Oh I am SO excited to have this plan in place, and it’s far more affordable than I thought it would be!!!  I built a raise bed garden outside a few years ago and really caught the bug!  Together with my Parents (we rent out their upper, I have a medically complex kiddo- had to sell my condo ) we thought about putting in an aquaponics farm, but our city stonewalled that one   So, I came across this and was so excited to get it going as we have SO MANY windows!!!  The plan is to put 4 columns in each room listed- my room, Parker’s room, Kitchen (but this is going to be a 6 column possibly in the picture window!), and great room.  That hits all angles, north, south, east, and west.  Yes, there will be supplemental lighting where applicable.  We do live in Wisconsin, so the concern is if we need a heating element in the winter time.   I just need to find the darn bottles!!  Has anyone had success contacting like a recycling center?  Has anyone used 2L bottles like for soda I hate soda, but I’d buy it for the bottles!  And then what size netpots do you use?  My grow cubes should be here today!  I’m getting seeds and such going this afternoon.  I want the whole thing built and up atleast in the kitchen by two weeks from now.  Our growing season in WI is alittle more than half over, but if we can have fresh veggies and herbs year round, it will be incredible!!!  I’ve had quite a bit of success in my outside garden, though, this year is a hard one.  I’m used to hand pollenating everything, because we have no bees.  (We are actually considering keeping bees!) So, any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

Oh, and Will Allen and Growing Power is about 15 minutes from my house   Check out his website because I’m going to reach out to him and Sweet Water Organics for any help they can give or good nutrient mixes!!

I went to and called several grocery stores and could not find this size of bottle. I also tried searching in google, amazon, and walmart online, with no success. Has anyone else run into this problem? Please help! Thanks, Christine

Hello every one I am new to this site and I like to sahre give a nic

Share information:

Solar air pump works with bateries to!

I cant wait to start my own windor farm!

God bless and have fun

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZeVb7DzUOE

Any idea : )
?
thanks in advance !

The weak point of my low water level pulser design has always been the single part that actually made it work so well: the check valve. If you don’t know what this low water level pulser thing is, you can visit the post/blog on windowfarms which I try to keep up to date right here: http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/01/26/low-water-level-pulser-pump/ This post is mainly about the check valve that finally made the system work consistenlty.

The type of check valve I use now, has also been the biggest “invisible” change to my windowfarm as of yet. I can not stress enough the importance of check valves that WANT to let through water and air with little to no effort. After DIY’ing a couple, testing some others and a lot of frustration, I finally found one on ebay that works! Just look for “Plastic check valve” on ebay and look for the ones in the pictures below (the full name of the ones I bought was “plastic check valve water air gas unilateral model new”.

The cool thing about these is that you can screw them apart and actually make the opening in the rubber thing bigger so that it lets through the amount you need. FINALLY check valves that keep on working.

It took me quite some effort but I’m happy with how it’s working now. And of course the fact that it’s working continuously. The pump is on its lowest setting. And the system actually started dripping on it’s own within 1 minute. Never had that with the other check valves. Anyway, we’re also getting really good at getting the little pulsers out of the tube and in again, hope we don’t have to do it again any-time soon though.

First post for myself as I just recently discovered the wonder of window farms.

 Coming from a technical background I was interested in the idea of the air lift system for the water feed and was thinking of the limitations and the sizing of the pumps for the task.

 So thrown some numbers about that hopefully are useful (and also correct).

 What is the pump pressure required to lift a column of water to a required height?

 Main factor is the tubing size.

 Minimum Required Pressure (psi) = (imperial tubing constant) x (height in Feet) x (number of tubes)

 ¼” tubing constant =0.02

3/8” tubing constant =0.05

½” tubing constant =0.08

¾” tubing constant =0.19

1” tubing constant =0.34

 Height is measured from the point the air hose enters to the highest point on the tube.

 Example

 Therefore for 1 feed tube at 3/4” diameter with 6ft of travel. =0.19x6x1= 1.14 psi

So as long as the pump pressure is greater than the min pressure required it will push the water up the tube.

 I haven’t had the chance to double check my figure but as a rough guide to estimate if a pump is good enough for the task then I think I’m on the right track. Also haven’t done metric yet but will do in the future

Not sure if this has been discussed… It is my understanding that the reason Nestle’s brands of water bottles are used is because they accommodate the netcups. If it helps any, you can use a heat gun (or blow dryer) to slightly melt a water bottle to give it shape. This could increase the amount of bottle you can find and recycle. Takes about 15 seconds per bottle. I had a hard time finding 1.5 liter Nestle’s brands of water  bottles. I did however find quite a few evian water bottles of the size volume, which did not have the center indent. Heat gun worked great. Hope this helps.

-Dom

We’ve just finished all the bottles to our giant windowfarm that’s going to be hanging at Kulturhuset during June.

The rawmaterial to the windowfarm. 150 soda bottles.

We drilled holes in the bottom with a sawdrill. This gave us really nice equally round holes to fit the bottles in. We also cut out two holes for the plants since we’re going to plant double in some bottles and we want the plants to be visible from both sides. Instead of cutting the holes with a knife we used a soldering iron and melted the plastic into shape we wanted. This gave a really nice edge to the holes that’s a lot softer, rounder and kinder to the plants. I can really recommend it. We also made two small holes in the sides where the crossbars that are going to hold the bottles attached to the bars will go.

Hanging out the laundry.

We’re using two different types of bottles: 1,5 liter soda-bottles from Coca-cola that will hold the netcups and the plants and 0,5 liter Plantbottles, a new type of recyclable PET bottles that are partly made of organic materials which reduce the carbon footprint. The smaller bottles will not have plants in them but will be inserted in the columns so that the people looking at the windowfarm cen see the water dripping through the system.

After this we cleaned all the bottles, hung them out to dry and started painting. We dipped the bottles in paint to get a even coat and minimum hassle with spill on to the parts of the bottles that shouldn’t be painted. We chose a nice gray colour that will make the green from the plants stand out! After that all we had to do was watch the paint dry…

Check out the video of the painting process.

The finished result.

/Daniel & Kristoffer

http://KONSTruktioner.info

Foreward, I hope this isn’t too long winded, being able to grow my own plants, outside of the shared garden, on more than my window sill and radiator cover beneath it is very exciting for me. I’m also a broke university student so the more I can collect (gathering or dumpster dive for, I found a tiny water pump for a decorative fountain a week ago) and/or process without paying, the better.

I’m new here and I’m finding this site a bit hard to navigate, it’s more akin to a network of blogs than any forum I’ve seen.

I’ve been able to find construction guides for doing it myself no problem, but there seems to either be a lack of recipes,  or they’re in no way easy to find. The nutrients and nutrition archives are mostly questions or have multiple tags diluting what I’m trying to find.

***Disclaimer, the rest is full describing what I have at my disposal and seeking feedback on ideas***

So far I’ve only found the post about worm castings and to me it only appears to be about getting the nutrients into a liquid form. Very little about what types of worms, no common name, no genus, family or phylym (I’m a biology major, excuse my geekiness, only finishing my first semester though..). If I had to make a guess it would be family Lumbricidae, then either Lumbricus terrestris (common earthworm/nightcrawler/dew worm), Lumbricus Rubellus (red earthworm, often confused with red wiggler) or Eisenia fetida (red wiggler, stinks if feels threatened).

So I have a few ideas and questions.

Has anyone thought of doing something similar but replacing worm castings with well decomposed compost?

My city isn’t a densely populated concrete jungle, there are parks both forested and grassy and a river runs through the city. I’m currently renting a house on the corner of the block with lots of flora, front yard is bordered by a hedge and our vegetable garden is there, the highly shaded portion between the side of the house and the fence is being taken over by a pair of strawberry plants I planted last year, tall lilac plants along the fence farther back, flower beds, raspberry bushes and some icky onions that are everywhere. Whenever we weed or trim the hedge it gets usually composted (except the first weeding this year since the compost bin has NO room from it being filled and frozen solid), same with food scraps, and we end up with MUCH more compost than we use.

So I would like to know if I could somehow extract the nutrients from the compost into a liquid form? Google was completely unhelpful in that, only thing I found was someone who clearly hasn’t heard of pasteurizing or even sterilizing saying how bad it is because there could be dangerous pathogens and harmful bacteria along with the beneficial types. Pasteurizing usually kills the bad stuff, leaving the good behind, and heat pressure sterilizing will make sure nothing’s left alive as long as it hasn’t been dry enough for heat-pressure resistant dormant micro-organisms to be present (I also cultivate mushrooms so I know a bit about that over top of what I learned in school).

Would I find the right kinds of worms in there to make myself a worm farm? What about the worms that come up after decent rainfaill or perhaps in wetter areas near the river?

Would grass/leaves/clippings from my plants be better to compost than the mixture of that plus food scraps in our bin?

Could the river water be a form of nutrients after it has mercury filtered out by an ion-based water filter [like in brita filter-pitchers]? I’ve read that banana peel help with filtering out metals but I think mercury’s the worst thing in the river, which all the life in it and around has seem to be adapted to, and I couldn’t find info if it helped with that.