After reading a danish article about your ideas about homegrown veges in the big city, I’ve decided to try it out at my dorm here in north of Copenhagen, Denmark.

I was wondering if there is any other Danish people in this forum, perhaps we can exchange ideas, find some cheap materials in the danish market.

- Rune, the danish guy

They make aound 150 meals everyday and buy most of their vegetables 4 miles away and have to make this trip, by foot, approximately every 2 days. As LoveDale is a not-for-profit organisation, this incurs costs that could be better spent elsewhere.

Our intention is to create a vegetable garden, providing foods such as tomatoes, onions, garlic and chillies, among others, that are the staple ingredients in the meals prepared here. The vegetable plot is a narrow strip, approx. 24 inches in depth but approx. 100 feet long (roughly 30 metres). We feel that this is adequate room to, if not feed the school for a year, to grow enough food to significantly reduce the costs incurred in purchasing and time undertaken to do this.

Having decided to undertake this project, we have come across one main issue and it’s a pretty significant one: we have a serious lack of water. Plenty of sun, plenty of space, not plenty of water. But having watched your TED talk on window farms in New York, we have been inspired to make this project work. We KNOW it can work.

So, why am I emailing you? Well, although inspired, we are not blessed with a huge amount of knowledge on this issue and also a huge amount of resources in terms of time to make sure it runs efficiently on a regular basis, i am asking for some advice on how to implement a watering system where water is a limited resource.

If you have a few moments, maybe you could offer some advice or even point us in the direction of people, websites or organisations that could help us.

Your time and efforts would be EXTREMELY welcome

Thank you for your time

Sincerely

Manuel Centeno

First column made from .5L bottles

My window is not tall. I barely have 90cm (roughly 3′). If you already tried to lay out a windowfarm, you already know 30-35cm (1′) is needed per level. On the other hand, choosing small bottles (.5L San Benedetto in my case) allows placing a level in every 19cm (7 1/2″). I have to choose smaller plants, though.

I haven’t wanted to invest a lot, and my first model barely reached $50 mark (10 000 HUF, in the local monopoly game). I bought all plumbing mats from the local aquarium shop, but a day later I decided 4mm ID tubing is not enough: I replaced airlift first, and then all water tubing with 6mm ID. This thicker tubing allows shorter loop (45cm – 1 1/2″), better drip flow, and top airlift splitting works evenly.

Top of my first column

I used chains to hang the system, which allows easily place bottles with some string and hand made hooks.

Using small bottles also means you might not want to put net pots into them (however we found small, 55mm – 2 3/16″ diameter ones, they fit nicely), but cutting holes  into their bottoms is much easier.

Besides, I’m not a big fan of cutting/drilling big holes into the bottom of bottles. An average DIY person drills three 6mm holes anywhere instead of cutting a single 1″ one to the thickest part of the bottle. My recommendation is this: don’t daisy chain bottles, but let the water flow through an airline pipe. Drill 6mm holes into every bottle bottoms, and drill 5mm holes to each bottle cap. Then, glue 4mm airline tubes into plant bottles’ caps, and a 4mm airline extension connector to the reservoir bottle’s cap. I tried silicone glue too, but I recommend using a glue gun instead.

Airlift tube shows how much water my reservoir has

I started off with spearmint, which filled two bottles. Then I germinated chives seeds in kitchen towel, which now happily sits on top.

Later on I decided to extend my original, more-or-less proof of concept column. However, I ran out of space (putting water next to the radiator is not fun). Fortunately Ken came up with the idea of splitting airlift tube to water two columns at once.

I wanted to try 1.5L bottles too, but keeping the same layout. I ended up cutting bottles in half after painting. Fortunately Jana bottle has a small waist where I can fasten the lace. While I still haven’t wanted to use net pots (for some reason I couldn’t even buy one which fits inside a 1.5L bottle), but I could repurpose some remnants of mosquito net to keep clay pebbles inside.

Small tomatoes, and coriander are placed there already, but strawberries are still too small, I planted germinated seeds to growing pots into coco choir. The lucky ones are expected to be removed to the top of my new column in a week or two.

I also made a video showing how it works.

enough emphasis on the design of the windowfarm in the community so far.

In my opinion a windowfarm only looks good in your window when it covers the whole window so it looks like a curtain. Have you ever seen a cuarter curtain or a half curtain?

In my case I had to cover a window of 1,90 m x 1,20 m ( 74 inches x 47 inches) as I am living in a pretty old house build in 1882. As I wanted to cover the whole window I needed 4 rows with 6 Bottles.

I first build a 2×5 Windowfarm inspired by the design Ramas post  but I was not happy with the rod sticking out of the middle. So I used metal cabels and ziptied also the tubing to these cables. This also gives me and the possibility to apply my lights next to the bottles. In the end my farm delivers the water up to 2,30 m. Impressive right?

I have not filled up all the bottels with plants as I am traveling to Mexico this        February to bring some more special mexican vegetables seeds with me.  My goals is   to grow all typical mexican vegetables like koriander and different chilies in my farm.

I really liked the experience of buidling this farm and would like to share my experiences with like minded people. If there is somebody here from and around Munich. Please give me a shout I would like to organize a little farmer meet-up.

Anybody here that has experiences growing chillies or year long?

Here I have opened up a German Windowfarm Group on Facebook. Friend me on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/andreaskopp and  I invite you in.

today was a productive day in our window farm project, we got the planters all set up in the wall…

We are having some difficulties finding rockwool grow cubes and hydroton in Canada at a reasonable price. We can’t find it in major retail stores and on ebay the shipping is really expensive, any ideas where we could buy it?!

We appreciate any help,

Carolina & Ricardo.

We wanted to create an unique window farm that fit our needs, we live in the first floor and we have a big balcony window – so we wanted to do something that could look nice and also work properly.

We thought the ‘pretty’ window farm from @mixu  (Mikko Mattila) was really well done and we were inspired by the work. So we created our own window farm plan see below:

We already found  the planters we will be using at the dollar store and already started getting them ready.

We are excited to continue the challenge tomorrow, we will be posting our progress as we go.

Well, wish us luck and feel free to give us any feedback and ideas you have!

Thanks,

Ricardo & Carolina.

Barely three weeks ago we saw Britta’s presentation on TED.com and we were immediately intrigued. We started thinking about a design that would fit our house, which is a little different than most windowfarms we’ve seen so far. The back of our house (orientated towards the south) is made of glass, like a greenery and thus should be used like that!

The highest point (ceiling) will be at 3.10 meters (10 ft), too high for us to reach, so we thought of a pulley system (Katrol in dutch) we can lift it and drag it down.

We are building it right now, looks like everything will work out! We’ll post some new pictures soon!

See you soon!

It was at first difficult to find the net pots and compatible bottles to use. I ordered a crate of bottled water online, which was probably a bad idea. I also had to order the net pots online.

Below is my first prototype. I had trouble getting the airlift to work, probably because I stubbornly refused to buy the rigid clear pipe that was on the manual, and instead opted for a much cheaper clear tubing method.

After much trial and error I created this simple solution which so far as been completely reliable and my one air pump can probably power eight airlifts like this, since I have to turn the power way down to slow down the water going up.

(when I made this, I didn’t read the other entries which described this very method. Would have saved me a heap of trouble if I had just looked here.)

A few friends who saw this for the first time became very interested and want to build their own now.

After success with my first model, I decided (at my wife’s request) that I wanted to make a new one that was more pleasing to the eye, (this is in my living room) and so I want to Daiso, which is Japan’s equivalent to a dollar store, and bought some plastic buckets and hooks and came up with this new design, which my wife likes much better.

It’s all based on the same concept and inside of each bucket is actually the upside-down top of a bottle screwed to the bottom.

The cone-shaped things hanging down were bought at Daiso and are actually made to screw on to bottles and stick into soil to nourish plants, so it worked out quite nicely.

There are two airlifts which both feed out of the same reservoir at the bottom, and both end up draining back into it.

A few practical advantages to this system:

• Because the pots are just hanging on hooks, you can very easily move the pots around for cleaning, light placement etc., without having to reconnect chains or other type of hanging systems.
• Two systems hanging on one column saves space.
• The staggered arrangement of the pots allow multiple columns to be placed close to each other.
• An open top may help the plants to not become too lopsided. (I’ve seen videos of this problem sometimes happening with previous models.) You can just flip the thing around to get it to grow the other way.

I would love to get feedback from other members and especially anybody in Japan who is also interested in windowfarming.

I will post more photos as I make more models and improvements to my systems.

So here are some pictures and some of  my concerns. I don’t even have specific questions, just this basic plea for help: HELP!! (-:

- First pic: These are Chives that weren’t doing terrible (just bad ;->) in a big plastic box with soil. I left it outside on the balcony in the summer, kind of gave up on it and then came across windowyfarming. I transplanted a piece that looked good with as much roots as i could into the windowfarm. The’ve been there for about a week now. I’m not sure they’re growing on reserves or windowfarm nutrients.

- The parsley i transplanted from the same box as the chives doesn’t look to good either. Yellowy leaves, but they could still be recovering from the transplantation. They have quite a big root, and i have no idea if they’re surviving on reserves or actually adapting.

- I’ve got some small seedlings of turnip tops and i think they stopped growing when i put them in the windowfarm (2nd picture left has one, it’s knocked over by a nearby drop of water) . Am i using the right nutrients at all? How can i check? The bottle of the nutrients says “NPK 5-5-6″  (among stuff that looks less important to me – the rest is in Dutch). I don’t really trust the hydroponic judgement of the guy who sold it to me, but he told me to use about 1/10th the dosage on the bottle.

- The pH of our drinking water is almost 8. I use natural white vinegar to get it down to around 6, but every few hours when i check, it’s going back up. It takes about two to three shotglasses of vinegar per day. Not only does this require a lot of attention, it also gives me the unconvenient feeling something’s not right here.

- There’s bubbles in the top net cup from where the water sprouts out of the dripping tube. The dripping rate is pretty high. It’s a fast drip, maybe even two drips per second per side (i can check this if it’s of any importance).

-After a week i changed the water for the first time. There was some white stuff floating on top (bacteria? fungi?). I rinsed the system very thouroughly but the new water started look like this in a day.

More pictures are here.