Sunday, September 23, 2012

Harvesting Sweet Potatoes


This summer I decided to give sweet potatoes a bigger piece of real estate in
my garden.  I like the flowers, my wife likes the potatoes.  I grew them last year
as an experiment, we had a store bought sweet potato that started to bolt. So, like
any good gardener geek, I planted it.  We got a few potatoes but the best surprise
were the flowers.  See video click here.  This year I planted two full beds and a
corner bed with the little seed potatoes from last year.  I trained the vines up
the fence to maximize growing space. As you can see below, we got quite a
few sweet potatoes and plenty of seed potatoes for next summer.
So one left over store bought sweet potato has now become several meals
and I still have two beds to dig.
Back yard gardening is no joke, it's good eats. 







Sunday, September 16, 2012

GoPro Hero2 Macro Test Shots


A couple weeks ago, I shot a video of crazy ants carrying away a dead lizard.
The video is very funny but technically it was crap...... out of focus.
It got me thinking, GoPro cameras are very good POV sports cameras but
they have no macro capability.  So I went digging in my camera heap and
came up with this GoPro Frankenstein below.  Funny thing, it works.






It's a very simple temporary set-up, I used two rubber bands to hold
a small macro lens in-front of the GoPro housing.  You could use tape as well.
The little macro lens is part of a Bower Super Wide angle lens I got for
my Sony camcorders.  The macro lens unscrews from the wide angle element.
There is a permentent way to put a macro lens on a GoPro but it requires
taking the GoPro apart and screwing in a new lens.  So?  Do you have an
old macro lens in your pile of photo gear?  You may just have a way to get
 cool macro shots with your GoPro.







Sunday, September 2, 2012

Crazy Ants


My garden has been under a frenetic assault by Crazy Ants.
Crazy Ants you say? Oh yeah they are crazy!  I have no idea what specific
kind of ants these are, if you know please leave a comment below.
I posted a video today, click on this link to watch.  
The video speaks for itself, there is nothing these ants won't try to conquer.
I have watched as they have taken anything dead for a walk.
These ants forage in mass and take no prisoners.  All very good
until they broke the first rule of my science project/ victory garden.
They tried to take my house.
Saturday morning we had to call in an airstrike and nuke the invading army.
Did it work?  We will see.  
The question now is who will clean up the dead lizards?




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