Posts in category "sustainable-living" - page 4
-
How To Make Bio-Enzymes – Part II
This post continues from where I left off on Bio Enzymes. If you have not read that post, please start there. Once you have prepared the bio-enzyme, you can bottle them for different uses. I am including a video (see end of the post) showing the same.
...continue reading -
What Does Minimalism Mean To Us
Like many things in life, what something means to you may not mean the same to others. Take minimalism for example. It has a different meaning to different people, but the core tenets remain the same. Some people confuse minimalism with cheap or frugal. While it does help to be frugal, it does not necessarily mean minimalist. What does minimalism mean to us then? We'd like to think that minimalism means owning or buying the minimum amount of things that will let you lead a comfortable but simple life. That's a mouthful. Lets break it down.
...continue reading -
The Truth About Organic Gardening
You have heard about our organic terrace garden. You know all the exciting projects that came out of it and the fun we had building it. Don't forget the good harvest we had over the past year. However, not everything is always smooth sailing as one might mistakenly assume. We do have our share of pesky problems and that is what this post is about. I write this post in the hope that it may help you understand the other side of terrace gardening in case you are planning to embark on the journey.
...continue reading -
How To Make Bio-Enzymes - Part I
As a continuation of the previous post on how to reduce and reuse the wet waste produced at our homes, we need to learn about bio-enzymes. Bio enzyme is basically homemade vinegar made by fermenting left over fruit, vegetables, flowers, and leaves. We can use whole fruits or just the remains of the vegetables, i.e., peels and cuttings alone. As a household cleaner, bio enzyme can be used for your bathrooms, mopping floors, clean pesticide residues on produce, dish washing, as laundry detergent etc. It can be used to clean anything and everything literally.
...continue reading -
Drip Irrigation Control System v4.0 – Web Server
In the past, I explained the hardware and software parts of the system. This concluding post on my drip irrigation control system will go into the details of the web server. As you know, I wanted to build a system that I can control from anywhere. In the previous designed, I had to be near the control system to configure the drip time and duration using buttons on the board.
...continue reading -
How To Make Homemade Compost
Most of us can manage our wet wastes at home instead of disposing them at the landfills. Have you ever passed by one of those waste disposal centers that make us close our nose and car doors? Almost all of us are responsible for that. I am not aware of how many developed countries actually do manage their wastes (I am not good with statistics or numbers as such), but I firmly believe India is definitely not one of them. Our stinking drains and over-spilling garbage on roads is almost an integral part of our lives. I can't tell exactly when this realization hit me that I too am a contributor of the same and have to do something about it.
...continue reading -
Drip Irrigation Control System v4.0 – Software
This is a continuation of my previous post on control system v4.0. In that post I wrote about the hardware. Now I will talk about the software. If you have been following my drip irrigation control system design, you know that I switched from Arduino to ESP8266. It took some time for me learn about the new board, but it is very similar to Arduino when it comes to programming it.
...continue reading -
The Start of a New Series: Sustainable Living
In the last two meet-ups I had with my readers, I understood that a few people are interested in sustainable living. For those readers I am planning to start another series called the sustainable living. Since I don't know much about the topic and it is mostly run by my better half, I will hand over the reins to her when talking about sustainable living or organic gardening. To kick things off, I asked her to write a guest post as an intro to sustainable living and how she got started. So here is that one from her. Take it over mrs reynd.
...continue reading -
Drip Irrigation Control System v4.0 - Hardware
As promised, I started upgrading my drip irrigation control system with v4.0 design and software. If you read my last update on the control system, you know that there are two things that I wanted to add to it. One was a way to access the system via internet, so I don't need to physically configure it. And the other was to add a humidity sensor. I finally worked on the first upgrade. Now my control system is accessible over the net (currently limited to my home network). However, I had to make a few hardware design changes. I replaced Arduino with ESP8266. The why and how follows.
...continue reading -
Organic Gardening: Shade Net, Drips and Harvest 2.0
In one of the earlier posts, I talked about the shade net setup that we worked on in 2019. We only set the shade net on a small part of the terrace as a test and it worked brilliantly in protecting the plants. The rest of the plants outside of the shade net area were not handling the sun well. So we wanted to finish the rest of the terrace too. In the mean time, monsoon hit and the original shade net was all torn in many places, so it needed replacement. From that we understood that the shade net might need to be re-done every year after monsoon :). Eventually, after the monsoon we set down to work on the rest of the shade net project, dubbed 2.0 for obvious reasons :P
...continue reading