Posts in category "sustainable-living" - page 5
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Drip Irrigation Control System v2.0 and v3.0
In one of my previous post, I wrote about my drip irrigation control system. But there were a few problems with it. In the process of rectifying them, I built v2.0 and v3.0 control systems. And to think people were asking if I was getting bored in retirement or if I wanted to get back to work :). Why? I love what I do now and it occupies me completely.
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Drip Irrigation Control System v1.0
If you have been reading about my organic terrace gardening project in the last few posts, you know that I have setup a drip irrigation system that automatically waters the plants everyday. Tinkering with electronics has always been my passion and this was one of those fun hobby projects that I wanted to do after retirement. Sorry, this post may be a bit too technical (electronics and code), so feel free to skip.
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Organic Gardening: The Harvest
I have been talking about my organic garden setup in the last two posts. So I thought it was time to show some results. The previous post ended with us setting up the shadenet around April 2019. From then on we have been harvesting some vegetable or the other. Although I don't have photos for some of the harvest, what follows next are bunch of pictures of fruits and vegetables we plucked from the terrace as well as ground garden. Enjoy!
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Organic Gardening: Shade Net Setup
In the last post I talked about how we started building our very basic organic terrace garden in the early spring of 2019. Soon the summer will start and we were worried if the plants will be able to handle the sun. Even during the spring season, the plants were having difficulty coping up with the heat on the terrace. So we decided to build a shade net. The idea was to
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Organic Gardening: The Beginnings
Some time soon after I retired in July 2018, we decided to grow some organic vegetables in the small place that we have available around our house and also on the terrace. And ever since I have been planning to write a couple of posts about it. But somehow other important things came up and I kept on postponing it. Finally the time has come :). The project has been one of the longest on-going one. We still keep adding and changing things.
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Update on Rain Water Harvesting Project
One of the benefits of retiring is that you have a lot of free time and you itch to do something. But without a boss and a project to throw you around, you are on your own. Which means you can come up with whatever ideas that fancy you. One such idea was the rain water harvesting project. I blogged about it a few weeks ago and you can read all about it there. As I mentioned in that post, the project was still a work in progress as we were trying to improve some shortcomings and fixing bugs (software parlance). One of the issue we noticed with our setup was that a single 1 inch pipe is unable to drain out the water from the drum fast enough during heavy rainfall. So the drum is filling up and overflowing even as the 1" pipe is draining water from the drum. We finally fixed the issue now by replacing the 1" pipe with a 2" pipe and everything works like a charm. So here is an update on how we achieved it.
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Rain Water Harvesting Project
When it came to self-sustainability, I was interested in doing three projects -- growing organic vegetables, setting up water harvesting and generating power from solar panels. While we cannot certainly be fully self sustaining if I completed the projects, we could at least be less dependent on outside factors. A while ago we started growing vegetables in our side yard and terrace. I need to get around to writing a post on it. Some topic or the other always comes up and I write a post on it and eventually the post on terrace garden is way overdue. I did not want to let the same thing happen to this project which we started working on setting up recently. So here is something on that topic. The work is not yet fully done, but if I wait, I may end up never getting around to it :)
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