Hallo,

as the title says this well be exiting. I came across the idea over ted. So I planed to build the V3-Version as it is and optimize it later. But I could not hold on me to give it my one twist. Customiced for my needs, so her is the plan:

The main difference are the bamboo containers. I will install this windowfarm in our kitchen, so i like it to look a little bit more pleasend as the pet bottle version.The second difference is the mixing of water and air. I want to put up an almosted closed system, so i thought I’ll try to mix the air and water with a t-piece and two check valves. This idea is simple, maybe so simple, that it was already thought of and didnt work.

0. Contents

1. Part list

2. Installation and Mounting

3. Plumbing System

4. Problems to solve

1. Part List:

Installation:
1 x 3.5m bamboo trunk 2 x 4m of 3mm steel rope 8 x eye nut m3 (maybe 10x) 8 x female screw 8 x washer – small inner, big outer diameter 8 x luster terminal (inner metal part) 2 x hook for the wall 4 x hydroponic planting cups
Plumbing:
1 x APS 50 airpump 1 x check valve (need one more) 1 x 4m transparent tube – inner diameter 8mm 1 x 4m semi transparent green tube – inner diamter 4mm

2. Installation & Mounting

1. Cut the bamboo trunk into pieces, just right above the in wall. Put some “after work” on the cuttings (sandpaper).
2. Drill two 1cm holes, each hole facing the other hole one the opposite site of the trunk. Positioned about 2 cm below the upper rim of each bamboo container.
3. Also drill a 6 to 10 mm hole in the bottom of each bamboo container (exept the water reservoir). Be carefull and drill gently, so the wood doesent break.
4. Put an eye nut in each hole and fix it with a washer and an appropriate female screw. Maybe you need to cut the screw little bit to safe space inside the trunk.
5. Take a piece of bamboo, which you don’t plan to use. Peal of some bamboo fibers. At least 3 x 10cm for each bamboo container.
6. Tie 3 fibers together. If they are too curved, you can straighten them by heating the bamboo up. I think the temperature should be around 170 ° Celcius. So take a heat gun or one of these kitchen things to make creme brulee. WATCH OUT! Dont burn yourself.
7. Put them into the bottom hole of the container.
8. Now take the luster terminal and get ride of the plastic. Work your way as far as possible with a princers and then try to rip the rest of with a comb pliers.
9. Put it together.

PS: I will add some images.

3. Plumbing system

ToDo

4. Problems to solve

1. As i told, i would like to mix the air with a t-piece and two check valves (see sketch above). Solved!

2. The water tube will be inserted to the bottom water container either by:

1. vertical: V3 System at the bottom with a bicycle valve or
2. horizontal: at the side like this (just at the bottom of the container):

It fits pretty tight. I will see if it leaks.

I posted earlier about designing a prettier window farm. I’m now building a clean and simple single column farm, and I figured it might be about time to post something about my progress. The pots, suspension and drip pipes are mostly in place. The reservoir and the airlift are still in the works. I haven’t made up my mind yet about what kind of reservoir to use.

Part list:

• 4 Plastic orchid pots. These are made of Polypropylene, which is (afaik) safe to use with food. The pots also have an inward dent in the bottom, so they will never drain completely. I don’t know whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. Be careful when drilling plastic. I managed to break one pot by using too much pressure. (2 euros/pot at Bauhaus)
• 2 meters of aluminum pipe, 6 mm diameter. One meter for drip pipes and another for the air lift. (4 euros/meter at Bauhaus)
• Two meters of aluminum strip. Mine is about 12mm wide and 2mm thick. I wouldn’t go any thinner than 2mm, since the rigidity of the column would likely suffer. (4 euros/meter at Bauhaus)
• 4 gaskets for sealing the drip pipes. The ones I got seem to do the job pretty well: 17mm outer diameter, 5mm inner diameter, 4mm thick. (around 2 euros for a 4-pack)
• M3 Nuts, washers and screws (or bolts) for attaching the pots to the aluminum strip. (Less than 1e total)

Parts not installed yet:

• Sera Air 275R Plus air pump with adjustable air flow and two outlets. Came with two non-return valves. (28 euros at a local aquarium store)
• 6mm “colorless” air hose. It’s possible to stretch this over the aluminum pipe using pliers and some soap as lubricant. (2 euros / meter at a local aquarium store)

Still missing the reservoir and the airlift needle(s).

This is not the final assembly and you might notice that some of the drip pipes and pots are not straight. I’ll fix that before doing the actual planting. Originally I’d thought I’d have to glue the drip pipes to the pots, but with the gaskets in place and the hole being tight enough, I’m not sure if glue is necessary. It won’t matter anyway if the drip pipes are wet on the outside.

I was wondering though, should the downward water flow be somehow restrained so that the water drips down slowly? Now when I pour water in the top pot, most of the water has come down in less than a minute. How does it work in WF 3.0?

The wife said it looks alright. I might even get a permission to build a second column Stay tuned. The next step is building the airlift.

It turned out to be a lot less work than expected and building was fun.

Currently I’m trying to grow some strawberries. I have no idea a what interval (or perhaps continuously) the pump should be turned on and I’m experimenten with nutrients. Who knows, it might just work…

It’s still leaking a bit.

I’ve had some problems figuring out how to get the airlift to work efficiently. In my case pointing one needle up and one needle down seems to work.

During the “experimental phase” I discovered that my design wasn’t yet cat-proof.

I’m thinking about doing the vertical window garden, as I already have a large floor window garden.  Can anyone say if they have to rotate their bottles to help keep the plants growing straight?

I rotate my floor pots or else they all start leaning  towards the window and it also seems like I get a better plant when I do this.

Plants below are all window grown dirt-based.  Thai basil, Italian basil, queen basil, and the bottom pic is of a pineapple i’m growing indoors. ( never thought I could do this)

Did anybody try using .5L bottles instead of the 1.5L Bottles? From what i’ve read, i would expect that space is an issue for only some plants.

If the vertical space is the first problem, i could cut off the top of the bottle and space them further appart, put the plant higher in the bottle, so their effective root space is just as big as in the 1.5L bottle.

The advantages would be space, taking less sight in the window, and less weight.

The disadvantages, i don’t really know, there could be many, but i would assume they’re all space-related.

I’d like to think this would make a kick-ass mini-window-farm for maxing out cress and other really tiny plants.

I’m about to build my first WF. While I generally love the idea of growing food at home, the free design of WF 3.0 is a bit of an eyesore as such. I wanted to come up with something that’ll still be a full grown window farm, but is still approved by the wife.

Update: Second Draft

Thanks for the input everyone. I came up with a simpler less work intensive solution: flower pots. I went to a hardware store to look at PVC pipes, and stumbled upon some plastic orchid flower pots. They seemed right size and only cost 1,99 a piece, so I got two for testing. The pots have a dent in the bottom, kinda like wine bottles. See the drawing. This type of construction prevents the container from draining out completely. Not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

I also decided to try string instead of metal wire, since I couldn’t find proper parts for attaching the wire to the pots. Here’s a picture with initial string based suspension:

Drawing:

First Draft

Here’s my first draft on an improved design. I didn’t bother drawing the irrigation system in detail since it’s not really important in this context. The main idea is that we’ll encase the water bottle, suspension system and the irrigation system in painted PVC pipe. Any other pipe should do as well. My first draft doesn’t depict how exactly the pipe and bottle are attached to the suspension system. I haven’t really made up my mind on how I should implement it. Anyway, the PVC pipe should be sort of fixed into the suspension wire system, while the bottle and the plant are easy to remove. It’s not really feasible to remove the pipe, since the wires and the irrigation hose run through the pipe.

Comments and improvement ideas welcome

See the next post for construction details and pics.

I cut off the white part of one of these sports caps (the one you can open with your teeth). I’ve got some tube that i bought as 6mm inner diamater and 8mm outer…  The tube fits exactly in the hole, but after testing it, it’s not water-tight. I looked through my stuff and found three things with approximately 6mm diameter: a metal cylinder, a plastic piece of junk (i think it’s for making those glow-in-the-dark bracelets) and a 6 mm wall plug. I’ve tested putting them inside the tube before putting the tube into the cap.

Two out of three gave me a watertight connection (at least for a couple of minutes).  (-: They fit inside the tube, the tube then fits more neatly in the bottlecap, the point being to make it watertight.

The wall plug (the only of the 3 items labelled to actually _be_ 6mm)  measured only at 5.7mm. Being optimistic about the four little “flaps” it has, i tried it first with only the first 5 mm of the plug, then later sacrificed another whole plug to find out that even that didn’t work. I think putting a couple of layers of tape (or anything else) on the plug first could make the plug large enough as well, but i didn’t test it (yet). The tape doesn’t have to be watertight, just extend the plug, so the plug presses the tube out to make a watertight connection with the cap.

The tube:  is labelled “Cristallo Extra, Hi-Fitt 2007/19/EC a-b-c Made in EC”

Look mommy! Cheap, not too messy, easy to connect/disconnect and watertight!

I just came across this site after watching the presentation on TED.  From what I’ve seen, this place and the ideas here are fantastic.

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

I used the design that I found on this board to build a hanging grow light CFL system using the brown screw on adaptors by @cambria with the soda can reflectors by @owen but found that the can got way too hot after a few minutes use.

Last night I got to thinking about it and so I tweaked the design so that the end of the can towards the base of the bulb was bent at an L and an inch or so was cut off the bottom of the can so there was more room for the heat to escape and still have enough area for the light to be reflected. You can also bend the can lip (after cutting off a few inches of the heavier rim metal) around the grow light and it’s solid enough to not need glue/zip ties to hold it onto the light!

It works great and the can never gets hot and you can bend the cans to that the light is either reflected up or down depending on your lighting setup!

A quick tip that you can use regular old scissors to cut the can (once started with a razor) and a can opener to take the top off the can and get a nice clean cut.

Some more pics

So, as a rebel wannabe and annoying being that I am, I came up with a model for my future windowfarm.

The main objective of this model is to avoid the use a pump as I don’t want to use the money I’ll save from buying veggies to pay more in the electric bill

I got my inspiration from Lousie (http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/03/06/testing-a-waterclock-dripper-system-based-on-brians-plans/) a great idea to keep the tank pressure constant (hence the dropping frequency constant) is to use a float valve, but as I said, I don’t want to waste a cent, so I came up with a float valve of my own, using a bottlenose with a ping-pong ball inside, it should keep the water from falling into the secondary tank (this part may be tricky but I wont buy that float valve)

The other part of my idea is that I don’t like things hanging, it makes me feel everything is going to fall apart and I want my plant to be safe, so I decided to make shelves for the bottles, but they’re hard to make, so I thought that, If I cut off the bottom of the bottles and fold the plastic outwards, and then cut a piece of the folding so a twisted wire can go around the bottle, then the bottle itself will be its own shelf. And taking things further, If I make the same (maybe adding something instead of folding the plastic) with the net pots then I can take off every bottle with their plants without having to dismount everything YAY!! modularity FTW!!

But I’m not sure things will work out, I’m new with this, the last time I ever planted something was a carrot in primary school and I think it died, so I leave here some schematic I made with my crazy mspaint skills, so you can visualize things as I do and maybe give me some feedback on this.

PS: I don’t mind moving the water up when the tanks are empty, it’s nice to have some activity around the plants other than killing them

PS2: The whole idea is based on reducing costs, materials and work (I just can’t understand how the airlift thingy works)

PS3: I’m sorry if I’ve butchered English :O

PS4: THANK YOU!!