our.windowfarms.org

Check out this little video of the latest windowfarm design on our Youtube channel.

Kits will be a lot like this.

Please check out the excellent work of the Finnish Windowfarms team. This shot is a sneak preview of them installing the first few LED lights on the windowfarm they made out of Finnish recyclables in the window of the Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum in Helsinki.

Their work on adapting the Windowfarms Project for Finland is part of a larger program called Herbologies/Foraging Networks at the Pixelache festival happening this month in Helsinki.

Niko Punin was responsible for development of the grow spectrum LEDs and has some very interesting ideas that we will be watching closely in the future!

More pictures here:

Windowfarms Finland on Facebook

I send here a picture of the windowfarm which I assembled 5 weeks ago.

I hope I am the first in Israel to do it ,and  would be very glad.

Due to the fact that winter here is not so cold I put the whole set outside

in the garden, and it grows very nice.

Last Friday all the children of my daughter’s kindergarten and the staff came

to our house, and I showed and explained about this technique.

The neighbors who are coming to our house  (there are many) are looking and

like it and want me to build for them or at least to instruct them how to do it

What you see in the image is just a probe and I have already developed new

way how to do it with all the vertical elements made from pet used bottles.

This is my “work” farm.  I started it last week and already have two sprouts in it — rosemary and violas.  There is a desk lamp shining a CFL on it (on a 12 hour timer).

We have a second one (which was the first) here at home but I can’t find the photos of it right now (and am a bit too lazy to take a new one.

I saw a post about the window farms on Gothamist and just HAD to try it.  Got to say, it’s fun!  Folks walk into my office and are incredibly curious about what this curious structure is.

My husband and I are designing a larger farm for our living room window and will probably build it over the winter break (we are teachers).  Our major problem is getting the soda bottles since we use the SodaStream carbonator fr our soda needs and don’t drink bottled water.

I started my WindowFarm about a month ago, working on it in my spare time. I wanted to interface it with a microcontroller for automation and used the ATMega168 (same as on the Arduino) to control a windshield wiper pump to move water through the system for 4 seconds every 10 minutes.

The construction of the actual WindowFarm setup is IMO pretty terrible-looking and very sloppy. I just wanted to get something working though, and the plants don’t seem to mind.

Here is a picture of the circuit:

And here is a picture of the complete WindowFarm:

I wrote a little bit of code for a Fonera Fon2100 router I had lying around, making the modifications to the OpenWRT firmware (version 8.09.1) running on there. It gives its web-interface a ‘Sensors’ link that AJAX-updates the analog pin values from the Arduino. Right now on my setup it is all just noise except pin 0 which has a photosensor on it that gives light readings near the window. It is the plan to turn on the lights in an 18-hour window if the light value falls below some threshold.

Here is a screenshot of OpenWRT’s modified web-interface:

I have the code for the Arduino sketch as well as the OpenWRT changes here: http://github.com/nemik/arduinoponics and more photos of the setup on my Flickr set here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nemik/sets/72157622608195083/

I’m going to try to automate this more and more, hopefully also fix the construction.

Open to any suggestions or criticisms!

We just got word from Alvis from Videotage in Hong Kong that they have built a reservoir system!!

They will show it at an upcoming festival called Microwave (http://www.microwavefest.net/festival2009/) by starting the pump in the officiating ceremony. The theme of this year’s festival is Nature Transformer.

They are also translating the how-to’s into Chinese!

Their team will soon make a post with pictures and talk about their process.

On October 2nd, we installed this windowfarm at the Whitney.

The next day, we hosted the Whitney’s Family Day for several hundred New York families.

We tried out some of the latest innovations, including:
- suction cups for suspension!
- new way of attaching airpump needles for increased height!
- new airpumps
- regular bottle used as the bottom reservoir
- new dried powder nutrients

My cat Lizzie (not pictured) has pretty much killed one of my Amish Snap Pea plants. Here is my simple yet effective cat defense system: cover windowsill with many house plants, in this case orchids and 1 cactus.

I had my first harvest last night. Friends came over for homemade pizza which I topped with pesto I made from sweet basil and silver thyme–both of which I grew in my Window Farm. The other ingredients were mostly local. I made the dough, grew some of the tomatoes we used on my fire escape; the smoked mozzarella came from a great store in Little Italy (NYC) and the cured ham–which everyone ate but me since I’m a vegetarian–came from a Spanish shop around the corner. It was super, super yummy. Here’s a picture which isn’t the greatest but at least you can see the results.

After a tiny pump problem and loss of several plants, my window farm is fi=ull (except for one spot which I’m saving for a broccoli plant I’ll get next week). Here’s what I have:

2 Amish Snap Pea plants

1 Red Basil

2 Sweet Basil

2 nasturtiums

1 DeMeaux Endive

1 Maruba Santoh

Most of my plants came from Silver Heights organic farm @ the Union Sq farmers market.