Recently, Colorado Public Radio did a segment about the explosion in popularity of “backyard farming” — basically, people growing their own vegetables and whatnot. Becky is very much a part of this trend; one of her major projects of this spring and summer has been planting and tending a variety of vegetables in our yard, including a whole bunch in a raised bed that she built herself.
In much the same way that I get excited and geeked-out about my iPhone 4, Becky gets all excited and geeked-out showing me how her garden is thriving, this or that plant has grown, etc. So, a couple of weeks ago, I decided to combine her gardening geekery with my all-around nerdiness, and create a time-lapse video of her garden (well, part of it, anyway), so we could actually see the plants grow.
As you can see, I wrapped my video camera in plastic bags (to keep it dry in the event of rain), plugged it into an extension cord that stretched into our garage (with the A/C adapter also protected from moisture), put it on “interval record” mode (one half-second of footage every five minutes), and just let the camera roll. For 12 days.
Tonight, I finally brought the camera inside and downloaded the video to my computer, then edited it in iMovie. I’ve eliminated all nighttime footage, since you can’t see anything in the dark, and I’ve sped things up substantially, so those twelve days take just 1 minute, 10 seconds.
As a sneak preview, here are the first and last frames of the video — so you can see how much things changed:
A few things to watch for in the video:
• At 5 seconds, a beautiful yellow flower blooms in the middle of the giant squash/zucchini plant at right (Becky isn’t sure which it is).
• At 7 seconds, our landscapers install a drip irrigation system.
• At 11 seconds, that same flower, having closed for the night, opens up again.
• At 27 seconds, a bunch of plants are suddenly out of place. This was due to a big windstorm last Friday.
• Each day, the plants appear to wilt in the heat of the day, then recover in the evening. Pretty neat.
• Even neater: watching individual plants grow and spread as time goes on.
Anyway, without further ado:
And here’s an even faster version, showing the 12 days in a mere 21 seconds (and thus making the plants’ growth more obvious and dramatic):
That’s really cool, especially the kind of “breathing” effect of the plants daily.