by Tony
Strawberry update-Day38-First fruit eaten
12:37 am in Completed Window Farms, posts with pitcures! by Tony
- Strawberry – first fruit
Success!. Well, here we are at the 38th day after the transplant and I picked a couple of the berries off the middle plant and they tasted like strawberries. Amazing.
Most of the fruit is coming in normal looking, but there are a few that look deformed. I would attribute that to poor pollination. I have added a fan to assist in pollination.
The plant in the pot in the lower right corner is also a strawberry. I put it in the pot at the same time as I put the three in the WF to compare. I wouldn’t say it is growing any faster or slower than the others. The rest of the others plants down there are for the regular garden.
The resevoir for the main unit is a gallon Tupperware container that is sitting inside the tin snowman container. It looks nice and keeps the light out. The lid of the tin supports the WF. I can easily take the lid off the tin to be able to take the Tupperware container out and change the nutrients. The tin itself once held popcorn and I think it might have been a school fundraiser item. I originally thought to use the tin as the resevoir, but it is not water tight. It would rust anyway. The tin also has a small hole in it that I use to sample the water for taking ph readings. I have old assortment of baby/kid medicine droppers that I use to suck out the liquid. They also work good for measuring and adding the ph down acid solution when the ph needs adjustment.
I made a new WF unit which is sitting to the right of the tin. I’ll try some non fruiting plants this time around. It is single story unit for now and will expand up as I find more bottles. The bottom resevoir is a 1/2 gallon juice bottle. The air for the airlift pump comes from the same pump as the other unit. I had an air flow splitter from the girls old aquarium sitting around that you will see hanging from the 1/2 gal container. It has a couple of valves on it so that most of the air flow is going to the main unit and a little going to the single story unit. The tubing is sized for the taller unit and is wrapped around the bottle for now. The kids like to watch the bubbles race around before dropping in. I decided on a seperate resevoir for this one since the strawberries are on a “blooming” diet.
A few weeks after I started, my father-in-law who now lives in Florida said, “You should take the window screen out. It is blocking alot of light”. It was something I never thought of so I took it out. A screen can block 20% of the light or more. I wonder if this would be good advice for everyone since I see other pictures of units and I can see the screens. The other thing I do with the window is keep it clean. It is hard to tell when it is running, but over time it is spashing out of the bottles and onto the window getting it dirty.
I am really enjoying everyones posts,so keep taking lots of pictures! That’s all for now.
Good call on the screen. That a huge light blocker, and I don’t recall seeing anyone here talking about that, but taking that down is helping your light more than 150 watts of CFl’s would, for free! I won’t go into how I came up with than number today, but a good topic for when i have less to do and not right after typing a excessive long comment about nutes.
Pollination can be done by hand. Find a very small soft paint brush, watercolor brushes are good, unless your in the UK, then you will need a watercolour brush. Just gently dust the inside of each flower, trying to pick up pollen from the stamen, and dust it onto the stigma. with small flowers you can’t really see what your doing, but gently brushing inside of them will do the trick.
I´m trying to germinate my strawberry seeds, but I see no progress after a week. How do you guys do it? Or do you guys just buy strawberry seedlings?
These were not started from seed so I can’t help you there. Maybe someone else has some experience. I have some berries growing in the back yard already so I dug up a couple that started out as runners last year knowing that they would flower and fruit this year.
It takes about 2-3 weeks for seeds to germinate.
I purchased some strawberry seeds from the local flower market. I planted 2 packets – arount 30 seeds, I only saw three little sprounts and one died. The other two are coming along nicely… One bigger than the other, but both look healthy.
I havn’t transferred them to my window farm yet. I am still in the R&D phase although almost completed. I will test with some peppers first as I have about 20 of them on the go…
I refridgerated the seeds for two weeks, then planted them carefully. They took around three weeks to sprout.
@marshallb148 Looking forward to seeing more berries so post up some pictures when you get farther along.