Pumpless design
6:42 pm in Completed Window Farms, Getting Started, How-Tos, Materials and Resources, posts with pitcures!, Projects in Process by Stuart McPherson
We were having trouble finding the right pump, so we decided to water manually.If the pump makes it cost prohibitive, this could work for you, it costs less than $50.
We give each column about a litre of water every 4 days. It’s only been a few weeks, but the peppers are flowering and everything is growing.
Check out the full blog: http://ebw.evergreen.ca/blog/entry/window-farms/
I’ll post the plans soon.
-Stuart
I don’t see a top reservoir in your post, do you just fill the top plant and let it trickle through?
My Top tank, on my V1 farm, took less than an hour to empty, even with small drips – your method drips for 4 days?
Hi Stuart,
I’m looking forward to seeing those plans! I would like to build a pumpless system as well and was considering doing it via a wick system… as I couldn’t think of away to slow down the flow as you have done.
Great work, and I’ll keep looking out for your plans.
How’d you make the substrate mixture? Is it 50/50 rock/pellets and throughout each bottle or in cups?
50/50- That’s it exactly, the spun rock can hold water pretty well, We didn’t use any cups, just seeds grown from the start in spun rock. Just make sure to make sure what you see on the very top is mostly clay pellets.
There’s no drip system used. The mixture in the bottles is 50% spun rock (The brand name is Grodan) and 50% clay pellets. The plants were grown in Grodan starter kits and then buried in the mixture that fills the entire bottle, not in cups. Instead of a drip system, you water slowly and the spun rock holds water. Paul Norton, who suggested this modification, suggested that you add just enough water that all the containers in a column are well watered without much waste. If there is left over water, you can check the pH and add vinegar drop by drop until it’s right and then reintroduce it to the system.
I’m working on them, hopefully by the end of the week!
So the bottles full of substrate hold enough moisture for four days?! That’s great, I had tried a pump free system, and I had tried filling bottles since adding a pump, but never thought that a bottle full of media would hold enough moisture, I think you may have just put some life back into my electric-free attempts! Spun rock = rock wool?
Keep Farmin’
@James – Spun rock is rock wool – yeah. Just another name for it.
I usually just cut out a 1×1 cube of rock wool just to start the seedings going, but the roots quickly outgrow it.
It does remain moist for a very long time though. Very interesting.
Although I think it would be interesting to find a more organic/biodegradable option because rockwool sucks for the environment.
http://www.simplyhydro.com/growing3.htm
Yea, I’m not too keen on using non-degradable things… But it did get me thinking, maybe a hydroton/ sand mixture would leave plenty of space for air, and still retain a good amount of water? Something I will probably try, I am thinking I may tweeze out the three columns of my towers, keep one a drip, make one a DWC (if it can hold weight), and make one similar to this system (sand/ fine grit gravel instead of rockwool). Maybe I’ll even make a whole new system and have matching plants at each level to compare how well each method works.
Have you posted your plans somewhere yet? I’m really interested in the pumpless system, and hope to get started soon! Your system sounds like exactly what I’m looking for.
Stuart- Pumpless systems are a popular topic. We’re all dying of curiosity here. How’s it going? Mind appending some new pics and an update to this post? Whether things worked out or not, we are all super grateful for pioneering and testing this. In our community, failure is a lot more interesting than success, so if it didn’t work out, please do contribute your troubleshooting and let us know how far you got with this technique so we can continue your technique and just tweak it. The popularity of pumpless systems will never die, I assure you. If those plants are still thriving, please tell us what you think is the magic factor here.
-Britta
hey this is great!
What is the story with adding sand to the growing support? (we have sand in Dakar!)
I am using coconut fibres (from the coconuts we eat here everyday), torn up and dusted as a root support, and I think it would be good to be a bit more dense, but it seems to me like sand will either fall to the bottom or if I fill up the cups with a lot of sand then it might be a too dense environment for the roots. The sand here is very tiny and dusty. I will rinse some and give it a try. I am afraid it will stop the water flow completely and then we might have to water each bottle separately which is not really ideal.
Its not really that we are trying for a pump-less system, but as we are still in a phase of looking for an electricity-free pump and thinking about a low maintenance system, a more solid and water holding root area seems like a good plan.
A gardener here told me that horse manure can be good as a plant food. There are also a lot of sheep here and bats, but I was told those manures would be very acidic.
Overall in just about all the water flow methods, don’t the top bottles always get much more water than the lower ones?
Yes, the top bottles get more water than the bottom ones, but if the pump runs for long enough(in powered systems at least), the growth media starts saturating and more and more liquid just passes through.
The top bottles will get access to more liquids, so it’s a good idea to put thirstier plants at the top and plants that doesn’t need as much at the bottom.