by Tony
Strawberries-9 Months, New WF & First Snow of the Year
6:16 pm in Completed Window Farms, posts with pitcures! by Tony
Here we are at the first snow the year and my strawberry Window Farm is still going. The three strawberries in my original WF on the left are 9 months old. To the right is a new window farm. The resevoir on this is a recycled cat litter jug and holds about 2 gallons. The peas on the bottom are 32 days old and the bib lettuce in the middle are 26 days old. Nothing is on the top yet.
First Snow of 2010
It’s interesting that during the summer, the gallon resevoir on the strawberries needed to be topped off ever few days. In the course of a week I would use about an extra gallon of water to top it off. Now with the change of season and less light, during the week only a pint is needed to keep it topped off. I have no supplemental lighting yet.
With the new WF I went and bought a Petco 9904 air pump that has the 4 outlets so I can supply air to both units. In the second WF I am using a variation on my original Tee air pump design. The difference in this one is the 5″ of hose that is coming out of the bottom. It is hard to see, but this short extension also has smaller hose shoved in it. You can see the plumbers tape in the hose that is holding it in place. With this restriction, I seem to get better nutrient flow up the hose and less air bubbling back through the bottom. The Petco pump has a variable output and I get plenty of flow with it set to its minimum.
Variation on Tee Air Pump
Happy window farming!
Your strawberries look fantastic! I am so envious. They are still producing fruit without any supplemental lighting?
Keep up the awesome work!
p.s. You should decorate your strawberries for the holidays, considering how festive the reservoir is. haha
This is an awesome picture with the snow and the strawberries. They seem so out of place…
I think the smaller diameter hose inside of the bigger hose is a really neat concept and a good idea. It must work like a venturi tube. Since you decreased the area for fluid to flow, and the quantity of fluid entering the bigger diameter hose doesn’t change, the velocity must increase, since Q=VA. The higher velocity helps expel more air and pull more solution up the hose. Nice!
@adodd87f , Actually I wasn’t thinking in turns of a venturi tube, but my thinking with adding the restriction was to create another pressure drop as seen from the air entering the tee. Under certain conditions, the air wants to blow back through the bottom. The restriction effectively increases the water head and helps push the air up the hose.
Being an engineer you may like this post. http://our.windowfarms.org/2010/04/11/alternate-air-pump-performance-data/
@jamesnutter, So far I have no supplemental lighting. The experiment over the winter is to see how long they will continue to flower. I have been feeding them a blooming diet this whole time. I know a regular soil strawberry plant needs to go through a cold dormant period in order to flower so we shall see what happens.
My resevoir is actually a tupperware container sitting inside that snowman tin. The tin was actually a Christmas present one year and it contained different flavored popcorn.
p.s. Keep up the good work on http://anuttahwindowfarm.blogspot.com/. I’m enjoying watching your progress.
The path of least resistance, I like it. I really like the graph you put together also, nice job!
This is great! Do you happen to know what variety of strawberries you’re growing?
@andrewcarter, The strawberries are a day neutral variety called Selva. I actually wrote up a short history of them near the end of this previous post.
http://our.windowfarms.org/2010/04/05/strawberry-update/
@ajinil This is some awesome experimentation. I love it that you are testing the limits of photosynthesis with rigged nutes! Serious R&D-I-Y. Please do keep us updated. Are you still seeing flowering?
@ajinil
One nice thing about the blowback is that it aerates your reservoir.
By the way, your T design is very similar to the new design for the school windowfarm kits. What is the time interval you get between the air bubbles going up the tube versus going back out into the reservoir with this setup?
-Britta
@britta Getting back to you. After it starts, I really do not get any air going back into the resevoir. I can run the Petco pump at any rate and none goes back into the resevoir. It actually work best and is most quiet when the pump runs at the lowest setting. At the low setting, you get a big slug of liquid going up slowly every few seconds.
@ajinil I have found the same thing with my air pump, I use a restricting valve and only let a little bit of air through. If there is too much air it just breaks up the nice bubbles.
Also, how did you do your bottle cap/ tube assemblies? Are you using any glue to hold the tube in?
@bionicmel The bottle cap/tube that drops the nutrients from one bottle to the next is really simple. I just drilled a hole in the bottle cap a little smaller than the diameter of the tubing. You just shove the tube in the smaller hole and it hold real snug. Glue is not needed and it does not need to be a perfect seal anyway. Any that leaks just slides down the outside of the tube. The reason I did it was just to keep the nutrients from splashing out of the bottles. It may not seem like a lot, but over time it adds up and the window gets pretty spotted up.