Cindy Conner's Cover Crop Video

This is a teaser for Cindy Conner and her son Luke's first instructional video. Another is due out early next year featuring some local gardens in the Richmond area, including the Maymont vegetable garden.

Choose Green... figuratively... literally... digitally

Patricia Donovan, the GIS lab manager at the Blacksburg campus, selected all the very small RGB values from image statistics and captured all the green vegetation. Using tools in the ArcMap software, it is possible to select out only pixels that meet the criteria RGB values <= 0.105 which returns the actual number of pixels. Now it is possible to calculate green vs non-green vegetation, soil, etc.

I am trying to figure out a bare bones way of doing this that can be used as a Photoshop macro. Hopefully we will have something to measure against SamplePoint's results before the end of Winter.

Quantifying Ground Coverage

I originally started this blog (again) to chart my progress with an ongoing project in Richmond. Maymont was good enough to allow me to attempt revegetating an eroded hillside in the middle of the park using a selection of native plants. Above are some photos from earlier this fall.

Asparagus' Aspirations of Greatness or A-ga-ve Whoa oh!

Stephanie and I ran into this thing in Oaxaca last month.

Flashback to Fuchu

I've been trying to determine the exact moment I starting taking a renewed interest in plants and their cultivation. My folks kept a big garden with a section for me. My ma kept a lot of houseplants and her parents still had a farm we visited throughout my childhood. Despite all this it wasn't until my late 20s in Japan that I really got into it. These photos show one experience I really enjoyed outside of Fuchucho in Hiroshima prefecture at Kouji Uenishi's family farm planting rice one weekend. My skills were not so strong and his kids were leaving me in the dust... or in the muck.

Maymont Spring Vegetable Garden

The garden turned out pretty good this season. Cindy Conner's garden plan served me well. Most everything was coordinated well enough that the beds were full and abundant at the same time. Only problem was the containers, I should've lined them with plastic. The terra cotta is constantly wicking moisture out of the soil and even after adding extra water, the leaves were still looking chloritic. Fearful of loosing the tomatoes, I added some synthetic fertilizer to the containers. On the upside, the container plants are now dark green, sturdy and beautiful. On the downside, they will not be permitted to compete in the next Olympic Games. All the other beds remain chemical free and no sprays are used, so that's good.