From Seed to Science: What we Learned from our First TinyFarm Experiment

In preparation for our TinyFarm project in collaboration with the City of Greater Geelong we have been putting our TinyFarm through its paces. Our first test crop was coriander! To plant our coriander we first needed to set-up our plant pods. The plant pods sit in the reservoir and a coconut coir growth medium is placed inside the plant pod. The coconut coir draws water and nutrients from the reservoir up to our seed which is nestled inside the coconut coir. 

After completing the physical set-up we move onto the digital side of the experiment - Tinyverse! The Tinyverse is the cloud based platform that houses TinyFarm experiments. It enables us to login remotely to our farms, monitor results, add water & nutrients if required and much more.

In order for our coriander seeds to grow we need to set up a day/night control code. This turns on the grow lights for a set period of time each day and maintains temperature. Alongside the day/light and temperature control code we included code for a daily photo so we could create a timelapse of our plant growth over the life of the experiment. 

Once our physical (planting) and digital set-up were complete we could start our experiment in earnest. It took roughly 7 days for our seeds to germinate and sprout. 

While that was happening we explored other functionality in Tinyverse, specifically our data collection capabilities. The farm has 11 sensors available and we can collect live data from all of them. With this in mind, we set up a second project page that displayed live data from our farm. 

Over the next 7 weeks our coriander germinated, sprouted and outgrew our farm! 

What we learnt from our first experiment

·      Plant 2-3 seeds in each plant pod to minimise failures. We had two plant pods that failed but were successful when we replanted new seeds.

·      Water and Nutrient demand rapidly increases. As soon as our plants started producing their first curly coriander leaves their consumption multiplied dramatically which we could see on our water level graph.

·      It’s super fun! Once we had a couple of green shots everyone in our office would check on the plants each day to see how much they’d grown.  

What’s next? Wildflowers!

We’re growing wildflowers in our tinyfarm this month.