Category Archives: Urban Farming

Gurobo Farm Update 5.30.14

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And JAM! Look who got his update done. That’s right, this guy! Even though i did two hours on DDoCast today i was still able to knock it out. There are ducks at the end so look for that. Also i guess the final duck names have been chosen. I will have to get them all typed out from the boss. I don’t tell you wrong. Ideally the ducks could become fairly well trained and could follow some commands and that seems cool to me.

Anyway if you are in the market for eggs let me know the chickens must have stepped things up, because yesterday i had the boy get eggs in the afternoon and there was around 30 eggs in the coop and he claims to be bringing in eggs everyday. 30/Five hens equals a really busy group of ladies.

Anyway please enjoy.

<3s

Gurobo Farm Update: 5.16.14

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I taped this on Friday morning. Turns out that i have zero idea what day of the month it is when not sitting at my computer.

Update Update….

Thanks to the wife’s prodding i ran out and bought a in tank heater and an extra filter and low and behold i had a lot less dead fish then i thought, thank goodness! Now if i can just keep what is alive that way things would be great!

<3s

Upduckdate 5.16.2014

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One of the two videos for this week’s update, a duck update. Right now they are living in the older rabbit cage on my kitchen table. They are super sweet, will come to me if i quack and they will eat greens like lettuce from the greenhouse or some grapes quartered.

Anyway enjoy these littler quackers and tune in later for the normal update once Youtube is done deshakeing it for us.

Lots of Little Things, including Gurobo Farm Update 5.6.14

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Right off the bat i want to say thanks for stopping by, i know that i my base is all over at the moment and that makes me fairly happy. Having so many people with so many different topics come here because i might entertain them for a moment is fairly cool.

Okay lets get into it.

1, DUCKS! Oh man if you missed the 30 sec link i tweet to them still in the shipping box don’t panic. First it is right here:

Second, i will be taking a longer video later and will have it up as soon as i can. I hope to run down the breeds and names i hope. Right now i like using our Grandparent’s names for the ducks but with 4 girls that might be hard.

2, Greenhouse, i have a new update processing right now over on youtube, what phones are shaky… Odds are it will be done later tonight so it might have to wait until tomorrow but if you don’t want to wait i am linking the shaky video below. I also did find and get two IBC totes, one of which Remmie and i busted hump and converted yesterday. It is not 100% ready for fish and plants yet but it is getting close.

3, Got to see Spiderman 2 yesterday. Really good but i also have a bit of a crush on Emma Stone. Yeah i know. I also have a thing for Dr. Girlfriend and Lana from Archer.

I plan to do a ring tone of this scene for CtH.

LESSAH!

Okay, i better check on things and tape more videos of the ducks. I mean how damn cute are they? Super damn fuck’n cute, i know.

In Light of Earth Day, Watch me Point at Things.

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In light of Earth Day i am going to link a couple of videos that i made last Friday. I did tweet them so if you are a tweep and you already saw them then there is nothing new for you here. But if you haven’t seen them they are not bad.

The first one here is a little shaky but YouTube is “fixing” it as i write this so i hope that it wont be too bad for you soon.

Pre-Strawberries

Post-Strawberries.

Also the spinach has started to poke up in the purple bed and i did go ahead and fill the grey bed with peppers, yeah ghost Habanero. So much fiery goodness.

More Strawberries and other Trees?

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Last spring the wife and i bought a Pine Tree, not a huge one. It was somewhere in the 2-3 feet tall range with the idea that it would be mostly an inside tree and would also double as our Christmas tree. But it didn’t do so hot and died. But having that tree spawned the idea of adding other trees to the yard and house.

Rewind as few weeks back when we were looking at Cherry trees we also looked at some smaller inside/outside trees like the Meyer Lemon tree. The idea was that a patio tree would be ideal for our needs. But we passed.

Tangy yellow stuff.

Fast forward to yesterday, when the wife gets an email letting her know that the web site where we bought the cherry tree, http://www.fast-growing-trees.com/ was having a one day 50% off sale. So as we tend to do we started to put together an order.

The we started looking and we noticed that the sale was taking 50% more off then what we thought the sale price was…. So we started looking around for more things to buy, i mean there are always more things to buy right?

 

And we landed on 100 strawberry plants. Because we really love strawberries. …

 

Meaning that this weeks project is not xping Samius, but taking pallets and making an A frame planter.

Pallets! Aka transportation leftovers.

A few boards and some rain gutters. Seems easy enough.

I want something small enough that i can move it into the greenhouse this winter but tall enough to keep the chicks from eating all the fruits of my labor.

After all i need to end up with something that looks like this, right?

As usual i will let you know how things are going once in progress.

<3s

Gurobo Farm Update: 4.11.14

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So i am not 100% sure how it happened, exactly…. But now we have a bunny. A super sweet Angora Bunny. Which naturally leads to the next to pictures of the boys (Remmie and one of his friends) dissimbling some rescued pallets from work so i could cobble together the last picture. Aka, rabbit run for nice days outside.

So bunny.

So bunny.

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Yes my son is the one in red with the loooong hair and he is huge.

One Bunny Run

One Bunny Run

I hope it looks super rustic and cobbled together, because that was the look i was going for when building it. On the other hand i have gotten this (below Video) more or less ready.

Now i feel we are ready for the ducks to arrive in about a month. Might even put some fish in the duck pond for the summer. Not sure about that yet.

Stepping into the greenhouse lets do a tomato side-by-side.

I realize that the pick of the aquaponic plant isn’t so great but it was REALLY bright outside and i couldn’t see the screen on my phone… But it more or less looks like the ones in soil but bigger.

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About 4 inches tall.

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A head of Romaine we ate last week, placed in one of the dutch buckets. It is really taking off.

 

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Trying to hang a cucumber this year. My hope is it will climb the fence and help shade everything else some when it gets HOT.

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Swish chard is roaring back from its hard winter. So much so as it has been hot dog and brats buns for the last week or so. Along with a spinach and lettuce leaf. You can also see some of the straw berries plants, what you can’t see is that some of them are already fruiting.

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Grapes are waking up. The ones out side are still asleep.

 

 

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Garlic – Top – first year to try them. So far so good. Ghost and Devil Peppers – bottom – also first year. Not sure how they are doing yet really.

Last big news is we added our first fruit tree. It is a 4 breed monster cherry tree, i can’t remember the different kinds but there are 2 early fruiters and 2 late fruiters. We hope is that it will fruit this year (it should even if there will not be a ton) but if not this year it should next year. This weekend we will be getting some of those stone rings and getting it mulched real good.  I added like 8 or 9 eggs to the soil around the tree. I read an article how eggs are great time realize fertilizer as well as good eats.  I am testing that out with some tomato plants in the greenhouse as well but i wanted to go ahead and get some in hear as well as i really want to make this happen for the wife. Speaking of the wife now that we have one fruit tree she is thinking she might want another for the backyard. And the is more talk in the house about getting a lemon tree for inside. Think i might have made some growing monsters. 🙂

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The Cherry tree.

What are you doing this year garden wise? I know you have some room so don’t give me any grief on that one. Go plant something.

 

<3s.

 

News from the Greenhouse

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Today i want to share a few images i took this morning from the greenhouse.

So this is the current setup for the aquaponics. I plan to have another flood and drain tray to the right again but the tray i used last year had a crack and i was slowly loosing water. So i plan to replace it with the other tray i already have setup. I also hope to have a little more support  setup this year so the tray can stay level and not weigh down on the tank directly.

Something i am trying is using that rain gutter extension as my water return. So far it seems to work well but i am worried now that we are out of the store that it might be too not dark, ie will let too much light in and let algae grow in the return which is not something i want. However, i am thinking i might be able to put some clay pebbles in these tubes with light holes cut in them and have an easy to make drip tube. The ridges should hold the pebbles well enough as long as i can get enough pebbles to stay in place for the plants to be able to grow a reasonable root system.

These two picture what i was able to grow or over winter with no heat. A fairly sad Swish Chard (Top) and some fairly healthy lettuce (Left) even if i started with eight heads and now i have like 3. That just means that i will be able to use this tray for something else soon, right?

This is the current salad bowl trays, to the left (or top damn werdpress fuckn tags hello!) is lettuce and the right (bottom) spinach. They are doing well and are right on plan.

Most of the tomatoes we started from seeds are taking off. I ordered i guess two different breeds this year, Big Beef and Sugar Sweetie. If i am lucky i will like the taste of one of them. But i wouldn’t count on it. And i assume that we will end up picking up at least 3 or 4 more that are ready to plant from the store later, we always do.

Speaking of things from seeds. I ordered like 5 different HOT peppers this year. Including the Trinidad Scorpion aka the hottest pepper around at about 1,463,700 Scovilles. For some degree of scale a Jalapeno rocks s cool 3500-8000 Scovilles. My brother in law was taking a good game last year about eating all the peppers. We will see, we will see.

Guess, i will end with one last image of the strawberries that wintered over. They look like shit but hey if i don’t have to buy new strawberries… well shit i already did and i planted like 30 of them in one of the buckets. I might have a lot of strawberries. Tasty.

In other planting/Gurobo Farms news looks like we are going to try potatoes, bulb onions, and garlic. We haven’t grown any of these things well not intentionally anyway.  Also we have decided to add ducks to our backyard farm animals. Yep, Old McGruobo had a farm E-I-E-I-O. Hell i am even debating on adding a float try to the system full of crawfish. Why not one more group of animals?

<3s

Life is Coming Around to the Idea of Me being Amazing.

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If you have been following along you all know my personal woes in the last few weeks. But things are feeling better. To start off i got called in for an interview with the post office. I know it sounds strange but i have been doing a lot of thinking about what i want to do and what i wanted to due when i was little.

And i remembered in the way way back……. Back in first grade my school was close to the post office and one day we walked over for a field trip. I remember loving the idea of delivering letters and packages. Then later in way back when I was looking for my first job i wanted to be a postman but that finishing school thing got in the way. Then i meet my wife and my life took a lot of turns and twists. So i have the feeling that my interview will be good tomorrow and i will have that under my belt.

But I haven’t given up on a maybe moving in to QA @ Turbine. I took yesterday and started playing with perl. Yes the P in perl is lower case why i am not sure… But i can say i like it. I am a PHP guy through and through, syntax-wise any how, and perl is like the love child between Java and PHP. Or that is how i see the syntax… I am barely (less then 6 hours) into  it but i have gotten most of my simple starting scripts to work easily enough. I am missing something in the way libraries are called i think, skipping ahead on my reading some, and i am having issues sending an email but i am sure that will be explained soon enough.

What has happened that i am not please about happened in the greenhouse… During the day it has been sunny enough most days that someone (me) has to go and open it up as to take the internal temp down to a reasonable temp. But then with the last 2-4 hours of sunlight left someone (aka the son) needs to go and close it up. Well the Monday night i sent him out and reminded him that i had pulled the window and he needed to close it. Well he didn’t. Tuesday in the early hours it frosted and killed almost everything in the greenhouse. So i got to take a few hours and do some tearing the old plants out. So much waste because a window didn’t get closed. I should have checked on it myself i guess. Live and learn.  That said as i was cleaning out the aquaponics flood and drain bed i noticed that some of the cold hearty lettuces are coming in. Maybe there will be something growing in to eat the fish shit so they don’t all die to ammonia bloom… Woot?

Okay looks like a worth wild post. Now i need to go do some more cleaning in the green house, it was really packed and there is a lot to remove before i can work on more recovery. Then i need to hit the stores. I need to get some not jeans for my interview and with the cold some of the hose in the aquaponics got brittle and broke when i was cleaning so i need to fix that up too. Also gives me a window to make some layout changes… Maybe get that other bed setup…

<3s

Gurobo Farm update Aug 8

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Here is the video i took Thursday before heading on my weekend getaway with the wife. Youtube is “smoothing” the video out. Had my phone auto uploaded it to YouTube like i had the other one setup to do, I think you would have gotten this video last week.

Anyway this is a little video of things. The rosters are gone now and there is one less thing for the wife to have to deal with in her day to day life.

Well hope you enjoy.

Link to YouTube Vid…

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