Monday, May 3, 2010

Our New Garden 2010 Version (with a Crystallography Lesson)

We've been gestating (incubating?) a garden indoors for a couple weeks, using a seed-starting kit, and this is what the garden looked like a few days ago after it snowed. (We had started moving the little sprouts outside during the day, using a plastic storage bin as a mini-greenhouse.) Note the chocolate mints, which were planted in the ground last year - they are now in pots, having been taken out of the ground so they wouldn't take over the entire garden.
This morning Two days ago on May Day, the garden was looking like this.
The little sprouts, still in their original heater box get some water.
Then, after being transplanted to their new, roomier accomodations, they get some more water.
Here's our experiment in cubic closest packing, also called face-centered cubic packing (fcc). Successful cubic closest packing would have given us 7 rows of 4 per bin.
That didn't really work, because the rows stuck out too far on the sides, so we went back to body-centered cubic packing (bcc), which gave us 6 rows of 4 per bin.

(Surely only a mineralogist would think of these things.)

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