Germination update (Aug 2024 sowing)

The Monilaria moniliforme germinated very quickly after 2-3 days in the greenhouse. 16 out of 16 seeds germinated and 13 of those have survived to develop true leaves which came in after 3 weeks. 

The Pleiospilos nelii took a few days longer than the Monilaria to germinate but grew very rapidly in size afterwards. 15 of 16 seeds germinated and 12 of those are still kicking. As of today, they're just beginning to split and show the true leaves inside. Unsure whether they just take longer or if me sun stressing them didn't help -- they got a little red around the edges and don't seem to appreciate being directly under the grow lights. 

And Dinteranthus pole-evansii seems to be a very heat-loving species. Germination took 3+ weeks and only happened after a heat wave where temperatures in the greenhouse peaked at 39 C. Every time we have another hot day, a couple more seem to pop up. Current germination count is 10ish of around 50 seeds that I just chucked in there -- the seedlings are extremely tiny when they first sprout so it's hard to spot them among the rocks. I suspect these guys aren't done cooking yet anyways. 

New greenhouse, Harvst S16 review

I got a greenhouse recently so that I could grow my plants outside and provide them with more light, better temperatures, lower humidity, and safety from a very curious cat.

The cat in question, doing her best to look like she hadn't just sat on a conophytum.

The greenhouse has been set up a while, but I've procrastinated on writing this post, mainly because of how much of a saga it was to get my hands on the damn thing.

Back in May, I ordered a Harvst S16 from an online store in Germany thinking it'd ship domestically, but it turned out to be drop-shipped straight from the manufacturer in the UK. I wasn't happy about that to say the least, largely because there was no warning that that would happen, but the shop owner was apologetic and did his best to deal with UPS on my behalf. Unfortunately, German customs took offense to some paperwork mistakes and the shipment basically got trapped in limbo forever.

So I gave up on trying to import it in July, and I managed to find an EU-based store that had it in stock and could ship to Germany. A week later, I had it mostly set up. Mostly. 

Assembly

Boy, was this thing heavy! It arrived in three boxes weighing around 50-60 kg total. Everything was flat-packed and mostly straightforward to assemble, though it did take me around 6 hours to assemble on my own.

Unfortunately, I was missing heater cables and a fan unit, and I got 6 left side shelf brackets instead of 3 left and 3 right. Harvst support was very quick to respond to my queries though, and they made it right -- shipped all the replacement parts to me at their cost and made sure the package wouldn't get trapped in customs hell again. They also threw in some acrylic vent covers which were added to their design after my unit was produced.

Some minor gripes with the assembly instructions and documentation, while I'll note here in case it helps anyone in the future:

• Small pieces like the zip tie holders get installed way later than they need to be, which meant that I had to hug the entire back wall of the greenhouse with my short little arms to try and bolt them down. The zip tie holders should be installed on their panel before the panel is inserted into the support beams.
• Likewise, the support brackets don't get installed until the very end. Which means I had to lift up the entire fully assembled greenhouse which weighs more than I do to install them. Not cool. These brackets, in hindsight, could have been slid onto the vertical supports as soon as those supports were added and lightly bolted down out of the way. 
• Instructions didn't mention to plug the pump in, but at least that's fairly self explanatory.
• Instructions didn't mention to plug in the lights and with 12 LED grow lights on three shelves that need to be attached to a branching power supply, a wiring diagram would have been really helpful. I ended up just winging it and I kind of regret it because my wiring scheme made turning off lights on certain shelves (by unplugging them) way harder than it needed to be.
• Instructions mention zip tying the aluminum shelves to the brackets but the new bracket design doesn't have holes for this purpose. The shelves stay in place just fine without it, but it was a bit of a confusing moment.
• Likewise, the instructions also talk about fitting heater cables into nonexistent notches on the shelf brackets. Apparently the cables are now to be woven into the shelves themselves.
• If you don't want to use the pump, you need to set the watering schedule to 0 minutes every 0 hours or else the system will complain of a pump fault (setting 0 and a nonzero value isn't enough). 

Note: I removed the pump when I was done because I don't think my xeric plants need automatic watering, and poking at them is part of the joy of plants for me, anyway.

All done!

When all was said and done though, I was quite pleased with the result. 

On July 20, I had everything minus the missing parts installed and moved my tiny collection in.

The plants in their new home.

After I got back from vacation, I was able to install the missing parts and get the electronics up and running on August 2. I put the system on a guest network to isolate it from the rest of my home internet.

It's been running well and behaving as expected, though there's some UI jank. And sadly, trying to view logs crashes the whole thing and causes it to reboot, but Harvst support has told me that this will be fixed in the next firmware update. 

Greenhouse temperatures over the last week

Overall impressions

Build Quality: 4/5 

Everything was high-quality and as advertised...except the Pozidriv screws?! These screws were made of really soft metal and began to cam out under the force of a manual screwdriver, thus defeating the entire purpose of Posidriv. I'll probably replace these if I ever need to disassemble and reassemble the greenhouse. The loss of a star is for the missing parts in the box and for the crappy screws.

Ease of Assembly: 3/5

See my complaints about the instructions, above. I will admit that things would have been faster if I had asked my partner for help assembling it, but I'm stubborn like that.

Software: 4/5

It does exactly what is advertised and the automatic functions work. There's some UI jank and the logs thing would normally merit me taking an additional star off because I despise when basic functionality causes an outright crash, but I really appreciate the fact that this thing is designed to function even without a network connection and isn't filled with unnecessary bloat, so I'll leave it at 4 stars. Would be nice if in the future the fan speed could be controlled because I'd rather run them constantly at low RPM than have them going full blast for 5 minutes every hour.

Support: 5/5

Very fast responses to all of my inquiries and they made things right. 

Value for Money: 4/5

I personally found it to be good value because the form factor and features (except the automatic watering) were exactly what I wanted in a small greenhouse. If I were more experienced or had more space, I probably would have gone with a custom build using my own lights and sensors but I found not having to worry about the design to be really nice for my first greenhouse.

Overall: 4.5/5

Plants happy, I'm happy. Would again, despite the setup pains.

August 2024 sowing

 Sowed seeds today (2024-08-01):

• 16x Pleiospilos nelli from Mesemb Study Group
• ~50x Dinteranthus pole-evansii from Kakteen Haage
• 16x Monilaria moniliforme from Kakteen Haage

Seedling pots in the greenhouse

Substrate: 100% pumice

Growing location: greenhouse

Water: Distilled

Fertilizer: none

Pot size: 5 cm square tall

Removing carbonate hardness from tap water

The water in my area is hard and we frequently get limescale buildup around our taps. According to my municipal water source, we get 10.1 °dH (or 180 ppm CaCO3). I'd like to remove the carbonate hardness from the water I use for my plants. Supposedly it's better for them.

I don't want to shell out for a hydrogen ion exchange softener (or deal with installing one, for that matter). So I'll just add a weak acid the good old fashioned way. I'm using citric acid because it's easy to get the powder and it doesn't smell like acetic acid does.

Since I don't feel like trying to remember my high school chemistry lessons, I opted to copy others' work.

From this online calculator, I got that I need 3.231 dry oz citric acid to neutralize 100 gallons of water down to 2.5 ppm CaCO3.

Right now my plant collection is small and I only want to mix up 2 L of water at a time. Math time:

(.03231 oz / 1 gal) x (1 gal / 3.785 L) x (28.35 g / 1 oz)  x (1 tsp citric acid / 3.8 g) x 2 = 0.127 tsp citric acid per 2 L.

That's right about 1/8 tsp per 2 L.

Now to test it. Everything is at around 24°C room temperature.

Initial pH (2 L tap water + 2 mL Wuxal cactus fertilizer): 7.25

pH after adding 1/8 tsp citric acid: 5.5

My hardness measuring kit says at this point there's still about 7 dH left. Yikes. Not even close. 

I also repeated the experiment with a slightly different method of calculation and got a similar predicted value of the amount of acid needed. And similar results. Clearly something isn't working as intended.

Tried letting the water sit for a few more hours. No change.

Tried adding another 1/8 tsp for 1/4 tsp total and let it sit a while again. Hardness kit said 6 °dH and pH is now at 5.0. 

Clearly there's some buffering going on because the pH didn't change nearly as much.

An additional 1/8 tsp (total: 3/8 tsp) appears to have entirely neutralized the alkalinity. The pH is somewhere below 4.5 -- my test strips don't go down past that. 

Letting the bucket of water sit a couple days showed no effect on pH. The pH ought to have gone up due to the loss of CO2, formed after the carbonate ion reacted with the H+ ion, to the atmosphere. What gives? 

In the end, the solution turned out to be so acidic that filling up to 3 L of total solution didn't budge the pH above 4.5. This makes absolutely zero sense to me as 1/2 tsp acid in 2 L ought to be the same ratio as 3/8 tsp in 3 L. Sigh. Probably some buffering nonsense, although adding tap water should have added more alkalinity too. I don't want to risk watering my plants with a solution of unknown pH considering citric acid can drag the pH all the way down to 2-3.

Anyways, I think I'm going to chalk this up to a semi-successful experiment for now and do 2 mL of fertilizer + 1/4 tsp of citric acid in 2 L of water from now on. Neutralizing some alkalinity is better than nothing, and I'm certain a pH of 5.0 won't harm my plants.

(Have I contemplated just using rainwater? Yes, but I have no good way of gathering enough to actually be viable. Have I considered distilled water? Yes, but I'm lazy and don't want to carry the giant jugs home from the grocery unless I'm growing seedlings. Have I thought about a Brita filter? The small ones I'm aware of are all sodium/potassium ion exchange filters, and I don't want to think about the effect of that on my plants and whether I need to adjust the fertilizer. So obviously, banging my head against the wall while trying to remember high school chemistry is the correct approach.)

An unfortunate lesson in pest control

I thought my plants were pest-free because I haven't noticed any sign of damage, but yesterday I saw a tiny isopod-like creature on one of my lithops. It was about 1 mm wide and 5 mm long, the same color as my pumice, and it moved incredibly fast. I'm pretty sure it was a mealy bug.

Unfortunately I didn't have any rubbing alcohol on hand, and by the time I grabbed a pair of tweezers, it had crawled onto the substrate where I promptly lost sight of it.

So I grabbed a bottle of Neudosan AF Neu Blattlausfrei, which I had because of an aphid infestation of my potted herbs. Active ingredient: "salts of amino acid". 

I sprayed until the top layer of substrate was wetted, and then put the pot back under my grow lights.

Mistake.

The instructions, which I hadn't bothered to read in my panic, said that damage to the plant may occur if exposed to sunlight.

Yellow spots and pitting -- damage from the pesticide

I think these guys will survive (except maybe the middle one which was already pretty screwed up) but they'll be ugly until their next leaf change. Ugh. 

One day my new greenhouse will arrive. It's currently stuck in customs (thanks, Brexit). The moment I move my plants into it, I'm nuking all the pots with acetamiprid. Take that, you mealy little bastards.

Hello, world!

I've decided to start a blog and shout words into the great abyss that is the internet. This is partly an exercise in record-keeping for my own sake, and partly an attempt to see whether anyone else will find my ramblings of value.

Who am I?

My name is Al (that's A-L, I'm not an AI chatbot). My interests range from video games to knitting to quilting to watercolors to my most recent fascination and the reason for this blog: growing succulents. Prior to this botanical adventure, which started about 3 months ago because I saw a picture of a lithops on Reddit, I've had no experience with keeping plants alive for more than a few weeks. 

The plants in question

My modest collection, as of 2024-06-24

My main botanical interests lie in members of the Aizoaceae family, specifically those that tend towards the small and clump-forming. Most of my plants are lithops, but I certainly won't turn up my nose at other mesembs. On my wishlist right now: more conophytum, titanopsis, and Monilaria moniliformis.

But I do occasionally find cacti endearing as well -- the smaller and rounder the better. I currently have a Tephrocactus geometricus and an Astrophytum myriostigma. Maybe this fall I'll get myself a Lophophora williamsi to keep them company. 

Future plans

As I live in a small, north-facing apartment in southwestern Germany, I've had to keep my plants under grow lights. I recently ordered a small lean-to greenhouse so that I can move my plants outside. Unfortunately, it'll have to be north-facing, but according to my light meter, the brightly-lit outdoor shade provides the same amount of light as my tiny cheapo grow lights. I'm curious to see how this works out in the long run for my plants. 

Once I get the greenhouse up and running, I'll be focusing on ensuring the plants get through the summer. The early part of this summer hasn't looked too promising, with a few days of high heat alternating with weeks of cold, damp, and storms.

After the weather cools down in the fall, I have some lithops seeds to sow. I collected some from my plants; the more interesting seeds will be arriving by post later this summer, courtesy of the Mesemb Study Group. Looking forward to seeing what sprouts, and here's hoping I don't kill them all!