our.windowfarms.org

Big changes this week in Brooklyn and the windowfarm is beginning to feel like a stable viable thing in my home. Plants have grown a couple inches, timer, pump and valves working steady.

Recently I added liquid organic fish fertilizer (Neptune’s Harvest 2-4-1) – about 1 Tbs diluted in 1 gallon water added to resevoir that already had a gallon or two in it. There’s definitely a bit of a smell. I think I’ll probably drain the resevoir and try a different fertilizer at some point for a comparison. I really need the windowfarm to be as smell-free as possible as the guestroom of our apt will soon be occupied and so I need to tone down the workshop/mad scientist aspects of the project.

After reading Britta’s post about lights yesterday I suspect that my baby mint and thyme plants are looking leggy so I’ve added linear flourescent shop lights balanced vertically in the corners of the windowframe. I put these on the same 14 hour on timer that I’m using with my seed germination light. Since I’m not trying to induce flowering (I’m growing leafy kitchen herbs.) does anyone know if I should be using a dawn to dusk light cycle instead with the lights?

Hopefully by next week plants will be big enough to show up in a photo. I swear they are there.

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’ve taken the plunge, set up a timer, got the water flowing, and have planted out my tiny tiny seedlings. Sorry plants are such babies that they’re barely visible in this photo but it’s mostly spearmint and thyme. As other things germinate I’ll plant out different herbs, hope to have oregano, spicy globe basil, marjoram, dill, and nasturtiums.  The first generation of plants have been in the windowfarm for a couple days now and they seem to be happy.

Had some minor issues when I started the system pumping on a regular basis where one column was dripping beautifully and the other dripped in fits and starts. Turned out the top reservoir was not level. Now I have about three gallons of water in the system, timer set to run the pump for three minutes every two hours, and water flow seems constant.

Next big step is adding nutrients to the water in the system. I’m worried about the smell of the organic fertilizer I’ve used in my regular garden in the past. I’ve spilled so much water on the floor during setup that I’m worried the room will soon reek of fish fertilizer. But I’m going to start with a small amount and hope that the smell won’t be too strong.

Once things are growing well I’m hoping to upgrade the system to using an electronic float switch and relay to power the pump when the bottom reservoir reaches a certain level. I’m really eager to get an Arduino attached to my system in hopes of learning to monitor environmental data. I want to use the windowfarm as a testbed for a data gathering and  control system that I can eventually use with my rooftop chile garden for remote monitoring and hopefully remote control of watering and fertilization.

Has anyone experimented with a float switch as a way or triggering a pump instead of using a timer? A friend suggested this to me and it looks like the switches are really cheap compared to timers. The idea is like the float in a toilet tank, but instead of turning off the water when the resevoir reaches a certain level, a circuit closes inside the switch when water reaches a level and turns power to pump on or off. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

http://www.aquahub.com/store/ifloatfloatswitch.html

You can grow edible plants with 100 or 150 watt CFL bulbs. Even fruiting plants. I have done it successfully in several windowfarm systems. You must use CFLs with the proper color spectrum. The “daylight” bulbs you get at Home Depot in the blue package work. Arrange your plants so they are no more than a few inches from the light. You will need to move them frequently or they will grow into the light and singe themselves. I highly recommend putting them in a window so they are also getting at least some indirect natural light because I highly doubt that these CFLs really provide the complete spectrum of light that plants need. You can put them on a timer so that they are only on a few hours during the day to supplement natural light. This keeps them from blinding you at night.

Until plants reach the adult phase, they require more light. I generally supplemented seedlings light for 18 hours per day. Then, once they reached maturity, I decreased to 12 hours.

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!