Light and shade study for your garden
Here is a trick that can put some of your technology to good use in the garden...creating a Sun/Shade "map".
Unless you have an entirely open garden with no trees or large structures, the light changes from moment to moment and season to season. Have you ever noticed how your neighbor's large tree shades your rose bed for hours each day? How about the fence that effectively shades the shrubs at it's feet throughout the winter?
If you have a camcorder, digital camera or webcam, you can make a sun/shade map of parts of your garden or the entire garden if it is small enough. As you know from all those cool time-lapse movies that get shown on the Discovery Channel, compressing time makes the movement of clouds and sun much more dramatic.
Using a camcorder, you can videotape the garden and then speed it up by fast-forwarding or bringing the video into your computer and increasing the speed. You could also shoot a series of still photos and assemble them into a video. Finally, and one of the easiest methods if you have the equipment, is to set up a web cam designed to shoot pictures at regular intervals, say every minute. I can do this using my camcorder as input into my computer which is running EvoCam software and setting up a schedule.
When you play back this video at the end of the day you will have this wonderful map of exactly where the sun shines for this particular season. I recommend doing one on the Summer Solstice (June 21) and one on the Winter Solstice (Dec 21) so you can mark the extreme extents of sun and shade in your garden.
Link: Previous mentions of solstice
Link: Gardening Products from Amazon.com
Technorati Tags: garden, gardening, grow, howto, how-to, outdoors, technology
Unless you have an entirely open garden with no trees or large structures, the light changes from moment to moment and season to season. Have you ever noticed how your neighbor's large tree shades your rose bed for hours each day? How about the fence that effectively shades the shrubs at it's feet throughout the winter?
If you have a camcorder, digital camera or webcam, you can make a sun/shade map of parts of your garden or the entire garden if it is small enough. As you know from all those cool time-lapse movies that get shown on the Discovery Channel, compressing time makes the movement of clouds and sun much more dramatic.
Using a camcorder, you can videotape the garden and then speed it up by fast-forwarding or bringing the video into your computer and increasing the speed. You could also shoot a series of still photos and assemble them into a video. Finally, and one of the easiest methods if you have the equipment, is to set up a web cam designed to shoot pictures at regular intervals, say every minute. I can do this using my camcorder as input into my computer which is running EvoCam software and setting up a schedule.
When you play back this video at the end of the day you will have this wonderful map of exactly where the sun shines for this particular season. I recommend doing one on the Summer Solstice (June 21) and one on the Winter Solstice (Dec 21) so you can mark the extreme extents of sun and shade in your garden.
Link: Previous mentions of solstice
Link: Gardening Products from Amazon.com
Technorati Tags: garden, gardening, grow, howto, how-to, outdoors, technology
posted by Douglas at 11:06 PM
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