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August 2009

The art of ripening.
08/31/2009 - 12:37
As it gets cooler, tomatoes that still look like this may need a little help ripening.

Well this weekend produced a very fall-like environment for us here in East Central Illinois, and while it may continue to be hot here and there, the inevitable decline of temperatures that precedes the onslaught of winter has begun. Overall, it has been quite a cool and pleasant summer. This was good for us humans, but may have produced blight-like effects on the inhabitants of your garden (those that are Facebook fans know this happened to me).

The cool weather has also made it difficult for plants in certain locations to ripen. I've heard reports of tomatoes, specifically, struggling to attain that glorious red hue that denotes their underlying sweet deliciousness. We've inquired about this phenomenon to some seasoned gardener friends of ours, and what they suggested is somewhat surprising.

They suggested picking the ripening tomatoes and stuffing them in a paper bag with an apple or banana. The tomatoes should ripen up after a short amount of time.

I thought this sounded slightly far-fetched, kind of like hearing about the second cousin of your brother's wife's great aunt who grew the 80lb tomato using coffee grounds and eggshells as fertilizer. While there may be grains of truth in any story like this, the reality is usually much less spectacular.

So I looked into what I believed to be a myth, and lo and behold, it is actually true (results may vary). Not only is it true, there's actually a wiki out there will the oh-so-clever title, "How to Ripen Green Tomatoes."

How it works is, the ripening fruit (the article suggests a banana but hear it works with an apple too) releases ethylene as it ripens.  Ethylene is known as the ripening or ageing catalyst for fruits, of which tomatoes are of course. This method only works for certain types of fruit, and in certain conditions.  But is should definitely work with tomatoes.

The catch here is that, in order for it to work, you have to pick tomatoes that are already sufficiently ripe. The article mentions how to tell what tomatoes to pick, and as an added bonus, what to do with the ones that are going to stay too green.

So if you know you're going to have some tomatoes that aren't going to make, you should think about giving Mother Nature a little help.

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Gardening and Eating
innovative ideas, ripen, tomatoes
4
The king of all crops
08/27/2009 - 11:16
Corn is pretty much everywhere and in everything.

There are a variety of tradeshows and we have an assortment of projects going on around the country at all times. It is, of course, necessary for us to attend the tradeshows and check up on our projects from time to time. In one such instance, my boss purchased and read "The Omnivore's Dilemma," a book that traces lineage of the food we eat in America. It was found that, in most cases, our food begins in some way in a cornfield.  Whether it's soda sweetened with high fructose corn syrup or beef fed on an all corn diet, Americans eat heaping piles of corn.

Not long ago a movie was made on this very premise entitled "King Corn." A couple of guys made a film exploring the fact that, at least in America, people are basically made of corn. What they discovered is that America produces a lot of corn, most of it low in nutritional value and essentially used as a raw material for production of further food products.  They also found that the production of the crop is basically unprofitable, except for the Federal subsidy program which makes it a sustainable operation. I'm only commenting on the fact that this current state of affairs and not on the rights or wrongs of such a situation.

The point of all this backstory is to say that a home vegetable garden is a great way to ween yourself off some of this surplus corn.  Garden vegetables are better for the environment because large commercial growing harms benefial organisms in the soil, whereas a home garden is usually organic. It also enables you to eat less commercially produced food, which takes advantage of low cost corn to produce sometimes unhealthy food products in an environmentally unfriendly manner.  A home garden produces food that is high in nutritional density.  A home garden allows you to be much more diverse in the foods that you eat, and by extension, in the assortment of vitamins and minerals you intake.

Now don't get me wrong, I love hamburger and McDonalds's and Coca-Cola and all the good stuff like that - all of which take advantage of inexpensive corn as a production material.  But, I also enjoy delicious tasty food.  And that, for me, is the best reason for a home garden.

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Food, Gardening and Eating, Gifts
commercial food, corn, nutrition, vegetable garden
4
These tomatoes are cracked out!
08/24/2009 - 10:47
Cracking in tomatoes is usually caused by rapid growth due to an uneven watering and/or fertilizing schedule.

This time of year gardeners are beginning to swim in a sea of vegetables from the garden.  Most have already become utterly sickened at the thought of another zucchini dish.  Cucumbers may haunt the dreams of gardener's around the country.

However, many are enthusiastically harvesting their tomatoes.  There's just something about a bountiful harvest of ripe, red tomatoes that is good for the soul.  These plump, juicy fruits have a culture all their own and are among the most popular of plants that grow in an average vegetable garden.

However, all is not always well in tomato-ville as this gardener can personally attest to.  Life can get busy, and it is not always possible to give a garden and the plants therein the even care they need.  Did you read that?  Even care.

So it may be with great disappointment that some overtaxed gardeners are monitoring their harvest and noticing bursted or cracked tomatoes.  It won't happen everywhere, and it won't happen all the time.   But it definately does happen.

The culprit is rapid growth.  That rapid growth comes from a sudden dose of water, as comes from several days of heavy rain, or a large dose of fertilzer.  But that's not usually enough, and here's the key.  Cracking from rapid growth occurs under these conditions primarily when the plants have been deprived of even watering or feeding, respectively.

So in this gardener's specific case, the summer has been relatively cool and the watering has been very sparse.  Several days of heavy rain got the tomatoes to ripen and grow alright, but it happened so quickly that they split their skins!

So a word of caution to the gardeners out their who are in a similar situation: the garden must be evenly watered and fed throughout the growing season to prevent sudden spurts like this.  That way, even if the rains do come, the plants have been conditioned to accomodate the rapid growth that will inevitably follow.

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Gardening and Eating
4.5
Sizing up your cooling needs.
08/07/2009 - 10:02
A properly ventilated greenhouse is a MUST in the hot summer months.

To size an evaporative cooling system, you first need to find the CFM (cubic feet per minute) requirements.  CFMs are essentially just the volume of air in your building, the standard being that you want to move the entire volume of air within one minute.

Finding your CFMs:

  • Length X Width X Height = CFM (As a rule, we typically use 12 for the height value in this equation.)
  • Let's assume a 30'x48' structure:
    30 X 48 X 12 = 17,280 CFMs

Using this you can size your fans, inlet shutters, and evaporative cooling wall.  Alternatively, you can size and install a positive pressure cooler and outlet shutters.

Sizing the Fans (Negative Pressure System):

With a negative pressure system, exhaust fans pull air out of the building.  This air is replaced by cool air from outside the building coming in through the inlet shutters. 

A typical exhaust fan arrangement with a negative pressure system is two fans.  This increases the efficiency of your airflow.  So:

  • 17,280 (your total CFMs) / 2 (number of fans) = 8,640 CFMs per fan

This means each of your two fans should have a CFM rating of over 8,640 to have standard air exchange rates.

Sizing the Evaporative Cooler (Negative Pressure System):

Evaporative cooling walls are most often installed along an end wall, and as such, it they need to be sized to fit accordingly with the available space.

  • 17,280 (your total CFMs) / 250 (4 inch pad thickness) / 3 (standard pad height in feet) = 23.04

This means you will need 23' of cooling pad at 3' in height.  In a 30' building this gives you plenty of room.

But what happens when you need a larger system than your building is wide?

In this situation, you will need either to move to thicker cooling pads, or a taller system.  Sometimes proper sizing will require both.

  • Assume a 20'x 72' structure:
    (20 X 72 X 12 =17,280 CFMs) / 250 / 3 = 23.04

This is exaclty the same measurement as before, only now we have just 20' of wall space to put 23' of pad.  What do we do?

  • Increase the height of the pad.
    17,280 / 250 / 4 (height of pad in feet) = 17.28
  • Increase thickness of pads from 4" to 6"
    17,280 / 400 (6 inch pad height) / 3 = 14.4

Either of these solutions will work, as long as the shutters can be sized accordingly.

Sizing the Shutters (Negative Pressure System):

When an evaporative cooler is present, properly sizing the inlet shutters can be a little more complicated. There are three factors to consider when sizing your inlet shutters:

  1. You need to size the shutters for the proper airflow.
  2. You also need to closely match the height of the shutters with the height of the evaporative cooling wall.  This will ensure ease of installation on the cooling wall.
  3. You will need to ensure that enough shutters are present to properly expose the cooling pads to the incoming air.

So, using our CFM measurement from above:

  • 17,280 / 2 = 8,640 CFM

This corresponds best with 2 48" shutters.

However, if we use our first example we only have a 3' tall system.  This will generally be too large a disparity between shutter height and pad height to effectively seal the evaporative cooling system around the inlet shutters. 

Additionally, this shutter arrangement would only provide 8' in pad exposure to incoming air.  On a 20'+ system this is far to little exposed pad surface area to effectively cool your building.

To properly size your inlet shutters, it may be best to divide total CFMs by the CFM rating of the closest size shutter to your pad height and work from there.  This will give you the number of shutters you will need in that size and rating.

  • 17,280 / 5,000 (CFM rating of a 36" shutter, ) = 3.5

Four 36" shutters should work. Now let's make sure they propely cover the cool cell.

  • 4 (number of shutters) X 3 (width in feet) = 12 feet of shutter (NOTE: If the shutters are not a whole foot measurement, such as 40", then: Number of Shutters X Width in Inches / 12.)

There should be no more than a couple feet of unexposed pad along an evaporative cooler.  This means shutters can be spaced +/-2' in from each end, and then +/-2' apart.

  • 2 (space between shutters in feet) X 5 (number of spaces) = 10 feet of acceptable additional space

Now add the amount of shutter coverage and the acceptable spacing distance.

  • 12 + 10 = 22

This is perfect for our system.  Differently sized systems may require trial and error calculations to correctly size all components of your system.

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Evaporative Cooling, How-To, Fans and Shutters, Cooling and Ventilation
calculations, sizing
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