by florian
Update on my farm
12:00 am in International, posts with pitcures!, Projects in Process by florian
New Pictures:
I took some more pictures of my farm as it’s evolved. The reservoir, airlift and lighting are the biggest changes. I also included some detailed shots of materials I’ve used.
My reservoir is suspended from the steel wires that hold my bottles and stabilizes the whole thing. It's 2 centimeters above ground.
This shows my happy beans and thriving tomatoes. They really seem to like the led's I installed.
This is my version of the pulser pump. It works best of all the attempts I undertook.
These are the different sizes of tubing used in the pulser pump. The brand is Gardena
The check valve. I found this in an aquarium store
detail of the suspended reservoir
top of the farm, they sure love that bulb 
as they grow too close to the bulbs, they burn their leaves even though there's hardly any heat emitted by the led's
Hi all
I have quite some experience with my farm so far which I’d like to share. As you can see from the picture, it grew. I now have 8 containers made from 2l fanta bottles with net pots in them. The reservoir is made from an Ikea container named Rationell. They make it from recyled plastic bottles. It has a lid that closes perfectly and blocks out any light. The airlift tubes are wrapped around a net pot and sunk into the reservoir by a stone i put into the net pot. I have strawberries, peppers, cherry tomatoes and beans growing, the 2 remaining containers will get more tomatoes and another sort of beans. After experimenting with wine bottles and using a mixture of techniques taken from @eloinen and @jamesnutter, I went back to plastic bottles, but keeping the 2mm steel cables for suspending the bottles. In my opinion, it looks beautiful and is incredibly sturdy. With the wine bottles, it all wasn’t holding together very well and I experienced quite some leakage. I had some ph problems with my old setup, but it all seems fine now.
Pump
I have my pump on a day timer. It runs for 15 minutes every 2 hours. It has a break between 1am and 7am. For the end and the start of the cycle, I let the pump run for 30 minutes.
Airlift
I have two individual t-joint airlifts installed. What I noticed is that they take a while before they start performing well when installed for the first time or after changing the water in the reservoir (i.e. they come out of the water). I guess this is due to air in wrong parts of the hoses. In the beginning, I always fiddled around with the installation because I thought something was wrong. However my finding is to just let it run for an hour or so and see if it sorts itself out.
Water exit on top
You may see on the pics that they’re not identical on the 2 columns. Actually this was unintended but proves as a good solution for my pepper. It doesn’t like to much water, and the short end shoots most of the water on the bottles wall, making it flow down directly to the next bottle while only a few drops now and then actually get into the container.
Water and nutrients
I’m running my farm on some bought nutrients which seem to work fine. I change the water about every week to 10 days, checking the pH every now and then. It’s usually between 7.2 and 7.8. Once, I had it hitting 8, don’t know why and after a water change it never happened again.
Fortunately, we don’t have chlorine in tap water here in Switzerland, so no need to air it out first.
On my to-do list:
- Adding lighting. I ordered a 20W solar kit with a battery, charger, alternating-current converter and a bunch of red-and-blue LED growing bulbs which should arrive any day now. I want my garden to be independent from the power grid. It is quite an investment and I will have to grow a lot of veggies for a return on investment. But for me, it makes no sense having to buy a lot of electricity to grow plants.
- Starting a worm-tea manufacturing process.
Edit: I put a lot of info in the pic’s descriptions, but don’t know why it’s not displaying. Anyone know what went wrong?
Hi !
Your system is neat. Very aesthetic. Thanks for the technical details, too. I’m surprised at your pH level, which seems high to me.
Please keep us posted on your experiments with worm compost tea. I did have a problem with alcalinity build-up due, I think, to the presence of eggshells in my compost. Apparently, the calcium in the eggshells was filtered and retained by the rock wool I use along with clay pellets as the medium to grow plants in. I explained all that in a post (look it out under “nutrients”, if you’re interested further, along with other comments on worm tea.
I don’t know exactly what went wrong with your trying to put some comments on your photos. It happened to me once and I managed to fix the problem, but I don’t remember what I did.
This site has a few bugs that can be annoying. For instance, I can’t compose posts anymore. But the guys back there are trying their best to fix them and eventually, to move to a different platform all together.
Hey Louise
The pH is always this high around here, I checked from fresh tap water, and it seems to even go down a bit in the system. I’ll check out your post about the tea. However, I found something on youtube (can’t find it right now, sorry) about making worm tea only from the poop of the worms. I collected a whole bunch of that and was going to give it a try.
Oh yeah, my solar panel and stuff arrived. I’m working on a storm-proof window fixture now
Hi Florian,
could you help me with setting up my farm a bit. I am from Munich Germany and have problems finding the right parts. Also I have problems installing the airlift. Are you using needles or ts to connect the airtube with the water tube?
Hey Andreas
Okay, here we go: First of all, for the pump setup, I went with @Mieke’s proposal in this post: http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/01/26/low-water-level-pulser-pump/. The pulser pump works by far the best of all the different ones I tried. All my components were bought at the do-it-yourself hardware store nearby.
- The reservoir consists of a standard .5 metre, 11cm diameter plumbing tube. It holds 4 litres of water. With the hot weater we currently have here, the 4 litres will last for about 5 days. I do pump quite a lot of water and could surely stretch this a bit more.
- The water line that goes to the top is a 6×1.5mm tube.
- For the pulser pump, I bought the following: Tubing: 12x2mm, 10x2mm, 8×1.5mm and a Tetratec check valve. I spared the hose clamps and balloon stuff, it’s water- and airtight without as I found. I fixed it to an aluminum tube and sink it vertically in my reservoir. It sits about 3 cm above the ground.
- I bought fertiliser online, it’s organic and my plants seem to love it. I use GHE BioSevia and GHE BioMagix against fungi. Their website is http://eurohydro.com
Cool looking farm.
Little hesitant about using LEDs because not a lot of manufacturers are making them, and those that do, make them really cheap (and then discontinue the product or go out of business).
My hydroponic supplier believes they are about 5 years off yet from being a real viable option, but he’s done some independent testing and they work great.
Where did you find the GHE Bio Magix?
Cant find this one.
How did you do the white? it doesn’t look like it’s paint.
Hey Cleo
It is paint actually. I used a spray paint intended for small repairs on car’s plastic parts.
I will be very interested to find out how your solar kit works. I also want to use renewable, though I think I will start with a bicycle pump first while I perfect everything else first.