As a child I was occasionally served a certain type of frozen pizza (Totino’s Party Pizza, perhaps?) as a special treat, which to me tasted faintly of soap. I would tell my mother this each time, she would taste it for herself insisting that she rinsed her hands of all traces of soap this time, then report tasting nothing unusual. We all shrug and move on, repeat.

Ficus Audrey

For two years this tree did nothing. No growth, no changes, nothing at all. So we attempted to induce some kind of growth by snipping off a small length of growth at the top: the apical meristem. This shortly prompted the smallest of growths to develop on the node just beneath the cut, barely detectable, a small green nub.

Overview

I use cable ties to affix the shop lights to the underside of the wire shelves. There are now three light units:

• 4 ft shop light (2)
• 2 ft shop light

The 2 ft shop light was meant for the old smaller plant cart. New lights are 4 ft long, matching the length of the shelving unit.The lights are powered by a power strip with a 6 ft cord. It is attached to the side of the wire shelf with yet more cable ties. I also removed the overhead EMT conduit-mounted spotlights since they have been replaced by a shop light. It is a cleaner look.

• Herb
• Vegetable

🌰 Seeds

🌱 Seedlings

The seeds were started in little clumps of coco coir pellets and kept beneath a LED grow light.

Summary

The plants sit on a wire shelf cart. Some are not looking so good. The 4 notched posts that support the shelves are hollow inside, with an inner diameter that is a bit more than the outer diameter of 1/2" EMT conduit. This is lucky, as it allows me to slot in a length of EMT conduit upon which I build the rest of the lamp. I am able to rotate the conduit inside the posts to change the direction of light, and the lamp holder adds an additional degree of freedom by allowing me to change the vertical tilt of the lamp. There is enough slop / allowance between the cart posts and the conduit that rotate easily, but not so much that the lamp is unstable. Thanks to electrical standards, all of the components I build off of the EMT conduit can be made compatible with each other. I plug an outlet strip into a remote switch my parents gave me for my birthday. The plants now reach directly upward instead of angling toward whichever direction the window happens to be that day (the cart moves a lot). The cart can still move around even tethered to a wall outlet. Mounting the lamps to the cart means no floor clutter to bump into. I am pleased with how the build process went, and the result.

In April 2023 I built a raised bed out of recycled deck boards that were harvested from a disassembled old project (a wooden deck mounted atop the latter rack of my truck). The original lumber was pressure-treated and stained, which in some ways was ideal and in other ways possibly bad. It was suitable for outdoor use and for contact with the ground on account of the treatments, which is great, but for the same reasons it was also a hazard for the many chemicals that may leech into the soil and may be absorbed into the plant. After some amount of research and consideration, we decided that we would be fine.