Seed to jar, in three minutes
Four months of my first grow — germination to cured jars — compressed into a three-minute timelapse, stitched from the tent camera that watched the whole thing.
I wrote earlier about the dashboard I built for my first grow. This is the part the dashboard was watching.
What you're watching
Four months, start to finish. It opens on germination — jars and bottles on a tent floor, the least impressive footage imaginable — then seedlings, then the stretch, then the flip, and then the part where it stops being a houseplant and starts being a crop. Somewhere in the middle the dashboard makes a cameo. It ends where every grow is supposed to end: three mason jars on top of the washing machine, curing.
The black-and-white stretches aren't a stylistic choice. That's the tent camera falling back to infrared during lights-off, which is most of what it saw. There's something quietly funny about the fact that half the record of my first grow is security-camera night vision of plants doing nothing.
The camera did all the work
None of this was shot. It's the tent camera's stills, timestamped, stitched end to end — the same feed I'd check on my phone when I couldn't leave it alone. The handheld clips at the end are the only footage I actually filmed, and you can tell, because they're the only frames where the camera moves.
That's the accidental upside of instrumenting a thing: I didn't set out to make a timelapse. I set out to watch some plants. The timelapse was already sitting there in the folder.
The actual takeaway
Three plants, four months, a Raspberry Pi that wouldn't stop taking pictures, and three jars at the end. If you want the technical half — the sensors, the VPD math, the AI journal — that's in the dashboard post, and the whole frozen dashboard is at grow.phbeks.com.
This half is just the plants.
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