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  • From: "Paul A. Bock" <bockpa AT plesh.com>
  • To: "'Market Farming'" <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: RE: [Market-farming] incubator for seed germination?
  • Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 12:16:41 -0500

Marie,
This probably doesn't help you much, but I am building an
incubator/proofing chamber for mushroom cultures and my wife's bread dough.
I play around with digital electronics as another hobby, so this incubator
will have humidity and temperature controls with an LCD display to show what
the target temp and humidity as well as the actual temperature and humidity.
The microcontroller I am using will be able to turn on or off two devices a
little potpourri crock and a light bulb. The crock provides both heat and
humidity, and the light bulb provides only heat. I see that with your
incubator that I could also use this thing for germinating seeds, and the
original purpose of the GQC incubator, for hatching eggs.

I am working on another project that is similar to this that also uses a
microcontroller to make compost for eventually growing mushrooms. Basically
an insulated box that uses a home-sized steam humidifier to provide heat and
water vapor to cook the compost. The goal is to make a special compost for
growing Agaricus mushrooms (White buttons, portabellas, etc.) The
ingredients to the compost are bovine manure, chicken manure + bedding, and
gypsum. This is supposed to cook for a couple days at 160F and then you are
supposed to ventilate it and cools it slowly (5 degrees a day or something).
Apparently this lets each species of decomposer (bacteria, actinomyces,
fungi, etc.) time enough to do its thing to the compost. So I am going to
make the microcontroller adjust the temperature accordingly on the cool down
phase. It will turn on, and off, the steam humidifier as needed to maintain
the temperature.

You can make these microcontrollers do datalogging as well, so you could
measure, say, three temperatures in a cold frame. One outside, one inside
the frame, and one in the soil. Take a reading every minute, or every hour,
everything is programmable. Then this can be dumped back to a PC to plot
the data.

Paul Bock
Stone Gully


-----Original Message-----
From: market-farming-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:market-farming-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org]On Behalf Of Marie
Kamphefner
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2004 11:54 AM
To: 'Market Farming'
Subject: [Market-farming] incubator for seed germination?


Regards to the list:

Allison & Paul Weidiger inspired me at the St. Joseph conference!

As a result, I have a GQF incubator that I want to use for germinating
tomato seeds. At its lowest temperature setting, the thermometer reads
90F. My target temperature is 85F. Right now, I am experimenting with
how far open to leave the door to attain my target.

Does anyone know if there is an easy way to put a different thermostat
or whatever on this so I don't have to leave the door ajar? I don't
know how to reach the manufacturer for advice.

Do y'all think this will work or am I barking up the wrong machine for
seed starting?

Marie in Missouri





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