Here’s a link to the first post, and how this all got started: Worm Farm

Last post I had 2 frames completed, and here’s what’s happened since:

First of all I was tired of using a chairs as sawhorses, so I got a 2×8 and made my own. Took maybe half an hour. They’re simple, they work, and they’re much easier on my back and legs since they’re lower to the ground.

Got those 2 frames nailed up and put a couple layers of netting on.

I’m sure there’s a better way to do this, but I thought about it for quite a while and this is the best I could come up with. I wanted to use plastic because I was afraid metal screen would rust or somehow get into the dirt and mess with the worms. I was also worried about sharp edges, and in general plastic seemed like the way to go. I stretched 2 layers of netting at different angles and tightened them each like a drum head over the frames. They hold moist dirt pretty well, and I like how I can take them off and replace them if the need arises. This begs the question though as to why I used dovetails for the frames if I was just going to use nails for the netting…maybe I just like dovetails, ok? =P

Be warned, dry peat falls right through this stuff. Line it with paper before adding, or make sure your peat is moist enough to clump up. You don’t want soggy peat though either, it’ll suffocate the worms: find your balance.

Anyhoo, with the frames done and netted it was time for a lid to keep out the light and a tray to catch drips and whatnot underneath. Simple plastic lid for the tray, scrap wood from making the sawhorses to hold the frames off of it, and more nails on the lid since I didn’t feel like chopping mortises. In general if I tried the whole peg and wedge thing I’m pretty sure I would have split the boards and blah blah blah, excuses.

So here we have it: a completed home for my new redworms! =)

They showed up in the mail today, and I was too worried about making sure they were safe to take pictures. I’m a little worried the peat is too dry, but they seem happy. I had set aside a couple buckets for pre-composting their food, and I used that on top of a layer of paper towels as bedding.

Food for worms is basically vegan with no acids (no onions, garlic, or citrus), and in general you want to stay away from fats and oils (they make things smell). Anything paper is good for a neutralizer as well. Worms apparently have gizzards, which means they need grit to digest stuff, and in general paper and peat are great for that and keep it smelling just like dirt. It’s kinda cool that they eat the same things I do. ^_^ …well, except the paper and dirt part

My first piece of compost was a tortilla I left out too long and it dried up. =( And then the inside of the farm.

Left the top two layers empty. Redworms live in the surface of the pile, so I was thinking if I filled it all the way initially, the bottom stuff would just rot and smell the place up while the worms went to the top. I’ll fill it as stuff gets broken down.

So there’s my final setup. Compost in the buckets, rainwater in the sprayer, paper scraps in the bag. And then there’s a little guy/girl (they’re hermaphrodites) checking out the outside world. =)

We’ll see how it works out. As stuff get’s broken up I’ll cycle the layers so the worms will always be moving up into new compost. The bottom layers are then the leftovers from the worms, which I’ll use to make worm tea for my windowfarm. I’ve also got a couple pots out on the porch I’ll put the leftover dry material in after the tea is done.

If you want to know about compost tea and nutrients, I’ve collected a few youtube videos in a playlist that’ll hopefully help. Check it out: Nutrients Playlist

It’s been a couple of weeks since I built my first double-column hanging windowfarm design, and so far it’s been very solid. Good water flow and stable system. My plants are doing great! (except for my strawberry plant. Any advice on that?)

I wanted to improve on my original design, as having things look good as well as function really well is important to me, so here’s my newer and improved design. (the one on the left is the new one, no holes cut in the buckets yet.)

The fifth blue bucket on the right side column is now the water reservoir, which I think looks better than a bottle at the bottom.

It looks very similar to my v.1 model, but the functions are quite different, although it still uses the basic airlift system. I ended up replacing the clear tubing with acrylic clear pipe, as it just looks much better and is easier to clean.

In the above picture of the old/new designs, you can see that there is a T at the top of the tube. This is because I reduced it down to one airlift which splits at the top.

Turns out that the distribution of left and right for the water coming up is directly proportionate to the amount of tubing there is left after the T, so cutting them to the same length gives an even flow between the two sides.

You can also see that there is much less tubing hanging below the water reservoir, which looks less cluttered.

Here are the improvements that v.2 has over v.1

• Looks better (IMHO)
• Reduced the piping/tubing needed by 50%.
• Still get the same amount of water flow to the plants.
• Cleaning the tubes just got twice as easy!

 

Skylight Windowfarm

Just getting Started with my loft windowfarms.
The Jana water bottles seem to be perfect, it is a Croatian brand of spring water.

Suspended with a hook and shoestrings.
Airline tubing is 10cents a foot.
Tvalves are a few cents each.
the pump was pretty darn cheap, repurposed from fish tank.
3″ net pots were 50cents each
I had some paint, was cracky, gonna start doing acrylic painted/modgepodged bottles for fun flair.

Seeds I’ve Started:

Oregon Sugar Pod Peas – Pisum sativum
Green Onions

PEPPERS – Capsicum
Habanero – Capsicum chinense
Jalapeno – Capsicum annuum
Bhut Jolokia – interspecific hybrid (mostly C. chinense with some C. frutescens genes)

TOMATOES – Solanum lycopersicum
Roma
Brandywine
Yellow Pears

GREENS
Rouge d’Hiver Lettuce –
Arugula –
Dwarf Blue Curled Kale – Brassica oleracea

HERBS
Purple Basil – Ocimum basilicum
Cilantro – Coriandrum sativum
Sage – Salvia officinalis
Oregano – Origanum vulgare
Thyme – Thymus vulgaris
Chamomile -Matricaria recutita

More to come!

Going to have four layers once it’s said and done. Yes, I know my dovetails suck, I’m doing everything freehand and I’m a bit rusty. I’m also using a chair sitting at an angle as a sawhorse for now =| Have a 6ft Live Oak log I’m going to turn into a sturdy one once it dries out. (Maybe a week left now)

Need to get some more wood for a lid, and something for collecting excess water from the bottom. A watertight container with a spigot the layers can sit on should do, maybe a filter to prevent clogs. I’m going to probably just end up making those from wood too and seal the gaps with wax to waterproof it.

Going to tack nails along the bottom edge of the frames to support 2 crisscrossed layers of 1/2in screen. Bought at local hardware store, kind you use to keep birds out of your tomatoes. When it’s double layered it should hold back the dirt but have holes large enough for the worms to crawl through.

More pics to come =)

Here’s the rest of the process: Completed Worm Farm

I am a newbie to windowfarming, having recently bought a Classic kit via the Kickstarter site. I’m looking forward to March when they ship.

Until then I am planning the best place to put my farm. As an architect, I build 3D computer models of buildings, and I often use them to check the path of sunlight coming through windows at different times of the year. It occurred to me that I could find the best place for the windowfarm using this method!

I should explain that I am also waiting to move into a new apartment in a foreign country, so I do not have first-hand experience of which windows are sunny at what times, etc etc. But I could also use it to include Windowfarms in future (as-yet-unbuilt) architectural projects, to see how they would look. And it might be nice to design other elements around the kit, like an enclosure for the pump, or housings for lighting.

There are obviously many creative / engineering types on this forum, so I was wondering if anyone had made a model of their setup using Google Sketchup or other 3D software?

And if it is possible to get hold of an accurate 3D model or drawings of the Classic Windowfarm (from the industrial designers who designed it, for example), that would just make my day!

Failing that, I might make a sketchup model of the Classic Windowfarm when it arrives in March, and I will post it here.

Thanks for reading!

Stu

I’m a new window farmer and have some questions and thoughts I’d like to present to you all, regarding how we can extend the window farm project to individuals and communities that do not have the resources engage in this movement like the rest of us. I’m very excited by the potential the WF project has to alleviate some of the larger social and environmental issues we are faced with. Yet as I was building my own WF I saw how the currently available designs require many more resources than I imagined.  The tools, time, and money I had to put into building a WF made me realize how individuals without these resources cannot participate in this movement. Drills, air pumps, nails, paint and so forth, come out to be pretty pricey when added up and I feel as though this issue radically diminished the WF’s potential for large-scale change. This is especially true when considering the fact that the earth is rapidly urbanizing and soon most of our growing global population will live in urban settings.
I recently read Planted of the Slums (a paper on future global urban development by the distinguished academic Mike Davis) that shocked me with the expected outcome of current global trends, into thinking how it is critical for projects like the WF to reach out to underprivileged communities. Davis states: “cities have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population explosion since the 1950 and are currently growing by a million babies and immigrants each week, [furthermore] the global country side has reached its maximum potential and will begin to shrink after 2020”. The expected outcomes of these global trends will be “ the burgeoning of new megacities with populations of 8 million, and hypercities with more than 20 million inhabitants”. Smaller cities and ‘citized’ towns will also grow, as they will be expected to absorb three quarters of global population growth. This makes me think that there will be an unimaginable amount of people living in tight city spaces, and most of them (as Davis proceeds to point out) will be of lower-income status.  Davis in fact states that we are headed towards ‘a mass production of slums’ as already one third of the global urban population lives in slums. Many of the environmental, social, and public health related issues that will rise from this are freighting to think of.
THIS IS CRAZY, and if we really want projects like the WF to effectively counteract the negative social and environmental consequences of wild urbanization, than we need to do more. I’m curious to hear what you all have to say about this, and what measures you envision we could take to spread WFs and things of the sort. I’d late to make it clear my concern is not only for slums, but for all lower income communities in general. I think its crucial that every one finds ways of self-sustainment and self assertion in our times of incredible dependency on global, capitalistic markets. And the procuring of food should be a first factor in this.
Currently I am myself working on trying to envision cheaper and easier WF set ups, as I am also talking with my school about setting up an organization with funds to reach out to underprivileged immigrant communities in NY state. I’m hoping to be able to aid these politically and economically disenfranchised communities to re-affirm themselves by producing some of their own food.
I’ll post again soon and meanwhile I hope to hear what you guys have to think! Ciao for now

I wanted to share a system I build and have been using successfully.  Having seen the systems on this site, mine looks huge and clunky!

I live in Las Vegas, Nevada, which as most know, is very hot and dry throughout 9 months of the year.  I have a small yard, but no usable soil for growing a garden.  I don’t know much about gardening, but its something I’ve wanted to try.  My goal is to have a year round system that I can use to produce herbs, lettuce and other greens.

My system is a free standing, recirculating pump based system.  It has a reservoir full of nutrient solution that gets pumped up to a system of PVC pipes.  The water flows through the top pipe and then down to then lower pipe, and so on, until draining back into the reservoir.

Each pipe contains four grow sites, spaced about a foot apart.  Each grow site has a net pot filled with clay pellets.

My Hydroponic System

Before planting, I had started some beans, lettuce, tomatos, green onions and peas inside in a growth medium that I could easily transfer to the netpots.  You can see these small starts already planted in the photo above.  Below is a photo taken several weeks later.   I had since put a “green closet” (small green house) around the structure to help control temperature and filter out some of the intense sun.  The green house is made out of PVC pipe, made rigid with wood bracing and covered in 7 mil painters plastic.  In the photo below, you can see that the tomato plants are taking off, peas are doing ok and the onions and lettuce are still slow to get going.

Progress!

All of my starts did not take off.  My beans did not survive at all, and all but one lettuce plant died.  I attribute this to planting too soon, before the starts had developed good roots.

Here’s a shot of the root system for one of the tomato plants:

Tomato Plant Roots

These roots actually started to become an issue.  They started to grow so much that they would block the pipes and cause water to back up in the system.  A little bit of a “hair cut” fixed that (for a little while…)

It's a jungle in there!

The above photo was taken just a week ago.  The tomato plants by far had grown the most.  So much, that I had to remove a few plants do to their roots blocking up the pipes, and to allow for the other plants to get more light.  I have since added string support for the plants to cling on to.

We’ve been using the green onions and lettuce to make salads for 6 (two adults and 4 kids) several nights now. Below is photo of one of those plants, which we’ve been cutting leaves off of for a while.  They just keep growing back…

Lettuce

Below is shot that shows how dense the roots get on the tomato plants.  This is a pot I removed to thin out the garden.

Dense roots!

All in all its been a good experiment, and I can’t wait to build my next system, refining my ideas.  Hopefully the information on this site and its users can help me out.

Pete