for some time, though not for the same reason as Captain Oates

Get well soon.

[jennyjj01]

I have a question. I ordered a small solar panel to charge my powerbank. Thing is, lipo batteries don't like heat, and the panel needs to be in the sun. So how do I charge it up without knackering it through heat? Obviously it needs to be in shade, but is a bit of cardboard going to be enough? I could get a long lead and run it to better shade, but does that affact how well it charges? I suppose this only applies to heatwaves, so maybe I just avoid those.

I doubt they'll suffer in the ambient temperature on even our hottest days. They don't like 'extreme' heat. Just keep them in the shade.

[itsybitsy]

Ordered another water butt. It's arriving on Monday, hopefully I can fill it up before the inevitable hose-pipe ban/drought declaration.

[Yorkshire Andy]

Ordered another water butt. It's arriving on Monday, hopefully I can fill it up before the inevitable hose-pipe ban/drought declaration.

That's my job tonight go fill the ibc on the allotment

[jansman]

Sprout seeds are on Amazon, but you can also use the dried lentils in the shops - much cheaper than paying gardening prices

Wow! Is it possible that you could expand on the details please? I have zero knowledge of sprouts.

Absolutely. At Sainsbo, 500g of organic red lentils (might as well get the very best) is £1.50 for 500g. On Amazon, 250g of non-GMO broccoli seeds costs £9.99. The difference

Remember when I had the blog? I ran a sprouting experiment, not that I did it regularly, but definitely wanted to do it once, to see, and I used supermarket seeds for that. In italics below are my conclusions, with the bit about the origin of the seeds in bold.

Watering
I have a tendency to drown indoor plants, but I did really well with these:
watered once and covered them with a paper towel for 3 days, until they were properly poking their heads above the soil.
When I watered them subsequently, I used a small, purpose made watering can with a rose on it, instead of an ordinary kitchen jug – for people who over-water, this is a seriously brilliant idea.

Seeds
I didn't use expensive seeds, I used green lentils from Sainsbury, £1.15 for 500g, and soaked them for 24 hours. This was almost too long, as I was just starting to see the tips of the shoots coming out. I'd go for 20 hours next time.

Trays
The supermarket trays are so easy to re-use, so accessible, and free, but they have their problems. The first harvest, because I couldn't see the bottoms of the stems, I left them too long, they were turning brown, and I lost maybe 10% of the crop to this effect. Not important today, of course, but if I was in real need of these nutrients, that's too much to lose. I suggest that any tray used might be better to be only about an inch high, and then you can see much more easily when you should harvesting. If they were flatter than the supermarket trays, that would help too.

Harvesting
This was great, because I ended up treating them as cut and come again plants – the same little tray got me a total of four harvests, just roughly chopped up and sprinkled over pasta or something. It certainly felt like a proper portion-of-fruit-and-veg, not just a little sprinkle.

Growing Medium
Just an inch or so of a bog standard potting mix from any big store – B&Q, Wickes, Wilko, Poundland, whatever's easily available to you. At Growing Underground, they use a hydroponic liquid circulating through a kind of web of filaments made locally from recycled carpet, and after being used for a while, they're transported a few miles to a biomass power plant and used for fuel. My equivalent of supermarket topsoil is now sitting in my compost bin, of course.

Plant Protection
If you look online, you can see that people grow in propagators, to avoid draughts and keep a better, more even heat for the plants. I didn't use any for this experiment, and these days, with the extremes of temperature we've been having, I think you'd need to be very proactive about taking the protection on and off, so that the little microgreens don't die from overheating.

Lighting
LED lights are also popular. I didn't use any, but having a set overhead would extend your ability to grow more food more quickly. Nor would you have to turn your tray so often to catch the light coming through the window. They can get really expensive, really fast, but I'll certainly be buying a bulb, one that fits an ordinary lamp.

May all your Microgreens be Marvellous.

Many thanks Arzosah.

[jennyjj01]

Well my old power box project is no more

...
Screenshot_20220808-194847.png
Managed to get the bulk of the heavy wiring done .. ...

You showed me yours so I'll show you mine...

I finally got my relay and timer arrangement sorted out and bodged together, with a bit of help.

Using a relay and the seldom used timer feature of the PWM controller to switch the freezer to domestic mains by night and inverter mains by day. The inverter runs 24/7. Not under load at night
A simple mains timer powering an 8A battery charger, also by night so the batteries are nice and full by morning

I have a VERY loud mains fail alarm on the 'resilience' output sockets, so if it goes titsup, I can plug the load into the ring main socket, while I sort it out. I can also plug the load (fridge/Freezer) into the ring main if I go on holiday and can turn off the inverter, too.
This will not automatically power my freezer if the domestic mains fails at night.

Time settings will need to be revised throughout the year. There's also a bluetooth battery monitor constantly getting checked.

I did have a lot of help with this.

[Yorkshire Andy]

Those little cheap controllers. Do have their uses