A Yankee in Texas

Almost 6 months to the day of my “Lemonade” post I was offered a position at FG Squared ( fg2.com ) as their Senior Web Applications Developer and I accepted. It’ s been a big change going to work everyday after being off for over 4 months. It’s been a week and my body is starting to get used to my new schedule. Getting up a 7am is getting less painful. The commute is 45-60 mins each way so I’ve been loading my iPod up with podcasts for the drive and while I loath traffic I’m at least making the best of my time in the car.

– Jeremy

The past couple of days I’ve been coworking at Austin’s newest coworking space Cospace. I am loving it here. It’s nice to get out of the house and be in an office style environment with people to interact with.

Things are still pretty quite here at Cospace as they’ve only been open for 4-5 days. There definitely seems to be a lot of interest in Cospace so I expect the space to start fill up on the next couple of weeks.

I will be hanging out here for the rest of the month so if you are in the area swing by and check out Cospace.

– Jeremy

So with my experimental planting of wheat grass looking good it’s time to expand a bit. I cleaned and sanitized two 11″ x 12″ trays that we used to start seeds for our balcony garden last year.

For a comparison all three trays from the first planting will fit in to one of the new trays with room to spare.

To get things started I have 3 cups of wheat berries soaking overnight.

In the morning I will rinse the wheat berries, they will sprout in a about day and be ready to plant in two days.

– Jeremy

A quick measurement this morning shows the wheat grass is now about 5 to 5.5 inches tall. At this rate we should be harvesting this weekend. I plan on taking video of us juicing the wheat grass and I will post that for anyone interested in how that process works.

In case you haven’t noticed the wheat grass has become my favorite photography subject. Here are 3 images I snapped today:

– Jeremy

Just a quick update…. the wheat grass is now about 4.5 – 5 inches tall. I’m not doing anything but watering the grass. I think it will be ready to harvest in the next day or two.

– Jeremy

It’s been a few days since I updated on the progress of my Wheat Grass growing experiment. For a couple of days it was… well as exciting as watching grass grow, but the past couple days it’s gotten a bit more exciting as the grass has been growing about an inch a day.

As you can see the wheat grass is now about 3-4 inches tall.

It will be ready to harvest when it’s 8-9 inches tall which I am guessing will be by mid week.

I am looking forward to juicing up some homegrown wheat grass. Also since the experiment has been a success, so far, I am thinking I will order some actual growing trays so I can plant a much higher volume. The 3 trays I planted will only be enough for 3 days worth of juice so not only do I need to grow a higher volume, but I also need to figure out the “rotation” I need to plant so I constantly have wheat grass to juice.

– Jeremy

After a couple of days in the sprouting jar the wheat grass had sprouted roots:

So I decided I should probably “plant” the sprouted seeds. I drilled some drainage holes in the bottom of some shallow plastic storage containers we no longer use. I then lined the bottom of the container with a double layer of paper towel. The purpose of the paper towel is mainly to keep the dirt from going out the drainage holes.

After the paper towel was in added about a half inch of soil which I think thoroughly moistened.

Then I spread a nice thick layer of the sprouted wheat grass berries and covered them with a thin layer soil.

I didn’t take a photo yet, but I can already see a few blades of wheat grass pushing up from the soil.

– Jeremy

After they soaked for approx 22 hours I drained and rinsed the wheat berries. I put the sprouting jar in a shallow bowl to keep the jar on an angle that will allow water to drain. I also covered the jar with a kitchen towel to keep the light out.

About 4-5 hours after I drained and rinsed the wheat berries.

In this close up you can see that the wheat berries are starting to sprout. ( The white dots at the end of the wheat berries. ) I am excited to see what progress they’ve made by morning. I might end up having to plant the wheat grass a day earlier than I expected.

– Jeremy

A while back I bought a juicer and one of my intentions was to grow and juice my own wheat grass. Some how I just never got around to it it till now. Yesterday Nicole and went shopping at Sprouts and found in their bulk food section Hard Red Wheat Berries. So I bought 3 pounds to take a stab at growing our own wheat grass.

Wheat Berries

One of the things I am trying out is sprouting the wheat berries before planting them. As I was investigating how to grow wheat grass I came across some this piece of advice. We’ll see how it works out. Here are the wheat berries soaking:

Tomorrow morning I will drain the water and rinse the wheat berries. Then I will lay the sprouting jar on it’s side on an angle so any moisture can drain. I will also cover it with a towel so the berries sprout in the dark. I will need to rinse and drain the berries every 8-12 hours.

My plan is to let the wheat berries sprout for 2 days then “plant” them in shallow trays. I will post the daily progress of this little experiment.

– Jeremy

Polyphasic Sleep is something I’ve been wanting to try ever since I read about it on Steve Pavlina’s blog “Personal Development for Smart People”. Polyphasic Sleep is simply sleeping is literally sleeping in many phases. There are many different patterns for the phases. The one I am going to be using is called “Everyman” it consists of a period of 3-4 hours of sleep and then three 20 minute “nap” periods evenly spaced out through the remaining hours of the day. Which results in 4-5 hours of total sleep for the day.

I am joined in this little experiment by my friend Chris aka Maczter. Chris has actually been on a polyphasic sleep schedule before so if I run in to any issues I can get advice from him. I am starting tonight so I will post an update tomorrow night on how my first day went.

Ok it’s time for my first 20 min nap….

– Jeremy