Just need to vent a little, but I am so tired of spider mites devouring my garden. I keep them down using a water spray, but this is of course not enough to get entirely rid of them, and with the heat wave they are multiplying fast. I spend a lot of time doing this. I've tried some various oil concoctions (not neem oil, as that has been a little hard to source where I am, but canola oil was one I found recommended) without much luck, and they left a sticky residue on the foliage, so I stopped doing it.

This is the second year I've had problems with this. I suspect they have overwintered on some indoor plants, as the initial chilies were infected before being moved outside. Next season I will ensure a complete plant free environment for some weeks before I sow my crops indoors from seed, and will also look at finally finding neem oil or predatory mites to keep these guys in check.

This year I've also for the first time had some issues with inchworms eating my plants. The worst seems to be behind me now, but there was a period of time where I would find and pick off several each evening that I somehow had missed the day before (fat buggers!).

My indoor plants are also suffering from fungus gnats. I've not done anything to combat them, and will need to look into nematodes or other helpers. I am not sure about the effect on my herbs, as they seem to be doing fine regardless.

It's a learning experience, and steadily getting better at this for each season is nice - but I can't help but long for a proper garden where I imagine keeping a more balanced ecosystem is easier (but at least I don't have to deal with slugs on my balcony...). Maybe I am deluding myself.

I recently printed a vermicomposter in PETG. It consists of a bottom reservoir which is supposed to catch leachate from the above compartments. I'm not sure the rate at which this will fill up, but the leachate is supposed to be diluted with water and used as nutrients from plants.

However, the reservoir leaks from the plug and from the front leg slots, at least when the reservoir is filled completely up with water. The leak from the plug I seem to have fixed with a combination of an o-ring and some PTFE-tape, but for the other leak I've been thinking of coating it with epoxy resin.

My challenge is actually finding such a resin, where the finished, cured product is food safe (since it will eventually find its way into the plants I intend to eat). Locally, I've not been able to find anything that is certified food safe, only various epoxy fillers and primers for boats.

The local 3D-print shop recommended this product which I could get through them: https://siraya.tech/products/siraya-tech-aegis-coating-systerm-for-resin-filament-prints But I've found some less than favorable reviews for that one in particular.

Anyone with experience water-tightening containers like this?

I'm currently building a personal website and making a smol-version to along with it. The main website will likely live behind Anubis to avoid LLM-scraping and the like.

Since Anubis forces the client to waste compute, this is not very aligned with the smolweb guidelines as I understand them. How do people handle this?

Last year I experimented with a self-watering system for some containers to grow primarily salads and potentially some herbs. They are placed in a way that makes watering a bit cumbersome, and I am typically gone for days at the time during Summer, so that such a setup is very useful to me. It consists of two containers: a top container containing a soil mix and a bottom container filled with water. From the top container, I have a couple of baskets filled with perlite dipping into the water that wick moisture up into the soil mix (I originally used soil for this, which ended up with some nice mold growth :) ).

This worked reasonably well, and I had some good harvests of arugula and some regular green salads. But I found the moisture level of the soil becoming too high, especially towards the end of the season when the Sun and temperature were not as aggressively evaporating the water.

The soil mixture I used then was a general purpose plant mix mixed with perlite. I was planning on adding even more perlite this year as an attempt to lower the average moisture level, or simply go down to the beach to get some coarse sand and mix that in instead.

Any other things I should consider?

For the next growing season I want to 1) stop relying exclusively on store bought soil and 2) stop wasting all my food scraps. I've started looking into vermiculture (and in particular a multi-tray DIY-solution), and I am currently looking for some good resources (books, in-depth article or video series or online courses) that can help me learn, and I was hoping that people here would like to share some resources they have found to help them on their journey to become composting masters.

I don't only want to understand how to do this in practice, but also how any choices along the way impact soil quality and how to ensure I have soil of good quality for my home garden. So I appreciate any pointers to more general soil-related resources.

I have tried to make some self-watering plant boxes where I 3D-print some containers with holes to act as wicks to absorb moisture into a top container with soil. The wicks themselves are packed with soil.

However, some white mold quickly builds up around some of the holes (fairly self-limiting though, it does not get much more than what you see in the attached picture after some days since I first noticed it). I emptied the water and re-cleaned the box, and wiped off the wicks. The existing water had a slight sewage smell to it.

For now, the boxes are directly exposed to light, but will be built in by a wooden enclosure in the "final product".

1. Should this be of any concern for the plants growing in the soil? They will be edible greens.
2. Can I avoid this, while still using my 3D-printed parts?

I recently freed up some space indoors to form a seedling station that will allow me to transfer plants out on the balcony during the growing season in my country, and for indoor pots in the off-season. It is a two-story shelf on the top of a cabinet.

However, there's no windows in this room, so I need some grow lights, and I require these lights to be controllable from Home Assistant. I had originally thought I could just use a microcontroller flashed with WLED and connect some LED-strips to this, but apparently it is only compatible with these ternary output LED-lights and not any full-spectrum LED strips.

Ideally I would be able to have control over sectors (at least two in each story) and be able to tune the red:blue ratio. However, I will be happy if I can land on a solution that allows me to control each story independently, which I guess I can achieve with a regular system connected to a Zigbee switch or something like this.

I found tons of these full-spectrum LEDs on Aliexpress for fairly cheap, but I am inherently skeptical about buying anything from here from a quality and safety perspective, and especially stuff connected to mains.

Anyone here have a sweet setup for this they'd like to share?

I'm launching a little balcony gardening project that involves water reservoirs. I don't have much experience with these kinds of projects, so I need a little help.

Due to some dimensional constraints, I will need two regular plastic containers (your typical storage containers), and I was hoping to get away with only including a way to fill one of them. That means I will need to connect it to the other in some way. So I thought I would just drill a hole in both of them and stick a pipe between them.

1. What is the best way to drill holes in plastic without risking any splitting?
2. How do I make sure that the holes are water sealed afterwards? Can I glue around the pipe and plastic box?