by samenrahmen
To boldly go …
9:26 am in Plants, posts with pitcures! by samenrahmen
“… Anything leafy and green, essentially. You can’t grow carrots and you can’t grow root vegetables. Potatoes, garlic, those things don’t work.”
Mmmmmh. I can accept carrots and potatoes. But I wanted to try garlic, to be able harvest its leaves and shoots.
I know, it’s sitting very high up, but I want to give it every chance to grow sideways.
And it’s not as though root vegetables in hydroponics were generally impossible, as you can see here (3:44).
We shall see. So far it’s looking good.
I honestly don’t really know what I am looking at but good luck anyways. I found half the fun of Windowfarms is figuring out how to make things work with what you have and the way you want.
I am personally doing onions and carrots in a bucket farm type setup but I suppose if you have enough growing space it might be possible.
So how did you start it? Was the clove already sprouting when you got it or did you chill a clove to take it out of its dormancy?
#1: Well, you’re looking at a garlic clove sitting inside a container in my farm (see avatar), so far defying Maya’s prediction that root vegetables can’t be grown in a windowfarm.
#2: Yes it was. I simply picked the one that had the best developed shoot, and put it in the container. When I felt I needed to adjust its position the next day, it had already developed about a dozen roots of considerable length. Right now its two initial leaves have separated (there is one folded into the other within the shoot).
I think its more that there might not be enough room. Root veggies displace growing medium and need space to grow.
Plus the idea behind hydroponics is maximum yield from the space its using. You might be growing a garlic plant, but you might have been able to get a few tomatoes in the same growing space.
R&DIY at work. I love it. Leave it to windowfarmers. If you tell them there’s something they can’t do, that’s the first thing they’ll work on! Nice going, samenrahmen. We did actually grow a sweet potato plant in one of the eyebeam systems. The plant itself did really well but it just seemed to grow differently. Since the roots were all bound up in the clay pellets and essentially had no space to expand into, they formed around the clay pellets but remained pretty compact. The top part of the plant grew much more leafy than usual. A botanist told us that root vegetable plants just grow differently in hydroponic systems. I’m excited to see what happens with your garlic though. I want to try it myslelf too.
Britta, if the botanist is right, it would be the perfect scenario, because harvesting leaves is what I’m after. I think the amount of light it’s getting will force it to grow more leaves as well. The cloves don’t really matter, as they take to much time to develop.
HJ, the tomatoes I’m growing will be going onto my windowsill in a few weeks; there isn’t enough light or space in this window for them to fruit anyway.
If you had a look at the video I linked to you’ll have seen the way that beet root adapted to the net pot it grew in; I’m hoping for something similar. (‘Root vegetable’ is a colloquial term anyway which tends to obscure the differences between the plants subsumed under it.)
P.S.: I’d really like to know how to grow several tomatoes in the space that one garlic plant takes up
I actually didn’t know you could use the leaves for anything. I figured you were just after the cloves. That being said, one tomato plant produces more tomatoes then one garlic plant if all you were going for is the bulb.
.
But if your after the leaves too then that’s thrown out the “window”
Yeah I kinda stopped watching the video after awhile. Just fast forwarded to the end where it shows the beats. Its pretty weird but as I have found even with my own far, plants are pretty versatile.