Purple Hull Pea Time-lapse

Over the past month or so I have literally been taking pictures 24/7.
I decided that since it is spring and everyone has the itch to start work in their gardens I would make a time-lapse video of seeds germinating and growing.

My first thought was to grow radishes because they grow so quickly, however the seeds are tiny and would not be visible until the plant actually started growing so I ended up selecting Quick pick purple hull peas.

To start the project I built a small box about 9 inches tall, 4 inches deep and 12 inches wide and covered the front and back with plexiglass. I. built a little support out of 1x4 and screwed it to a work bench in my garage and filled it up and added the peas. I calculated that it would take about two weeks for the peas to grow and set the built in timer (intervalometer) on my D2H to take a photo every five minutes. A pair of fluorescent grow lights supplied the light for the project.

Unfortunately the peas were from a few seasons ago and only half of them grew. It turned out to be good since I had planned on planting the same seeds in my garden this season. After getting new seeds the whole process started over again, only with the intervalometer set to every 10 minutes. I would imagine that the seeds grew a little faster since I left the lights on for all 10 days. The plexiglass also allowed photosynthasis to start earlier than normal.

The video was produced by combining about 1400 images in QuickTime Pro and iMovie and if you look close you see a couple of the worms I dropped in the container cruising around the seeds.