This year's Dixie Farming Experiment is to recreate this song from seed. I bought two kinds of watermelon seeds from Southern Exposure, both originating in Georgia. One set are Stone Mountains and the other are Nancies.
Some of the Stone Mountains started to come up over the weekend. Once they did, their progress was rapid. When we left for Mass, the big ones you see at the back were barely peeking out from under the dirt. When we returned, they'd popped out their first leaves.
I thought this would be a great use case for my mobile Raspberry Pi time-lapse kit, so I pulled it out and tried snapping some pictures. They were all blown out. It was too bright for my USB webcam and I didn't have time to fiddle with the settings.
Argh!
This morning, it dawned on me that what I'm trying to replicate is me, standing in the yard, shooting pictures with my phone.
Hmm.
Why not take an old phone, root it, put it on the network via WiFi and set it up to take pictures? After all, it's a networked computer with a camera, right? I usually like the photos they take. The things are designed to produce excellent material for posting online, why not try that? They also take movies and have a decent amount of storage for the resulting files.
To that point, the Economic Times of India has a whole set of ideas for the things. My current Pixel 3's screen is in ruins and it costs almost as much to replace that as it does to buy a newer, but not newest phone.
I like where this is going!
Yes, it is kind of weird how things have changed with cameras and flashlights. I spent most of my life never having a camera or a flashlight when I needed one. And now, electronic devices that are a camera, a light, or both are scattered all over the house and cost practically nothing.
ReplyDeleteI think we might finally have found some watermelons that are sufficiently short-season that we can grow them in our garden. It looks like the melons will be about the size of a softball, but still, better than nothing. The alternative is growing them indoors in a pot. The last time I did that, I got these extremely cute, perfectly-formed watermelons the size of a ping-pong ball, each with three or four seeds and about a tablespoon of flesh. I keep thinking I should do this on purpose and sell them as novelty items.
"Tiny Watermelons Make Excellent Pets!"
ReplyDeleteThat's my tagline for your product.
My marketing fees are reasonable. Have your people call my people.
Ping pong ball sized watermelons. I love it!
ReplyDeleteAren't watermelons' size dependent on how much water they get? So the pot just didn't have enough soil to hold enough water?
ReplyDeleteThat's a good question about the water. The pots were not large, and the entire plants ended up dwarfed. Also they were indoors, so all the sunlight was filtered through glass, and you know how plants grown indoors tend to get kind of thin and stringy-looking. The leaves never even got as large as the palm of my hand, and the stems didn't even get as thick as a drinking straw. It also turned out that the vines couldn't hang down more than a couple of inches, I think if they were below the water in the pot they would siphon out more water than they could use and the hydraulic pressure killed those shoots. I ended up having to suspend the vines from the curtain rod with string, pollinate the blossoms with a Q-tip, and make little hammocks for the fruit to develop in.
ReplyDeleteI think they were basically bonsai melons. I should steal some of Sam's watermelon seeds and do it again this summer, and document it on my blog.