Andrew Wegner | Ponderings of an Andy - Review

Review of Claude Code for Python Developers from Real Python

2026-04-06T10:30:00-05:00

Introduction¶

If you are in the software industry and haven't started working with an AI assistant by this point in 2026, then you should start getting concerned about your role in the company you work at. Throughout the first few months of 2026, there have been several large layoffs by major corporations. Companies like Block and Oracle cited AI as the driver.

AI is here and as of today, it's the least capable it will ever be, because each day it gets better. I've been exploring it since ChatGPT came out and it's impact on interviews. I've written about it multiple times recently. AI's impact on junior developers is particularly important because I'm already seeing this in my role.

My teams have been utilizing a handful of AI assistants over the past year and making amazing improvements to our workflows. From things as simple as reducing the SDLC cycle time for major features to triage of support items, the impact has been dramatic.

I feel like I've only touched the surface - not even scratched it - touched the surface of how to better use AI tooling, and I've been using it a lot. So, I looked for a workshop to increase my knowledge. As a subscriber to Real Python, I was happy to see they offered a brand new workshop about Claude Code and as of this writing they are offering it again.

The course - Claude Code for Python Developers: Hands-On Agentic Coding Course. A bit wordy, but an amazing two days.

Spoiler¶

As a spoiler, my review of the course is on the main course page.

"Learning about how Claude Code works was great. Working with things like Skills, learning a workflow that functions, was what I was hoping to learn about. All of those were covered."

"I feel more comfortable with the tool itself and how to implement a basic workflow for myself with ideas on how to extend it to a whole team."

"This is one of the best training sessions I've joined in the last year across multiple platforms."

— Andrew Wegner, VP Product at Zayo

Course¶

As you can see from above, I thought this course was great. It was a two day (over a weekend) live course with about 100 participants from around the world. Based on the chat during the course, the skill set of participants ranged from "new to Claude code but experienced developer" to "somewhat familiar with Claude Code and looking to do more with it". It was a nice mix of participants. The instructor, Philipp Acsany, did a good job of answering questions, sharing content, and ensuring everyone was able to follow along. This was very hands on workshop.

Before the course began, set up instructions were sent out. I can not overstate how much this was appreciated, because that meant the course could assume that everyone has a functioning environment to work in. This saved so much time and basic questions and allowed the course to start with the interesting content, not a tutorial on how to install Claude Code, GitHub CLI, Python and uv, Git and Zoom.

Day 1 started with the very basics of Claude. Normally, I'd be annoyed by starting with such a basic concept, but Philipp kept it engaging and more importantly, showed some best practicies using Claude to scaffold a new project that I hadn't seen. Thinking that this bodes well for the rest of the course, I eagerly followed along.

As Day 1 moved on, we built upon our scaffold to develop a small application, learning how to manipulate various aspects of claude, setting up prompts and skills to assist our workflow and learning how to debug when something doesn't work. Day 1 concluded with a little bit of homework. After 4 hours in the workshop, I felt pretty confident that I could accomplish this and was happy to see that confidence was justified. After about an hour more of individual work, I completed the tasks and was ready for day 2.

Day two built on top of the homework by adding in additional features, ensuring we were able to utilize various skills, and learning more about how Claude operates under the hood. The session concluded with quick demos of additional aspects of Claude - hooks, MCPs, and Agents. Honestly, this was my biggest disappointment in the course, because it showed so many things we wouldn't be getting to, but it did fill my "research later" queue.

Conclusion¶

This isn't a cheap course. But, it was worth it to me. I approached this with two goals in mind:

Learn something for myself that I could take and apply to personal projects
Learn something for my teams so that we could use it as inspiration to make further improvements to our workflows

Both of these were met in Day 1. That made Day 2 even more fun for me, because I showed up wanting to learn more, cover more, do more. As I said in my review on Real Python: This is one of the best training sessions I've joined in the last year across multiple platforms.

Through out the course, student questions were responded to - both live via Philipp and in chat via one of Philipp's partners or from other participants. I found this aspect of the course really valuable too. I did get a handful of questions answered during it, but I was able to provide answers as well.

So, why did I only give this a 9 out of 10? What's preventing that last star?

There are aspects of the course that were touched on so briefly that I think would have been useful to dive into. These are the topics that have ended up in my research queue - hooks, mcp services, agents, agent teams. I think these could have filled another 4 hour block, but this was a weekend course and didn't fit. I'll be watching for a session that covers these topics.

The other thing - the cost can be prohibitive to students. There is the cost of the course itself: $800 normally, $500 on sale when I joined. Plus the cost of Claude. It is recommended to get at last the MAx plan which runs $100 per month. I agree with that. I think if I'd only gone with Pro, I'd have hit usage limits during the course.

That said, if you can afford it (or get work to cover it as training), this is worth it for both an introduction to Claude Code and to learn about features you likely aren't using to their full power. Even with this course, I don't think I am doing that yet, but I know what to research now to get better for personal usage and for team improvements.

Review of Data Analysis with Polars Udemy course

2024-01-29T11:30:00-06:00

Introduction¶

After the previous course about Polars, I was excited to learn more. I settled on Data Analysis with Polars with Liam Brannigan instructing. I was drawn to this because of the mention of visualization using Matplotlib, Seaborn, Altair and Plotly. The course is billed at 2.5 hours long and is currently going for $85, though I did pick this up during one of Udemy's many sales.

Let's get started on the review and why I rated it so low.

Course¶

I have multiple complaints about this course.

The entire course is reading from pre-built notebooks or slides.
The last 26 out of 27 lectures are one page slides.
The quizzes in the middle of the courses are not effective, because the course is not designed for the learner to actually do any coding.
The excercises at the end of lectures are never revisited.

This course felt like the instructor was given a bunch of Jupyter notebooks but a more senior instructor and told to go teach the class. There is a lot of reading directly from the notebook, quickly glossing over code, and then talking through the output of the code. Unlike the last course, this one doesn't even feel like a cookbook of usefulness. It's just a glorified slide deck.

Let me show you what I mean. This is the course list's last 4 sections. I've collapsed them to show only the section header so it's a reasonable sized screenshot.

There are 27 lectures in these 4 sections. The total estimated time for these 27 lectures - 7 minutes. There is only 1 video in this entire group of sections. The other 26 out of 27 lectures are one page slides. The slides are "What you'll learn by the end of this lecture" slides and a link to a Jupyter notebook.

The quizzes scattered through out the course are also ineffective. Many of the questioned asked are asking what code provided is correct. These can be helpful, if the learner has done any hands work during the course. But, this course isn't designed that way. It's an instructor reading slides, hand waving at some code, and then executing the code to show it works. It's ineffective.

The same problem holds true with the excercises at the end of many lectures. They are designed to get the student more experience and I started doing them early in the course. But, they are never revisited. The instructor doesn't talk about them. It's just homework that's assigned as busy work, essentially.

Conclusion¶

Avoid this course. nearly half the course is just a single slide for the lectures. The items I was interested in learning about - visualizations - were among those one page slides. The course is designed like a glorified README, and its not worth the sales price I paid, let along the full price.

Review of Learn Data Analytics with Polars (Python) Course

2024-01-25T08:30:00-06:00

Introduction¶

I started this entire Course Reviews series 7 years ago, with a post about a Pandas course. It went so well, I continued both taking various courses to expand my own knowledge and sharing my experiences with those courses here. It seems fitting to look at a Pandas competitors: Polars.

I've used Pandas for years and it's done the job well enough. But, Polars is gaining traction in the industry and one of the data engineers at work mentioned it as a possible tool to look at. I like to be informed when my engineers make tooling recommendations, so I took it upon myself to learn a little more about Polars. I did so by selecting a course by Kieran Keene, titled Learn Data Analytics with Polars (Python) in just 2 hours!. I got this course duing another of Udemy's sales for $13.

About the course¶

The entire course is run out of Google Colab. This is nice, because you don't need to set up a virtual environment or install anything to take this course.

The course is taught with Polars version 0.17.3, which is from April 2023. I took this course in January 2024, so I used the current version - 0.20.2. This introduces a few very minor deprecations from the older version, but simply reading the deprecation warning for each tells you how to solve the problem.

Named, the two deprecations that I recall running into:

In 0.17 there is the df.apply() function. This has been deprecated in favor of df.map_rows()
The groupby() function has been deprecated in favor of group_by()

Both take exactly the same arguments, so it was as simple as renaming the instructors function to the modern one.

The one other minor difference is that the example data has changed at some point between when the course material was recorded and when I took the course. This doesn't change how any of the lectures behave or any of the examples act. It does change a couple results, so I couldn't compare exact numbers between what I received and what the instructor received.

This was not a problem though. The instructor does a very good job of explaining what each lecture is going to teach, shows at least one method of accomplishing the task, and then summarizing the lecture. Through this, it's easy to determine if the results you get with the different sample data returns an accurate result.

I enjoyed the short lectures. I believe the longest single lecture is 11 minutes long, but each builds off of what you've done previously. By introducing these natural break points, it's easy to complete a topic and then spend a couple minutes experimenting with other methods or logic to see how the library behaves.

Additionally, there are multiple ways to perform certain tasks, and the instructor takes the time to explain each of these. Building off of one another, it's easy to determine which is appropriate for the scenario being discussed.

Speaking of scenarios, the course concludes with two short challenges. The goal is to use the knowledge gained from previous lectures to figure out results to two problems. If you followed along through the hour and a half course, these should be pretty easy to figure out but do require combining multiple steps to get to the answer.

Conclusion¶

I enjoyed this course, the instructor's teaching method, and two challenges at the end to tie the course back to the lectures. This was a very hands on course and the breaks between lectures and sections encouraged experimenting with the library.

Experimenting helps me learn more about the tool, and I commend the instructor for building the course in such a way that students could try out the library.

I also found that I liked the Polars library. Pandas has it's quirks and when I dig more into Polars, I'm sure I'll find it has some too. But, Polars feels easier to grasp. The API is easier to understand as you are reading through the code.

I think I'm going to try out another course to see what else the library can do. That alone should be a complement to both the library and this course - it's encouraged me to keep learning more.

Review of Learn Github Actions for CI/CD DevOps Pipelines Course

2024-01-22T10:30:00-06:00

Introduction¶

I received a coupon code for Houssem Dellai's Learn Github Actions for CI/CD DevOps Pipelines Course. I've written about GitLab runners and the CI/CD process of that tool in the past. I've used GitHub actions to check this blog for broken links. I've used TravisCI (and written why not to trust TravisCI). I've used and BitBucket Pipelines in my professional life. I wanted to learn a big more about what GitHub Actions could do and the coupon code made this 4 hour course worth the time to investigate.

You'll see below in more detail, but this course was not what I expected. It's advertised as being for "All beginners" and "Ops experts". I argue that both of these are incorrect. This course felt more like a 20-30 lecture "GitHub Actions Cookbook" than a course looking to explain GitHub actions.

Let's go through it...

Course Overview¶

There are multiple formats the instructor uses in this course. It's pretty obvious that the sections in this lecture were recorded independantly. Some lectures take place entirely within the GitHub interface, some are using Powerpoint slides to drive the lecture, one is done on a whiteboard. To me, it seems the various lectures have been bundled together.

After a bit of research - and a mid-lecture "Check out my YouTube" - it's clear why that feeling exists. The lectures are available on YouTube. Not all of the videos on YouTube are part of this course, but scrolling through, I can quickly see that many of the videos in the course are on YouTube.

As for the content of the course, it doesn't match what I was expecting. With the "All beginners" advertisement, I was expecting more discussion and coverage on why certain things were being done. A discussion on the trade offs or the instructor's through process on how to accomplish tasks.

Instead, the content is a lot of "this is my code to accomplish this task". It is a great course to get the quick run down of how to accomplish tasks, especially with Azure. However, it is not a good course if you want to know why a specific block of code is the best route to go. It's a cookbook to accomplish a task. A handful of lectures do cover theory, but these are few and very far between.

Conclusion¶

If my coupon hadn't knocked off the entire price of the course, I'd be upset with this one. I also picked up two other courses by this instructor and I suspect I'm going to find similar concerns with those courses. Honestly, that's to bad, because the content is good. It's just not marketed how it's packaged. With my expectations set for learning a bit, it's disappointing to get lectures that are designed to be copy and pasted from.

Don't come into this expecting to learn a lot of reasoning behind how things are accomplished. If you need an overview of how to accomplish the tasks in the content list though, you'll find that. It'll be a relatively dry walkthrough of the exact code you need. But, if you want to know why...this isn't the course for you.

If you can find a coupon code for this, I think it's worth your time to see how some of these advanced tasks are accomplished. If you can't find that coupon though, head over to the instructor's YouTube page and watch that section for free.

Review of Unreal Engine 5 Generative Motion Graphics VFX Course

2023-04-14T09:15:00-05:00

Introduction¶

After my last venture into Unreal Engine where I built a simple 2D platformer, I wanted to continue learning about blue prints, but take a set of lessons that would be relatively quick. I found a great course for that in Yu Fujishiro's Unreal Engine 5 | Generative Motion Graphics / VFX course on Udemy.

The course is billed as an hour and a half course that will help the learner gain comfort in using the Unreal Engine as an art and design tool. Here's the result of my work from this course, and I am happy with the result.

Course Overview¶

The hour and a half estimated time is slightly misleading, as the instructor is approaching the course expecting that the student has some experience. Fortunately, the handful of Unreal Engine courses I've taken since last year were enough for me to feel comfortable in this course.

The first "5 minute" section of the course depends on that knowledge (and your ability to Google) to set up and configure the project. It's not difficult. I will save you a bit of time on one step though. This minute and a half video on installing the DLSS plugin was more useful than pages of text from NVidia.

With that out of the way, it's onto the course material. The instructor is clear about the what and the why we are doing things. I appreciated the explaination of small bits of logic and the migration from hard coded sections to more dynamic blue prints. It was a good way to introduce a concept and the same type of thing I've done when teaching beginners.

I have one issue with my blue print logic that the instructor didn't seem to have. I'm not sure if it's due to different versions of the engine. I was using 5.1.1 and I believe they were using 5.0.

See that emission node down on the lower left? In the course, the instructor has this set to a default of 0.0. If I left this at 0.0, my cubes were all black. They'd start with the color I selected, but on the first split the children would be black cubes instead of the expected shifting hue of colors. I couldn't figure out what I did wrong, but adjusting the default solved my problem.

The only other oddness - at least to me - was the process of exporting a high quality render. In a previous course I exported a video as MP4, I learned that through Google and a plugin. This course exports as an EXR file format. I've never utilized this before so was initially confused by the giant dump of individual files I received.

Fortunately, DaVinci Resolve (and the course I took on it) can handle this without problems. This is how I created the video show casing my work above.

Conclusion¶

This course was short and sweet. It took me approximately two and a half hours to get through. This accounts for environment set up, playing around with various colors and values to make the composition unique, and the emission bug I mentioned above. I was looking for a short course that focused on a single "thing" and was pleased with how this turned out.

There are few things that I didn't like were the assumption that the students had experience. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but the instructor does reference "previous courses" a handful of times but they only have this course on Udemy at the time of publishing this post. Another negative was the instructor's push of a paid for Unreal Plugin. This was for electronic wires, versus the curvy ones from the image above. The electronic wires allow for a more compact blue print - which I can see being valuable in a very large project like the 2D Platformer - but in a short course it does cause the wires the overlap and can be difficult to follow. It also costs an additional $13.

Overall, this was an entertaining course and I am happy with the output I produced. It was very satisfying the first time I pressed play and watched my cube split, flash, lauch a few small sparks, and repeat. I recommend this course for someone with a basic Unreal Engine experience and a few hours to learn.

Review of Learn How To Make A 2D Platformer In Unreal Engine 5 Course

2023-04-11T13:15:00-05:00

Introduction¶

I spent a portion of late summer/early fall 2022 learning a little bit about Unreal Engine 5. I reviewed a course covering designing a realistic landscape environment, designing a realistic cabin, and building a small game. Each of these furthered my interest in learning more about Unreal Engine and everything is capable of doing.

The next thing to learn about in my Unreal journey was blueprints. You can build an entire game without writing code, and I wanted to learn more about how to accomplish this. I selected "Learn How To Make A 2D Platformer In Unreal Engine 5" by Uisco Dev to take this next step.

A quick spoiler before you get further down - the content of this course was pretty good. The demo I have below shows what I was able to accomplish following along with this course. The presentation of this course was frustrating and an excersice in patience to get through.

On to the review...

Course Overview¶

Negative Aspects¶

This course is advertised as a 7 hour course. If you are following along, as I was, with the course on one monitor and the Unreal Engine development environment on another, it's going to take much longer than 7 hours. The reason for this is how the instructor presents the course. It took me a month to get through the course.

It seems that the instructor is expecting students to watch the course and work in Unreal Engine at different times. There is a lot of statements like "connect these two nodes", or "connect this to the new node" - which on the surface are relevant. What isn't noticed though, because you are rapidly clicking through the blue prints and attempting to keep up, is that the instructor has moved to another node or isn't explaining which output needs to be connected to the new node.

So, the you need to pause the video, rewind a few seconds to get oriented, and rewatch. Then you go back to Unreal Engine and replicate the change. But, you didn't pause the video so the instructor continued to move on while you were catching up and the process repeats multiple times in a 5 minute lesson. That five minute lesson quickly becomes a 20 minute lesson because of the constant shifts between the lecture and the course with few natural break points.

Positive Aspects¶

The content of this course is really good. I mentioned above that I wanted to learn about blue prints and this course did a great job of showing how powerful blue prints are. It also provided an eye opening overview of how "simple" things are more complex under the hood.

A simple coin pick up system involve setting up a sprite, checking for collision and ensure it's the player and not an enemy, adding the coin to the player's count of coins and doing something if you collect enough coins. Conceptually, I knew all the happened, but setting it up showed just how much goes into the small aspects. Setting up a player or an enemey that will fight and interact with the environment is even more complex.

I really enjoyed learning those aspects of simple game development.

Another positive attribute of this course is the instructor interaction. The instructor has cultivated an environment of providing answers and explaining how the answer can be found or set up in the future. The is one of the most active Q&A sections on Udemy that I've seen. This should be commended.

Lastly, the instructor has updated the course to account for differences in Unreal Versions. The course was originally developed for Unreal Engine 5.0. I utilize 5.1 and appreciate that there are a handful of lectures - specifically during control set up - that show the differences between 5.0 and 5.1. While I was taking this course Epic released a preview version of 5.2. I imagine the instructor will be adding lectures as appropriate to show differences with that version in the future.

Conclusion¶

As mentioned above, the presentation of this course was frustrating. On several occassions I considered stopping the course because I was so frustrated with the constant pause, rewind, replay, repeat cycle. Normally, I enjoy getting through a section at a time in a Udemy course and on many occassions here, I could barely get through a handful of lectures before I needed to stop for the day.

However, the content of the course was very useful and I was learning. I would have appreciated some more "why" lectures but those existed for the areas that I felt they were most appropriate. It's the useful content and that I was learning something that would pull me back in after a day or two of being away from the course.

Below is my final result. Obviously, it's a bit basic, but for a month of work I'm rather proud of how it turned out. I am walking away from this with more understanding of how blueprints work and that was my goal.

Review of DaVinci Resolve 2022: Beginner to Advanced in DaVinci 18 Course

2023-03-03T23:45:00-06:00

Introduction¶

In my two previous course reviews - the beginners Unreal Engine course, and the realistic environment course - I presented a short YouTube clip of what I'd built. For both of those, I used DaVinci Resolve to quickly stitch together a few clips. There was nothing fancy in those, but while doing it I was impressed at the shear number of options and capabilities that DaVinci had available.

I decided to take beginner course to learn some more about the product. Spoiler: I'm ever more impressed by Resolve and at the same time know that I have learned only a tiny fraction of what it's true capabilties are. There is so much to learn about individual sections of this product that a single course could (and probably is) dedicated to each of those.

However, before I can dive deep into the product, I wanted to get a broad overview of it. I also wanted to really edit something using what I learned to get a good feel for the tool. I settled on DaVinci Resolve 2022: Beginner to Advanced in DaVinci 18 by Marius Manola on Udemy.

Course Overview¶

This was a ten hour course that covers major areas of DaVinci Resolve 18. The instructor is opinionated on their workflow and discourses devisions for that in a few places. The most notable on is avoiding the use of the "Cut" tab all together, and instead do all edits and cuts in the "Edit" tab. As a beginner, I am sure there is a reason for the "Cut" tab but this course does not dive into it.

Other tabs are covered to varying depths. The two that are covered the most are "Edit" (taking a bulk of the time during project demonstrations) and "Fusion". "Color" gets a section of lectures, but I felt this was more a demonstration of capabilites than an explaination of why something is occuring. To be fair to the author, I think they realize that their audience (ie. me) aren't professional editors or have color grading training or experience. Both of those are college degrees, I believe. The "Fairlight" tab (sound editing) gets even less of a mention than color.

The Good¶

This course was approachable to me. My experience with Resolve was smashing a couple clips together and rendering a final video. After this course, I now feel I can do that much more effectively, as well as introduce a few small effects and edits.

The author is good at talking through what they are doing. I don't recall any "draw the rest of the owl" moments. This helped if I got lost while poking through my own instead of Resolve, instead of just watching.

The author is using DaVinci Resolve 18, which at the time I took the couse was the most recent version. I had a minor release update, but many other courses I saw on Udemy were for older versions of Resolve. One of the things I didn't like about the Unreal courses what that the instructor used early access or beta versions of the tool, while I was utilizing a full release, so the UI was not always the same.

Working through the project was educational. My version didn't turn out exactly like the instructor's did and I think that's a good thing here. As a creative process, editing a video is going to be different for everyone.

The Bad¶

Ironically, there were a few areas that I thought could use better editing. A handful of times the instructor would demonstrate a new feature and it wouldn't work as expected. They'd redo it and it'd work. The first attempt would be vaguly glossed over and the instructor would move on. I think the failure would have been removed from the lecture, with a minimiumal impact on understanding of the concept.

The projects we did involved a lot of watching the instructor click around the screen while the student was, theorectially, following along. I think this was not the right way to present the project walk throughs. I found myself pausing the video a lot so that I could attempt something on my own project. I'd understand the idea for the current task and then move ahead. Eventually, I'd complete what I was working on and restart the video only to find out that the next several minutes in the walkthrough were roughly what I just did.

Focusing on the lecture at the same time I was focusing on my project wasn't possible. I think a better way to present this would be been a short instruction section showing the skill we'd be using, and then letting the student perform that task.

The instructor loves jump cuts in the projects. A lot of jump cuts. I wish we'd been able to cover a bit more about transitioning between shots or advancing the visual story. However, I suspect that's more of a filming technique that was out of scope for this course.

The Ugly¶

The instructor is using a computer with a loud system fan and no noise canceling. It's very obvious when the computer is struggling because the fan noise gets louder. For a while I thought it was either my computer (it wasn't) or my headphones (again, it wasn't). My suggestion to the author is to apply a bit of noise cancelation to the frequency your fan operates it, because with headphones it is very clear that the fan is running.

Conclusion¶

I found this course to be a great introduction to DaVinci Resolve. While my first project isn't going to win any awards, it's important to remember that it's my first project. I can already think of several other projets I can use Resolve for and I feel comfortable using it for these personal projects.

The areas that weren't extensively covered feel like great next steps, and not "the instructor didn't have time to do this". I mentioned it above, but I suspect these areas (and the ones that were covered) could be their own course or set of courses.

I got what I wanted out of the course, and perhaps a little more. The instructor did a good job covering the material, demonstrating the tooling while building the projects, and expressing opinions on workflow which I think are helpful to someone new.

Without further ado...my first video edit.

My self assessment of this video is that it feels like a novice edited it. (Surprise! I'm a novice at this). I'm not a fan of all of the jump cuts. It gets..."jarring" is perhaps the best way to describe it. But, this was the editing style the instructor went with. I've love to learn about other options so that it feels less jarring.

Review of GitLab's 'TeamOps Certification' course

2023-02-02T23:00:00-06:00

Introduction¶

A little over two years ago, I took GitLab's course on how to manage a remote team. That was a very useful course and I was able to apply several best practices from that course to my role at the time, plus roles I've held since then. I continue to manage global and remote teams, so I was excited to hear about GitLab's newest course covering their "TeamOps" model of improving teams.

This course is hosted on LevelUp, and is one of 9 public course they have available right now.

Course Overview¶

The TeamOps Certification course is split into 5 sections and covers about 2-3 hours of material.

The first section covers the foundations of TeamOps
The remaining four sections cover the 4 guiding principles of TeamOps
- Shared Reality
- Everyone Contributes
- Decision Velocity
- Measurement Clarity

Except for the welcome message in the first lesson, this course is entirely text based. I was surprised by this because of the previous course from GitLab and the extensive use of video on how to manage a remote team. This course does have a 6-7 question knowledge check at the end of each section and will not let you proceed if you score below an 80%.

Fortunately, the questions are easy - assuming you comprehend what you are reading and not just clicking through to the next page. The course also provides access to the updated The Remote Playbook, which is a great starting point for checking your company's remote processes.

TeamOps felt like a good extension and refresher from the "How to Manage a Remote Team" course. Unfortunately, that's all it felt like - a refresher.

Conclusion¶

The change from video to text based courses was surprising, and slightly unwelcome. The content of the course is good, and will definately help teams improve how they operate. However, many of the same ideas were covered in the previous course. I suppose that if this continues to work for GitLab, it makes sense that they aren't trying to make sweeping changes, but I was hoping for...more, I suppose.

I recommend this course to anyone who manages a team remotely and needs a refresher from the previous course GitLab provided or doesn't have the recommended 11 hours for that course. This should take about an hour and a half to read through. If, however, you have more time I think the "How to Manage a Remote Team" course course has even more information that will be helpful.

Rise Garden Two Year Follow Up

2022-12-07T08:45:00-06:00

Introduction¶

When I last talked about the [Rise Garden][risegarden] my family is using, it was during my first harvest two and a half years ago. I said I'd get the garden again. During the posts at the time, I also covered some physical changes that would be helpful and some application suggestions.

It's been two and a half years since I first assembled the garden and two years since my last update at the end of the previous article. Let's review and see how the garden has held up.

I mentioned above that I provided a few suggestions, and raised a few concerns. Here's a quick summary of those, so that we can easily see what I'm looking to address here based on concerns then.

Application
Number of plants the garden supports
Few fruiting plants
The number of pods that don't sprout
Subscription service item availability
Physical improvements
Nutrient build up
Pump

Application¶

Let's start with the application itself. In my previous post, I raised a couple concerns I had about the mobile application.

In good news, the splash screen issue has been resolved. The log in issue has also been resolved. I do still need to occassionally re-login, but overall, the application remembers me a lot longer than the handful of days it did at the time.

The lighting options have also been updated.

I have more than a simple time and duration option. The sunrise and sunset options aren't exactly what I asked for two years ago, but this is a nice compromise. It's winter, so I've moved my garden inside to a warmer location, which unfortunately places it out of direct sunlight. However, during the rest of the year, this gradual lighting is nice, because I was able to time it to when the sun hits the garden and when it does not. This allowed me to use less than 100% lighting through out the day.

I do have a complaint about this new screen though. Look back at my screen shot of the previous lighting page. Previously, I could select any time for the lights to come on, and it was a pretty intuitive hour/minute selector. Now, it is a single slider with 15 minute increments. It is really hard to hit exactly what you want with a slider. It takes a lot of small adjustments to get the time I want my lights to come on with this slider. I think moving to a slider from the hour/minute selector was a bad user experience choice.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the only bad user experience change.

This new page showing my garden is awful. The previous version showed an overview of the entire garden, and then allowed me to click a plant to get more details. This version shows a single tray on a single level and involves both vertical and horizontal scrolling to see all of my plants. I do not like this change. There is a lot more tapping and dragging around the screen to find specific plants.

The last application problem I'm still seeing is that plant information is wildly inaccurate. This is my current pea plant, that the application says is past harvest. It hasn't even started flowering yet. In two years, this page has not been accurate for a single plant.

Plants¶

The marketing images show very full gardens. When I've attempted full gardens and followed the application's recommendations, I get sub-optimal harvests. The large plants crowd out one another, even with aggressive pruning. The vines will take over an entire level and smother others, without aggressive pruning.

The plants that I can get to grow most consistently are lettuces and herbs. Fortunately, we use a lot of both. But, it'd be nice to get a consistent pepper, tomato, cucumber or pea plant each harvest too. Unfortunately, adding more than a couple of those plants to the entire garden results in a plant that doesn't produce.

Combining this with the sprouting failure rate I mentioned 2 years ago, that hasn't improved, it becomes a gamble on what to grow sometimes. The sprouting problems continue to plague each harvest, with approximately 1 out of 10 seeds across all plants not sprouting. Unfortunately, on my latest batch, I had 3 lettuce and 1 pea plant that didn't sprout. This was my highest failure rate so far.

I did notice, while writing this post, that Rise Gardens released a new nursery. It only supports 4 pods though, compared to the 12 pods one of my current nurseries holds. I'd have to replan how and when I plant certain plants (or buy extra of these small nurseries). I like to get two sets of lettuce in for 1 tomatato plant due to their different growth cycles. Fewer nursery spots would enforce more staggered growing. This isn't bad just something I'd need to adapt to.

Seed Subscriptions¶

I complained two years ago about the lack of variety packs. The garden came with a salad mix and a variety pack of plants. Those aren't offered as part of the subscription service. I don't need 4 tomato pods, because I can't get them all to grow at once, like I mentioned above. But, if I could get a tomato, a pepper and a couple other plants, I have a nice set of plants that I could use all at once. That is assuming that they all sprout.

I keep looking for this. Until then, I turn my subscription on and off for about three months at a time, because otherwise I just get to many seeds to utilize and I don't need to buy a subscription for seeds that have an increasingly common failure rate.

Garden Hardware¶

The garden hardware has held up really well. I did replace the original DC30 pump with the upgraded DC40 pump about six months ago. I did this because I kept getting nutrient build up in my tubing and along the bottom of my trays. Theorectically, the more powerful pump should solve this problem. At the end of my current harvest I'll have a better idea of how well it's worked, but I haven't had to do an emergency tube cleaning because the water couldn't get past the build up, so that is a positive.

I also installed chicken wire around the garden to give my climbing plants something to climb. This has been great at keeping the vine plants - peas and cucumbers - under control. It also has allowed a couple spots on the level they sit on to remain open because they don't completely overwhelm a tray. I have been able to utilize that to grow a faster plant on the level of these vine plants before they have spread all over.

The one physical concern I mentioned two years ago was the inability to easily level the garden. This still remains a problem because the garden needs to be level to ensure the water flows correctly. When I have the garden in my sunroom - which is less level than other areas of my house, I have a small wooden splint built to keep the garden leveled correctly.

I still highly recommend that Rise Garden make adjustable footings in their next iteration.

Summary Review¶

The question now: Would I get it again. Previously, I said that I absolutely would.

I would still do this again, but I think I'd get a smaller garden - something like the one level garden of mine, or maybe the personal sized garden for a handful of lettuce heads. This isn't because I don't want to grow plants indoors and year round. It's because I can't utilize all of the space I have now. A completely full garden hasn't been productive for me. I leave space open every time I plants. It's also due to the number of seeds that I've had not sprout. If I have less space to plant, I'll be a little more choosey on what I plants versus "I have some space available and might as well use it if these sprout". Additionally, the application changes have been very off putting. The new tray page is unusable and the inaccurate plant pages continue to be unhelpful.

This said, I am still enjoying growing my own food. It's still not sustainable, but that was never my goal. It's a fun activity. The kids enjoy planting and harvesting. They glance at it once and a while and provide updates on how they think things are growing or what we can harvest for a meal.

These stats fall into the same category as the plant stats. I'm not sure how reliable they actually are, but it is nice to see numbers. Saving nearly 3,000 gallons of water over two and a half years is drop in the bucket, but it's still good to see an impact. Rise Gardens describes it's "Food Miles" equation on their blog. Going with my calculations from this summer on gasoline savings and CO2 not produced due to remote work, I've made another tiny positive impact.

Finally, Rise Gardens: Add strawberries as a plant you provide in your subscriptions. I'd still like that API I talked about before, but I'd be much happier with strawberries.

Oh, and do something about the seeds not sprouting.

Review of Unreal Engine 5 Beginners Guide to Building an Environment

2022-10-18T23:00:00-05:00

Introduction¶

In my third adventure into learning little bit about Unreal Engine 5, I set out to learn a little bit more about modeling water. This was kind of brushed over in the first course I took, and not touched at all in the second course. I was hoping to learn about real time water simulation based on a couple of the course content section headers.

Spoiler: That's not in this course. However, I was not disappointed in the course.

I settled on Unreal Engine 5 Beginners Guide to Building an Environment by 3D Tudor.

Course Overview¶

Udemy says this is an 18.5 hour course. Plan on more than that. The instructor does a great job at explaining what the goal of the section is, how it will be accomplished, and then showing how it's done. The end goal of the course is building a little cabin in the mountains along a lake. You go from nothing, to basic blocking out the cabin, to setting up the landscape. From there you build the cabin, set up foliage, adding textures and details, to setting up the water material.

I mentioned earlier that I was hoping for a real time water simulation. You don't get that here, but you do spend some time building and setting up a water material that can be customized extensively. There are lessons on setting up a waterfall, building and animating birds in the background, and adding fireflies. Time is spent building a fire pit and simulating the fire and smoke. Finally it ends with setting up a camera and rendering the scene.

Overall, this course covers a LOT and the instructor takes the time to explain what is happening and setting up the course very logically. The time spent going through the entire workflow is helpful to see how to go from an empty grey box, to a very nice looking cabin.

Plan on spending more than the allocated time in several lessons. Multiple times in the course, I found myself just playing with how the scene looked. This became my painting canvas. The end goal was a cabin by the lake, but it wasn't to be identical to the instructors (and mine is not). I found knowledge provided was wonderful to spark new ideas in how I could make the scene my own.

Future learning Goal¶

I did find that I need to learn more about rendering a scene in the future. My initial output was grainy. It looked compressed and I was a little saddened to see that environment that I spent so much time in look so...2005 in how it was output. I did manage to make it a little better. This is a three camera clip of my result.

The first 20 seconds is just a static shot from the side of the cabin. This shows off the fire pit, the background birds, fireflies and waterfall as well as the nice lighting from the sky. The other 40 seconds are split to show a few different areas in a quick flyby. I did this on my own because I wanted more than just a static shot.

High quality renders¶

One thing I did find is that by default, Unreal Engine renders with compression. I tried turning that off to see the results. I quickly learned that a 20 second clip will reach almost 4.5GB of storage space. I'm still new at this...but ouch. That's a lot of space for a longer cinematic. I'm not sure how to get a super high quality without that much space though.

I also couldn't figure out how to render it as a 4K video, instead of 1080p.

The first clip in high quality (1080p):

I'm happy with this one. Everything looks good. Even those birds. I learned during this course that I do NOT have the skill set of 3D sculpt. However, that's ok. Those birds are in the background. The animation on the wings works perfectly and they look like they belong.

The next clip is flying from the side, over the island that I put in the lake to break up the water. In this shot you get a better look at the waterfalls in the distance, the chance to see all four sides of the house and some more details on the roof and dock. If you look closely around the 12 second mark you can also see some floating rocks. This looks like some foliage that is "touching" the landscaping - in the very back - and didn't stay attached the the side of the landscape going into the water.

Finally the last clip in high quality is a fly over the lake. It starts by getting a good look at the waterfall (and some more floating rocks). It then flies through the fireflies crossing the river, and gives another look at the cabin and firepit. Finally it pulls back along the river to give a wide shot of the entire scene. A few things to point out - around the 14 second mark, you can see the mountain in the background floating above the landscape. I should have caught that, but I was more focused on keeping the cabin in the shot that I let the camera go to high and you can see a bit of level design that wasn't meant to be shown. Around the 16 second mark, as the camera pulls back, you can see the water texture start to change. I'm not sure what is causing that, but my guess is because of the lighting angles. I don't know how to fix it though.

Conclusion¶

I really liked this course. I went into it hoping to learn some water simulation, and instead learned about a whole lot more. I also made a pretty good water material.

I found the course to be well paced, excellently explained, and almost like an art class at times. The instructor taught you the techniques you should use to build the end result but didn't want you to copy. You made it your own.

If you have the time to spare (one of the downsides to this course is the length), as a beginner, you'll learn a lot.

Review of Unreal Engine 5: The Complete Beginner's Course

2022-10-03T10:00:00-05:00

Introduction¶

Continuing on my journey to learn a little bit about Unreal Engine 5, I turned to Udemy again for a course I could take that would help to learn some more.

I settled on Unreal Engine 5: The Complete Beginner's Course by David Nixon. I wanted to learn more than landscaping (like I did in the last course). This was a ten hour course and covered much more of Unreal Engine.

Course Overview¶

The end goal of the course was to create a very basic game. This would demonstrate building a level, adding materials, enemies, puzzles, victory conditions, and more. To me, this course was really two courses mashed into one.

Course One - Overview¶

The first part of the course and the majority of the content, was the practical overview of how everything works in Unreal Engine. The instructor went over individual sections - designing a level, setting up the player, collisions, audio and most importantly, blue prints.

These sections of the course were detailed and demonstrated how various settings would impact the overall project. Additionally, the instructor injected just enough (bad) puns to keep the content from getting boring. This portion of the course I found very useful.

Course Two - The Tutorials¶

The other part of the course was the hands on tutorials. At the start of the course, this is what I was looking forward to the most. Unfortunately, this is where I felt the course fell flat. The tutorials did their job and my video below demonstrates it was effective - I have a completed game (and I was cool to the kids for the minute and half it took them to beat it).

However, the tutorials are rushed. On the better laid out ones, its obvious that the voice over was recorded after the video because the vocal instructions get 2-3 steps ahead of what the video is showing. This makes following along difficult when these are literally just "click here, change this value" rapid fire instructions.

Additionally, many of the instructions provided are to set exact object dimensions or locations, with no explaination of why or how these were found. The end result is a project that works...but I am left wondering how certain dimensions were found. Was this done via guess and check? Did the instructor do fancy math to figure out where to place walls? Is there a systematic way that these could have been placed?

Unfortunately, I don't know the answer to those questions. Instead, to follow along with the rushed tutorials, I typed in the same numbers as the instructor and have literally the same project as they do because of it.

Conclusion¶

This course was better than the previous one, but I still feel like it could have been so much better. The overview portions of the course were really good. Unfortunately, they didn't translate as well into the tutorial lectures. While the tutorials accomplished the goal of building a simple game, they left out so much content that would be useful to know. The tutorials moved quickly and felt more like checking off boxes to make a game instead of designing, debugging, or even just providing a little explaination on how or why certain decisions were made.

I recommend this course for the overviews provided. If you know going into it that the tutorials will get you the game I have below, without a lot of the design decisions behind it, then all the better. However, don't take this just for the tutorials. They are quick and lack context on why certain things are being done.

My game:

Review of Unreal Engine 5 - Realistic Environment Design for Beginners course

2022-09-20T11:45:00-05:00

Introduction¶

I have an idea for a game in my head. I've had it for a while, but I don't know anything about video game design. Unreal Engine 5 came out in April 2022. The demo looked amazing. The thought of my game continues to pop in and out of my brain over time. With my current free time, I decided to learn a little bit about how Unreal Engine works.

I turned to Unreal Engine 5 - Realistic Environment Design for Beginners, by Gavin Eisenbeisz on Udemy. My goal was to get a very basic understanding of how the tool worked and decide if I'd continue forward. I knew going into this that a 5 hour course wasn't going to be enough to learn everything of Unreal Engine, but hopefully it'd be enough to determine if I should learn more.

Course Overview¶

I am conflicted in how to properly evaluate this course. I have several complaints about the course (below), but it did meet my goal of getting me a basic understanding of how an aspect of the tool worked and I do want to continue learning how to use Unreal Engine.

But first, my concerns...

Version¶

The course was last updated in June of 2021. I mentioned about that Unreal Engine 5 came out in April 2022. The instructor is using an early access edition of Unreal Engine 5. This means the UI is slightly different, a few bugs exist - namely landscape material blend is black on the non-early access version of Unreal Engine 5, and a few options have been merged or moved in the full release.

This version difference isn't a deal breaker, but it does mean that quick clicks the instructor does on video don't align to the UI currently in use on version 5.0.3. They are in different locations or are renamed or simply merged into another option that isn't clear.

Instructor response¶

The instructor has not been responsive to students in the course. The landscape material bug has multiple discussion threads on the course Q&A section, but no response from the instructor. Students are clearly frustrated at the lack of response, and some have given up the course because they assume this bug prevents them from moving forward. Buried in the comments is a note from another student that this does not impact other areas AND the material will be useable when painting the landscape. Again, frustration.

There was plenty of good in the course though:

Landscape tooling¶

With a title of "Realistic Environment Design", it's not surprising that the course focused on building a landscape. Covering sculpting, texturing, decorating and a few small environment things like collisions and basic lighting, I was able to create an island. It's not going to win any awards for level design, but for a first time, I'm proud of it.

Plus, the kids now was to add "all the things" to my island.

Forgive the lack of true cinematics, and only 6 seconds of video...this wasn't covered in the course and I probably found an old way to do this manually, but here is my island.

Conclusion¶

I would not recommend Unreal Engine 5 - Realistic Environment Design for Beginners as your first introduction to Unreal Engine 5. The course is a year out of date and running on an early access version of the engine. However, if you know the tooling a little bit (or are willing to pause and Google a quick how to), the overview of the landscaping tools were useful for an introduction.

This course has increased my desire to learn a bit more about the engine. I don't think I'm close to starting my game, but I am looking forward to learning more about what this tool can do - and how I'd be able to take advantage of it.

Review of Go: The Complete Developer's Guide (Golang) course

2022-08-28T12:00:00-05:00

Introduction¶

Personally and professionally, I've started bumping into Golang more and more. I've been told that it's a good language to learn and know, but until recently I didn't have a lot of free time to dedicate to learning a new language. With my down time now, I figure it'd be a great chance to pick up a new skill.

So, I turned to Go: The Complete Developer's Guide (Golang) by Stephen Grider on Udemy.

Course Overview¶

This is a 9 hour course (plus an hour or two for three self paced assignments). It goes from nothing (what's Go?) through installation to writing way more than a simple Hello, World! Through out the lessons, the instructor is explaining what's happening and why, not just throwing code into the IDE and having you run it.

The course goes through two main projects, introducing new Go concepts along the way. The first is building a small program that deals out a hand in a card game. You learn about variables, functions, receiver functions, structs, slices, unit tests, pointers and more. Nothing feels overwhelming and it is a nice logical progression.

The other project is a web site status checker, which introduces goroutines and channels. These are very important concepts in the language and the example, while basic, is not contrived. It is very good at introducing there two features, showing common problems and how to properly handle them.

Throughout the course, the instructor made use of the official documentation and showed how someone new to the language should utilize it as well. This is an under rated skill and I hope that other engineers appreciate how useful it is to be able to read official documentation and not immediately go to Stack Overflow for an answer.

I do have a couple very minor complaints. First, the course is using a slightly older version of Go. In the version the instructor is utilizing the ioutil library is still in use. In the version I have installed, that has been deprecated. This led to a few IDE warnings, and a quick search to determine how to fix it. Once that was resolved though, it was simple enough to make the few changes needed locally.

My other small complaint is the relatively short lessons. I love bite sized lessons, but when a lesson is between 4 and 10 minutes and the first minute and last minute are spent summarizing the previous lesson and giving you and idea of what the next lesson will be, there is a lot of time spend reviewing.

Conclusion¶

I have some down time right now and plan on learning a few more items on my back log. Stephen Grider has a nice library of courses and several of them cover topics I'm interested in learning about. If they are set up the same way as this course, I think I'll get a lot out of each of those.

This course was a perfect introduction to Go. It covered the basics, assumed that students have some programming knowledge and related this "new" language to others you've probably utilized. It doesn't dig into the CS101 concepts, other than to briefly mention how certain things are done (declare variable, function syntax, etc) and instead focuses on the aspects that make Go unique and useful as a language.

Review of GitLab's 'How to Manage a Remote Team' Coursera course

2020-10-26T09:30:00-05:00

Introduction¶

I am a huge fan of GitLab - both the product and the company. As the largest all remote workforce, they are in an enviable position of being an expert on how to manage a team of over 1000 global employees without having an office. My current position puts me in charge of managing a global, remote, workforce as well but on a smaller scale.

When GitLab announced they were releasing a course on How to Manage a Remote Team on Coursera, I jumped at the opportunity to take it. I want to expand my skill set as a manager of remote employees and the chance to learn some best practices from GitLab in this area was a good place to start.

Course Overview¶

The course is split up in to a four week set of lessons and covers about 11-12 hours of material.

Week 1 covers Remote Best Practices.
Week 2 covers Managing Remote Teams.
Week 3 covers Remote Adaption Processes for Organizations
Week 4 covers Culture and Values for Distributed Teams

The final task then is building a remote transition plan for an organization.

Overall, these were well done. The videos are presented by various GitLab employees and cover a variety of different aspects in each section. There are various readings assigned too. These provide a ton of information, especially The Remote Playbook.

There is some GitLab centric information provided and back patting, but it is done in a way that helps to show why certain things are needed - like open and transparent documentation. By the end of the course, you will know that GitLab has an open handbook for everyone to read and you will know why you should as well. This type of thing is expected and knowing that the instructors will do some back patting is important too.

The final project - building a remote transition plan - is peer reviewed. You are presented with a series of questions, which you answer with a short essay for each and using information presented during the course. When you are done, the last task you have is to peer review three of your cohort's projects.

Conclusion¶

This course was information dense and useful. The time estimate is off as the videos take only about an hour each week. Either I am a faster reader than I thought or they have overestimated the time it would take to read the weekly material. In either case, I estimate that I spent about 6 hours. It was also nice that, although the course is split into weeks, everything is available immediately upon completing the previous tasks.

I recommend this course to anyone who manages a team remotely or who is in the process of transitioning to remote work. COVID has given the entire world a crash course in remote work, but this course is a good way to handle and manage those newly remote workers effectively. It is also a good course to take if your company is planning on extending the work remote environment that 2020 has thrust upon you to last beyond this current pandemic.

GitLab has done a good job with this course.

Rise Gardens Review

2020-05-29T10:00:00-05:00

Introduction¶

Before I close out this series with a quick run down of everything, I want to congratulate Rise Gardens on closing a round of funding to the tune of $2.6M this week. Well done, Rise Gardens!

I started this series a little over a month ago to document my new Rise Gardens indoor garden. I've covered everything from the [initial opening of the garden][unboxgarden], garden assembly, to [planting the first plants][plants]. I've covered the hardware of the garden and the software and subscription service. During this time, I've watched my plants sprout, grow and been harvested (at least some).

Harvest¶

A month isn't a lot of time for larger plants to grow. My tomatoes and peppers aren't even close to being ready, but several varieties of lettuce have been for a while. I've had the butter lettuce, romaine, and red oak already. My arugula is two days away from being ready, according to the app. I think it's more likely that it's about a week away.

Each variety has been good. I have favorites, based on tastes, but no complaints about the quality or taste of the lettuce. Surprisingly, the kids liked all of them too.

Five weeks into growing, and I have a decent crop growing. On the bottom, there is a couple tomato plants, some pepper plants, a swiss chard (almost to harvest too), and a tiny little kale plant. I finally got one of those to sprout. That was my last kale pod, so I'm happy at least one sprouted.

In the middle there are two basil plants and two chamomile plants. I've got a nursery started with some plants that will go in this area in about a week and a half. At the top is my lettuce. In this picture, I'd just removed two pods that had been completely harvested so it is a bit emptier than it had been.

On the bottom, you can see that I ran some twine to help hold up the plants. This was put in place to help the tomatoes before their stalks thickened. They had been leaning. Now that they are tall and thick though, they aren't even touching that twine.

It looks good!

Customer Support¶

I don't remember mentioning this in previous posts, but Rise Gardens has good customer support. I've reached out to them a few times for various questions. Each time I get a response within a couple days and have had my questions answered. They are friendly and know what they are talking about. Keep doing this Rise Gardens! As you grow, keep that focus on the customer.

Correction¶

In my post about assembling the garden I mentioned that there is a gap that appears when you place the small tray covers in place. It turns out, I was putting those trays on backward. This was pointed out to be by another Rise Garden owner. Thank you for your help!

In the picture above, you can see I have those trays in place correctly now. You can also see a long white stain on the second level that is clearly coming from the exit pipe. This is due to the splashing the water was doing before I turned the covers around and the lime in my water. When I clean the garden, this will get cleaned off too.

Final Summary¶

Rise Gardens has built an amazing product. It's not going to replace your trips to the grocery store. One garden isn't going to feed your family. But, it will supplement it. It will provide you with some fresh vegetables and herbs. It will allow you to grow for more of the year (especially in colder climates).

It's also proved to be very interesting for the kids. They love checking the garden each morning to see how big plants have gotten or how "their" plant is doing. They help out when nutrients are put in and like refilling the water with me.

There are a few areas that can be improved though. I think the biggest improvement that could be made, physically, is adding leveling feet. If the next iteration has adjustable feet, that solves the largest problem I had during assembly: how do I make this thing level?

Other areas of improvement are related to the software and subscription service. I mentioned these in my post about the software. Personally, I think the suggested times are a bit aggressive for plant harvesting. I'm continuing to watch, but based on the lettuces that have been harvested so far, the software tells me they are ready much earlier than they are. The subscription service could use a few additional features - mainly the ability to schedule selections out a few months and the newest seeds. I still don't see those and I think I'm going to miss them for June, because my shipping day is soon. I'll try again for July.

Of the wishlist of items I have, I'm hoping the round of funding they received can be partially used to meet some of these. On the software side, I'd love an API to pull back previous readings. On the hardware side, a light sensor and more lighting options would be amazing. If I had to pick between the two, I'd pick that API though...I am a programmer, so take that opinion with that bias in mind.

Would I get it again?¶

I absolutely would get this again. This is a great in door garden. It grows way more than herbs. It's large enough to grow big plants. It's expandable to grow more plants. It's easy enough to not kill plants. With a few improvements, I'd have no complaints at all.

Update: Oct. 2020¶

The first full harvest took place in late August/early September. I was reasonably pleased with most of the plants. I started the second crop a couple weeks ago, hoping to put some lessons learned into practice to do ever better this round. A few problems I had with my first crop:

I planted to many tomato and pepper plants. They grow larger than the shelf space and started growing up the sides.
I planted kale about two weeks after my first batch of seeds and by the time it was transferred to the garden it was tiny and overwhelmed by larger plants
Cucumbers had a lot of buds, but few fruits. I think this is because I didn't prune well enough.
The pepper plants grew very large, produced many flowers, but didn't product a single pepper. I suspect part of this is due to pollination and competition with the tomatoes.

For this second crop, I've spread of the plants that grow large much more and will end up having empty space in the garden because they will quickly overwhelm the other plants. I've put lettuce and herbs on the top shelf and filled it reasonably well. I've put two cucumber plants on the middle shelf and will work on pruning them better and shaping the direction they grow so that they remain on this level instead of growing everywhere. Finally, I'm only doing one tomato and one pepper plant this time. I'm hopeful that I get some peppers. The tomatoes were very good, but with only one plant I am hoping it have more room to grow and less competition.

Rise Gardens App/Subscription Improvement suggestions

2020-05-24T23:45:00-05:00

Introduction¶

The [garden has been opened][unboxgarden]. The garden has been assembled. The nurseries were opened. The first plants have sprouted. I've had my first lecture harvest (more on this next time). While waiting for that harvest, I offered suggestion on how to improve the hardware.

Today, after about a month of growing, monitoring and watching the sprout go from seed to plate, I've been using the application almost daily. I have thoughts on how to make it even better. I have thoughts on how to make the subscription service better. I'll share those below.

Mobile Application¶

One of the selling points of the Rise Gardens is the mobile application. It's built to help you maintain your garden. For the most part, it works well. But there are some warts that need to be ironed out of it.

I am using the Android application.

Loading Screen¶

Launching the application presents you with the Rise Gardens splash screen.

Learn to love this splash screen. On a good day, it will show for a few seconds. On a bad day, the application will hang forever. There is a simple work around, force close the application and relaunch it, but that's rather annoying. I estimate that I encounter this problem every three to four times I launch the application.

Once I've made it past the loading screen, I find that every four to five days my log in information is forgotten.

So, every few days I have to log back in. It's also important to point out here that this log in is not the same as the login you use on their website. My login on the website contains a +. The application rejects that form of email address. Since I usually use +servicename to keep my login information easier to remember, this is rather annoying.

I can stay logged into Slack, Hangouts, Gmail, NextCloud, and countless other applications on my phone indefinitely. I should be able to do that same here too.

Plant Information¶

One of the nice things about the application, in addition to it's ability to tell me how many and what kind of nutrients to add, is suggestions on how when to harvest your plants. Unfortunately, I don't think it's very accurate.

This accuracy is something I'm aware of and am keeping in mind as I add nutrients too. If I can't trust one area, can I really trust the other? So far, with four different types of lettuce harvested, I don't see a reason not to trust it, but that thought is still in my head.

Why is it inaccurate?

On harvest day, this is the information presented by the application. There are a few things to notice in this screen shot. First, "0 days to harvest", yet still showing the "Mid-growth" data. Second, this didn't change to "harvest" until a full day later. Thinking about it now, I suspect the datetime of when I added the plant to a nursery was recorded, not just the day and it's going by "hours since planted", to display the stage information.

This is the red oak lettuce on harvest day. This...is not ready. I will fully admit that I am not an experienced gardener, but this is a tiny little plant. I waited almost two full weeks after this picture was taken to actually harvest the plant. It had grown much larger by then.

I found the same type of problem with all of my lettuces. They all reached "Harvest day", but were not ready to be harvested. The other plants I have in the garden at the moment are longer growing and aren't to the flowering stages yet, so I'll watch for those stages in the application versus reality.

Subscription Service¶

One of the things I really like about Rise Gardens so far is the monthly subscription service, which sends plants that I've selected and nutrients to grow them. My shipping date for May just missed their newest plants, but I'm looking forward to getting a few of those in June.

That said, I do have a few suggestions for how to make the subscription service amazing.

Multipacks¶

One of the things that I was sent during the shipping delays was variety packs of seeds. I covered these in my post where I opened the nurseries. The subscription service doesn't allow this type of package. Instead, it ships four pods of an identical plant.

I'd like to try mint, or cat nip or a couple herbs that I haven't had or use very infrequently, but I don't need four pods of these plants. Instead, if I could create my own variety packs I'd be more willing to try some newer plants. This is how I got the red oak lettuce and the kale that is in the garden now. I wouldn't have gotten four pods of either of those, since that's just not what I need (or want, in the case of kale). But a single pod...sure. Might as well, and the kids can try something new.

Plan out multiple months¶

Plants are shipped out once a month. About ten days before that, I receive an email saying that my shipment is coming up. Five days before shipping I have the ability to go pick the plants I want and they are immediately locked in.

I'd love if this flow could go out multiple months. Instead of worrying about making sure I hit that five day window to make selections, let me pick the plants I want for the next three months or so and allow me to change those until a few days before shipping. Then I know what I'm going to be getting and if I decide that I don't like something or want to try something else in a few months I can still go change it.

Subscription plants vs Store plants¶

I missed the availability of new plants for my May shipment. I was looking forward to trying some of these for June. It turns out, the new plants aren't listed in the list of plants I can select for my subscription. This is incredibly disappointing.

Wishlist¶

I have two items that I really think would make Rise Gardens fantastic and both are software!

Access to old water readings¶

I know the application sending my water readings somewhere. I have to log in, and the application doesn't work when the internet is down (tried...doesn't load). Give us the ability to pull those old readings via an API call so that I can plot them. I love data and I love visualizing date. More information via an API call would be even better. Things like:

How long the lights were on
Water level
Suggested nutrients to add
Suggested pH balance to add

Maybe if enough people can see and play with their old data we can even make some suggestions on what would work better. As it stands though, we don't have access to it. We put in water readings and that's it. It's gone.

I'd really love the ability to pull that old data back.

Allow better light control¶

Right now light control is pretty limited. You pick a time for them to turn on and a number of hours for them to stay on. That's it. (The hour thing is why I thought about when the plant status shifted from "Mid-growth" to "Harvest" as well)

I'd like the ability to be able to turn these lights on and off through out the day. As the sun crosses the sky, there are hours where the plants are in direct sunlight. I could turn the lights down to 50% intensity during those hours or off all together.

There are two open ports on the controller. A piece of hardware that can detect light level could be used to control on/off or light intensity level. Obviously you couldn't put there right next to a plant, because the LEDs would affect the sensor, but put it on a post and it could tell if you if the sun was shining on the garden.

This type of thing could also be used in different seasons to determine when to turn the lights on or off automatically. I can use natural light for part of the day, but when the days get shorter, I need the lights to stay on longer.

Summary¶

I'm nearly done with this series. I am only planning one last post - a final summary of everything so far and a quick summary of first harvests (I think it'll only be lettuce at that point).

Here I've covered the things that have frustrated me (application loading/login), things that can be improved (plant information) and offered a few suggestions to make the software and subscription better.

Overall, I think everything I've mentioned is do able with some development time. I am looking forward to how Rise Gardens continues to improve the product.

One thing that is very disappointing though, is that the new plants - cucumbers, bean mascotte, celery, catnip, and several more - aren't even available as options when selecting my next subscription plants. I hope this is resolved soon, because I really want to try some of these new plants.

The next post will be the last in the series and will cover harvest and my final, overall impressions of the garden.

Rise Gardens physical improvements suggestions

2020-05-05T10:00:00-05:00

Introduction¶

I've opened the garden, opened the nurseries and assembled the garden. I've planted my first pods and am now eagerly awaiting a harvest from the new Rise Gardens garden. While waiting, I have some time on my hands, so this post is an overview on what I really like and what I think can be improved. I'm going to just cover the physical garden in this post, and in the next one I'll go over some improvements that would make the mobile application and subscription service amazing.

Improvements¶

Let's start with what hasn't been great. It's customary to do good news, then bad news, but overall I am very pleased with the garden so far. Granted, I'm not even at my first harvest yet, but first impressions have been good. I wanted to end the post on the "good" things about the system.

Packaging¶

Packaging has been a mixed bag. Packaging of seed pods and nutrients, has been flawless. Packaging of the garden, itself, was less so. As I pointed out in my post where I [opened the garden][unboxgarden], there were areas where packaging just didn't hold up.

The screws broke out of their paper bag and scattered all over the inside of the tray. This particular tray has a few scratches on it that the other two levels do not. I presume it is from the sliding screws.

My suggestion here is to either put the screws into a plastic bag instead of the paper one, or put the paper bag of screws into a little box. A box the size the pods arrive in would be perfect.

My top shelf was also scratched. This was stored right next to the bottom shelf - with drawers - and both parts are metal. I assume they rubbed together during shipping, causing the scratch. I think the easiest way to prevent this would be to add some small barrier between the two.

Finally, for the packaging complaints, we return to the small little antenna. This looks like it was picked from a warehouse bin by a worker with dirty hands. That's not uncommon for that line of work. My suggestion, in this case, is to have the antennas stored in some kind of protection - a small plastic bag, perhaps.

Seeds¶

I'm now about three weeks into my first set of plants, and while a majority of them sprouted, there were several that did not. I know that not all seeds will sprout, but if I'm getting only four pods of seeds per box and one of those doesn't sprout, that's an expensive failure rate over time.

For my first transplanting, 7 out of 18 plants didn't sprout after 10 days. After 14 days, those seven still had not sprouted, but a new set of pods had.

Unfortunately, I don't have a suggestion on how to improve this right now. As I watch the next round of plants, and my May seeds when they arrive, I'll be watching failure rate carefully.

So far, this is my biggest and only major complaint.

Adjustable Feet¶

I have three items that I think would make an immediate improvement on how the system is physically assembled.

Something I mentioned in my assembly post, was that the area my garden sits in is not perfectly level. The garden needs to be level though, so that the water flows correctly. My solution to this was cardboard box slices the length of the foot, so that we could level it out.

My suggestion though, is to add adjustable feet. This eliminates the need for users to come up with a way to level a garden that is 50+ pounds that isn't supported by the company. It'd also look much nicer than 6-7 slices of cardboard stuffed under one leg.

Light Sensor¶

The next item on my wishlist would be a light sensor. The controller has two unused ports. A light sensor could fit into one of those ports and could be used to automatically decide if the overhead lights should be on and at what intensity.

As the year passes, the sun rises and sets at different times of day. I received my garden after day light saving kicked in this year, but I am curious how it handles that too. Right now, the lights are controlled by the application to come on at a specific time, stay one for a specific number of hours and then turn off. My garden receives sunlight throughout the day. I'd like to use the overhead lights to augment that natural light. If it's a cloudy day - turn on the lights. If it's during that time of day where the sun goes over the corner of the room so the garden is in shade, turn on the lights. If it's early in the morning and the sun is shining on the plants, but it's just not the intensity recommended, turn on the lights at an appropriate intensity to augment the sun. As it rises and places the garden in more direct sunlight, lower the lights.

Wire harness around controller¶

The garden has some nice groves built into it to hide the wiring for the lights. It works really well and makes the garden look nice when you are looking at the plants, or showing off to family members. But, this nice wiring solution doesn't exist once everything is inside the cabinet. It's a giant free for all of wires. There are light wires, the pump power wire and the power cord for the whole system. It is fortunate that the wires are long enough that things can be moved and adjusted, but it also means that there is a mass of wires that hang around in there. A harness of some kind to keep these wires in the correct location would be helpful.

The good¶

With my list of complaints and wish list items out of the way, let's go over what has been good about the garden. Let's make it clear that, apart from my concern about the number of seeds that didn't grow, the scratches and other packaging things I mentioned are small and easy enough to ignore. The smudged antenna cleaned up and the scratched top can't be seen.

Craftsmanship¶

The design of the garden is fantastic. Assembly instructions are clear. At first they appeared to be long, but after using them during assembly, that's because they are complete. There were no missing steps. The components fit together well, the hardware needed to assemble the garden was all provided and nothing was missing.

The kids helped to assemble it, and I believe that's a testament to how easy it is to put together. They knew what to do and how to help.

The system is solid. I am confident it's going to hold the weight of the water and the plants. The biggest thing I need to worry about is a power outage, which would drain the water (due to gravity) in the basin in the cabinet. If this happens soon after I refill the water, I suspect it'd overflow. It'll happen at some point, so we'll see how it works out. But, apart from using a larger basic for a three level garden, I don't think there is anything that needs to change here.

Support¶

I've reached out to Rise Gardens support a few times now for various questions I had. I did this both pre-purchase and post-purchase. In all cases, support has provided me with accurate and helpful answers within a day or two. During the delivery delays, the company continued to communicate with me.

If they keep this high quality customer support and open communication thing going, they will do well in building customer loyalty.

It works¶

Rise Gardens is a young company. It's been my experience that young companies don't always turn out high quality productions on their first iteration. Rise Gardens has show that experience is not the rule. Everything worked as expected when I assembled it.

The pump, the electronics, the assembly instructions. It all just works.

Summary¶

The physical hardware of the garden has a few areas where improvement would take a great product to even another level. The packaging could be improved to reduce some of the cosmetic complaints I have.

This is a great design. Rise Gardens has clearly put in the time to design something that works as expected, but is easy to set up, maintain, and use.

In my next post, I'm going to cover some more improvement ideas focused on the mobile application and subscription service.

Planting the first crop in the Rise Garden

2020-05-01T10:00:00-05:00

Introduction¶

I've opened the garden, opened the nurseries and assembled the garden. In this post, we plant the first round of seeds, set them in the nursery and wait for them to grow. Let's continue on this new hydroponic journey with the Rise Gardens indoor garden.

Planting Pods¶

In my post about opening the nurseries, I had pictures of what the seed pods look like. These pods fit very easily into the pod holders and then slip into the nursery trays. With the variety packs and first round of seeds we received, it was time to pick what to plant first.

The first decision we made was that we wouldn't try to grow everything all at once. I can only eat so much lettuce or so many peppers at a time. I don't want everything ready for harvest all at once. So, we had the kids fill one nursery while we filled half of another.

Our initial selections were tomatoes, peppers, two types of lettuce, some chamomile, and basil.

The kids filled their nursery. We recorded which plant was which in the Rise Garden app, filled the water level as appropriate, and set it in the sun.

We planted half a nursery's worth of plants, filled the water level, and set it in the sun.

With everything planted, we updated the app, and started waiting. Let's see how these grow!

Three days later¶

Each morning the kids ran down to the nurseries and looked inside eagerly to see if anything had grown. On day three, we saw our first sprouts - chamomile. The kids were excited because this was in their nursery.

Day 6¶

On day six, the kid's nursery had several sprouts. In the image above, you can see a couple lettuces, some swiss chard, the chamomile, and a small tomato sprout.

The adult nursery was much less green. We have some lettuce.

Transplanting¶

Ten days after the initial pods were put in to the nurseries, we had sprouts that were touching the roof of the nursery. I figured it was time to transplant some of the more mature ones. Even though we were a week and a half later, there were not sprouts in all of the pods. We didn't transplant those.

Here, we can see the lettuces transplanted to the top layer of the garden. Lettuce doesn't grow tall, so it doesn't need the extra space provided on the bottom layer. It's also a single harvest, and should grow relatively quickly. We figured the top level would be great for the faster cycling plants.

We stuck the larger plants - swiss chard, tomatoes and peppers - on the bottom level and left anything else for the middle.

In total, eleven out of 18 pods were transplanted. The other 7 didn't have sprouts yet. The hope is they will in a few days. If not, that's a fairly high failure rate and we'll have to figure out something else to plant.

With the first round of plants in the garden, each of us picked one additional pod to plant and added that to the nursery for the next cycle.

Summary¶

We've finally made it to the garden. Unfortunately, the next step - harvesting - is a ways off. Even the fastest plants are at least a month or more away. That's fine though, by the time we can start harvesting, we'll be ready for it.

I'm a little concerned about the number of pods that didn't sprout. It is our first attempt though, so maybe it was a combination of which plants were together and which took in more water. We'll be experimenting with different groupings.

The kids continue to be super interested in this, which is exciting to see. They've grown attached to some of the plants they've never eaten before, both in the current round of plants and in the plants now in the nursery.

Next in this series is my impressions so far, along with a set of changes that would be nice to make the product even better. This will cover both the physical hardware and the electronics/automation side too.

Assembling the Rise Garden

2020-04-26T01:10:00-05:00

Introduction¶

It's time to assemble the Rise Gardens indoor garden. In previous posts you can find the process of unboxing the garden and the process of unboxing the nurseries. Today, we assemble.

Rise Gardens makes the following claim on their web page:

Within an hour, you can assemble your garden, connect your app, and plant your first herbs and veggies.

Spoiler: If you don't have children helping, you can definitely hit that one hour mark. For me, the kids wanted to help assemble, so it took about an hour and a half. Not a big deal. It was a good family project and assembly was fairly easy.

Assembly¶

The assembly manual that we pulled out while unboxing the garden is misleading in how complex the process it. It is a fairly thick manual, but it turns out that is because Rise Gardens has documented the process very well. Most pieces just fit together, get a couple screws and you keep working your way up.

Lower Shelf and Level¶

The process starts at the base. It's important to note, and it is noted somewhere in the manual, that the garden needs to be level so that the water flows correctly. If it's not level, water has this weird thing about not going where you expect.

We stuck this in a sun room built on a concrete slab. It's not the most level thing in the area. But, with a level and some ingenuity we solved that problem.

The metal shelf sits an inch or two off the ground once the feet have been attached. The screw holes on the bracket are designed to catch holes built into the shelf. Then they are tightened into place.

The lower tray operates on the same principal. The tray catches on, then is screwed into place with the included allen wrench.

Upper Levels¶

The next two levels are installed by adding the extensions for the level. They attach via a screw to each upright post.

These trays are also attached the same way. On the bottom of these trays is the light that will shine down on the level below.

Adding the third level is the same as the second. It is topped with the light. If you look closely at the right foot in this picture, you'll notice we have wedged several layers of cardboard under the foot to ensure the garden is level.

Plumbing¶

The plumbing was as easy to add as the trays. On the lowest level, we added the thick flexible tubes into the basin below.

The short tube in the back is the pipe that will go up to the plant trays. The longer front one is the water return. I didn't capture a picture, but the small flexible tubing we unboxed earlier actually will go inside the back tube. This is different than I envisioned while unboxing it, but frankly makes a lot of sense. This is a thick pipe and I didn't understand how we wouldn't just flood the system with that much water. The small tubing is much better suited for the task.

The inflexible black pipes fit into the trays. In the picture above, you can see the plumbing pipes on the left hand side of the garden.

The water will flow from the basin at the bottom, all the way to the back top. It will flow around the edge on the right and drain down to the lower level. This will repeat for the second level and then the first and flow back into the water basin.

Testing the system¶

With assembly done, it was time to test the lights and add the water to look for leaks.

Light check went well. They work at full power and 50% power, as expected.

Adding water to the basin and trays and turning on the pump went better than expected too. Water and I don't always get along. In this case though, water went up and cycled through as expected.

But, there was one aspect I didn't like about plant trays and the water. Each level has three large plant trays with four holes each to support twelve plans on the level. There is also a gap by the plumbing that has a small black covering too. That covering doesn't fit though.

There is a gap that forms, because the output pipe on each level prevents this covering from sitting flat. When the pump was first turned on and for the first few hours, we noticed that water was splashing out of this gap.

As you can see here, the output pipe and it's 90 degree elbow doesn't fit under the black tray covering.

This is something I'll have to keep an eye one. I have had the system running for about a week, but the time this was posted. The first day or two, while the water level was high, I noticed this splashing. As the water level got lower though, I noticed less and less.

Summary¶

Assembly was incredibly easy. The kids helped do almost all of it. Plumbing was also easy. Almost, plug and play, easy. I give huge props to Rise Gardens to making the assembly so simple.

I have one big complaint, but it's not related to assembly. It's related to the tray gap I mentioned above. I really wish the output pipe didn't get in the way of the black tray coverings, so that it could sit flat.

I also have one suggestion. In the next iteration, put adjustable feet on the bottom of the upright brackets. I can't imagine I'm the only one with an uneven floor, and it'd be so much easier to level it with some adjustable feet.

The build quality is good, minus that tray fitting. It feels very stable. I've had the water running for a week now and the plants in the nursery are getting close to the point where they can be transplanted to the garden.

Next up, planting the nursery and watching the seeds sprout.

Unboxing garden nurseries

2020-04-24T10:00:00-05:00

Introduction¶

In my last post, I opened all of the boxes related to my new indoor, hydroponic garden from Rise Gardens. Today's post goes over the opening of the three nurseries I received. Let's continue my review of the new Rise Gardens farm!

I mentioned in my first post, that there were shipping delays with the garden. One of the things that Rise Gardens did to make up for this was ship additional nurseries, nutrients and seeds.

The nurseries showed up a week before the garden did. Had I been planning properly, I would have set them up at that time. That way when the garden arrived I'd be a week into waiting for my sprouts. Alas, I did not, so the garden was assembled the same day the nurseries were started.

Oh well. On to the unboxing!

The Unboxing¶

The nurseries showed up in three boxes, all taped together. This should have been my first indication that the company loves tape.

Boxes two and three had identical contents. Box one had a couple extras. The first extra was this nice quick start guide.

It very quickly covers what's in the three boxes:

Nutrient Sensor
Batteries
Nutrients
Plant Holders (12 for the nursery, plus 6 extra for the next round of plants)
Seed packs. It says 4, but boxes two and three actually had five seed packs

It also gives you a quick overview of how to use the nursery. It's pretty simple:

Take the cover off a seed pod
Don't dump out the seed
Place it in the nursery
Put in the appropriate amount of water

The last step in the quick start is a note on the application provide by Rise Gardens. I'm new at hydroponics, so I'm looking forward to using this for the first few growing cycles. I'm also hoping that I learn something about how much nutrient solution I should be adding, so that I don't need to be reliant on the app in the future. We'll see how that works out. Technology is nice.

On to the nursery! I'm going to admit, I was surprised by how small this nursery is. I don't know what I was expecting, but it was larger. Now that I've thought about it for more than five seconds though, this is perfect. This is a nursery. It's designed to help the plants sprout, not grow. That's what the garden is for.

The nursery holds twelve plant pods and has a hole for adding water. If you look closely at the inside of the quick start guide, you'll see the nice bold warning: Never add nutrients to nursery.

The plant pods, or net cups as the quick start calls them, clips into the nursery. They are easy to add and remove. They are also much more solidly built than the plastic of the nursery. I'm interested in seeing how the nursery holds up after a couple cycles of clipping/unclipping these pods.

The last thing in the first box, apart from the seeds, is the nutrient sensor and extra batteries. Before I migrate plants from the nursery to the garden, I'll read up on how this works. In the mean time, quickly looking at it I see that it does pH readings and EC (electro-current) readings. As I go through a few cycles, and with the help of the app, I'll figure out what is the correct range of values for each of these.

In boxes two and three, there were nutrients for the garden. It's not mentioned in the quick start, but in the large instruction manual provided with the garden itself, there are brief instructions on the difference between the two provided here. The general idea, though, is that it helps the plants grow and produce. Obviously.

The seeds¶

Now we get to the seeds. What will I be growing on the first round of two of plants. With a three tier garden, and three nurseries, I have room for 36 individual. That's a lot of vegetables all at once. I'm planning on staggering these in 3-4 week batches. That what I don't get 40 tomatoes all at once.

In the boxes, I received the same plants for each, plus an extra box of chamomile in boxes two and three. That's eight pods. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that much chamomile, but I'll figure it out.

Salad Mix¶

In each large box, I received two salad mix boxes. Each of these contains

1 pod of Red Oak lettuce
1 pod of butter lettuce
1 pod of dragoon romain lettuce
1 pod of astro arugula

I'll have lettuce forever. Excellent. These also grow relatively quickly, so I'll be able to cycle through these consistently.

Variety Pack¶

I received a variety pack in each large box. This pack contains

1 pod of little bing tomatoes
1 pod of dwarf blue kale
1 pod of swiss chard bright lights
1 pod of fresh bites orange peppers

Basil¶

The last package of seeds was four pods of basil, in each large package. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with twelve basil pods, but again, I'll figure it out.

Plant Pod¶

The plant seed pods fit nicely into the net cups. There are a couple seeds in each pod.

Summary¶

The nurseries look easy enough to use. Select the plants I want, stick the seed pods into a net cup and add water. Wait a week or two for sprouts and then transfer to the garden until harvest time.

My only complaint about this entire round of unboxing is rather minor. Honestly, it wouldn't even be a complaint, if I hadn't received the variety packs of seeds. If, instead I'd gotten just single pods of lettuce or tomato or peppers, I wouldn't have thought of it.

My complaint is that I have twelve pods of basil. I don't use that much basil. A variety pack of herbs would have been awesome.

But, as I said, very minor complaint. I will figure out what to do with some fresh basil. I have family members that will probably be happy to get some.

All in all, the nurseries look good. The seeds look good. The tiny little gardener in me is ready to see if I can grow something.

With another unboxing complete, I am ready to start assembling the garden. My next post will cover assembly of the garden.