My driver has found a good source of used PET Aqua bottles. They can be bought from the local Tukang Pemulung or recycling folk. These people make a life of recycling Jakarta’s trash and reselling it. They have a lot of bottles but often they are slightly squashed from being in a big sack. I think they will have the Sport tops as well. The driver Mr. Ulung bought the rest of the bottles for ~ $0.10 each. He also bought a water based Pilox white paint which actually dries fast. I have all my bottles now. Thanks a lot Ulung!!!

Greetings from Denmark

I am going to make a window farm soon (as soon as my budget and time allows for it) but I just have a few questons

I don’t really have a lot of space, but I can’t make holes in my walls so I will have to make do with a floor standing model…

My idea is something like this:

The pot will be standing on the floor and I will then place to sticks to hold the  bottles… The top bottle will then be used to add water (I can’t afford a pump at the moment) and there will be a plant in the pot (possibly strawberries or flowers).

My big question is then: will the plant in the pot benefit or will it hurt it if I let the water and nutrient drip into the soil? Or should I put something else in the pot instead of soil?

I was thinking of having loofah as the growing medium in the bottles, as I have seen someone (D’artanan perhaps?) here having, as that seems to be something I rather easily can get a hold of but do someone have a better idea?

And the plan for plants in the bottles? I think strawberries, tomatoes, basil, peppers or the like…

So does anyone have any tips for me? Or an idea of a great plant to put in the pot?

I’m sorry if my english is bad, but it’s just not my first language…

crafting today a new windowfarm piece in Vienna with transparent mineral water bottles. Here is a short video to the whole windowfarm at the beginning of the podcast video and at the end the new ones. Klick left to have a look.

i know you guys probably don’t have probs following the bottle template instructions.
My experience here in Taiwan, I decided to change from the 2L bottles to the bigger water 6L bottles.
They’re roughly the same height but fatter, so having read some peoples questions regarding changing to bigger pots as plants grow, I decided to bite the bullet and go big immediately.

I used the WELLCOME 6L Mineral water bottles.  Reason:  I went round feeling the thickness of the plastic, YEP, The Taiwanese locals watched a strange guy feeling all the different bottles at the supermarket…

Eventually I decided on these.  Taped them up, Tried to use a stanley knife to cut the holes in the top (forget it!), So i purchased a drill and cutout tool (B&Q – Drill NTD$3000 - Cutout Set NTD$250)

Also the pots, I have visited all the flower markets to find net pots with no joy, so i purchased the black ones shown and when you cut off the rim, it fits into the bottle perfectly and the rim fits round the edge of the bottle (on the outside), which looks cool and also gives it an excellent support when your hanging…  See images!  You then have to ensure you drill enough small holes all over the pot to make a net pot yourself…  TIME CONSUMING, but worth it.  (pots used in wellcome 6L are 6″ pots with rim cut off carefully – Stanley knife = lots of cuts on your hands by time complete!)

I also painted them black first, then when dry, painted white, so its really light proof…
I found I need three coats of white to block most light, if i painted black then white, only two coats completely blocked the light.

Also, On the left column (only) I filled full of water, froze it to make it solid whilst i drilled.  Then used the cutout tool to make lots of vent holes found the sides.  I didn’t do that on the other two columns as I found the bottles lost alot of their  rigidity.  I wouldn’t recommeded it, An idea that sounded good at the time.
(I only froze for using cutout tool on sides, drilling the bottom is OK without freezing full of water)

Anyhow, hope this helps…

Brian, Taipei

 Windowfarm in Action Video : -

WF-Taipei

Hello folks,

I stumbled upon the WindowFarm project about 4 weeks ago and have been excited about it ever since.
The past 3 weeks I’ve been sourcing materials, building bits and bobs and tweaking, tweaking, tweaking to get our own WindowFarm to work properly.

Now after 3 weeks, I’m more or less done.
I haven’t posted yet, but this forum has been a very valuable source of knowledge and motivation. I would especially like to thank @Jesse Liberty for the T-Lift intro, Airlift Jedi Master @Brian White for sharing his immense knowhow, @Mikko Mattila for the “Pretty Design” idea and of course the founders of this entire project.

HANG IN THERE!
It’s been a testing but fun challenge to build our 4 column version from scratch. I’m completely new to the ‘airpump, aquarium scene’ and found creating the airlift by far the most challenging element. I’ve tried the inflation needle style, then the inflation needle puncturing airlift, then T-valve…. submersion etc. etc. It’s nice to have 4 column because this way I can quickly ‘side-by-side’ 4 design ideas. A nice little bonus is that I’ve be-friended a 70 year old lady who runs an aquarium shop in Amsterdam )) She thinks it’s all peculiar and interesting.
Now the Windowfarm is quietly dripping in the background and first signs of green are sprouting up. My advice to anyone: HANG IN THERE! It is very rewarding.

Hi

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

I am a current volunteer at an orphanage in India. It is an amazing organization called LoveDale. www.lovedalefoundation.org

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

I came here just in the right time to see cool mods like the t-valve technique (thanks @gaiatechnician), and the way of splitting airlift (credits goes to @kenokazaki) allowing two columns to be watered using only one reservoir and airlift. Read the rest of this entry →

After 6 month of testing different models I just finished my third custom style windowfarm.   In my opinion their was not

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.

Hello there,

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.