our.windowfarms.org

Ran across your site a while back and thought I would give it a try.  Spring is almost here and I am iching to do some gardening.  I made a free standing system since I have nothing to hang it from.  I had most of the parts laying around like the pump from the kids old fish tank.  They only things I bought so far has been the 3/8″ tubing and a 3/8″ tee.  I wanted to share the pump design since it worked pretty good.  The long 3/8″ tube goes in the top end of the tee.  A short piece goes in the bottom end with half cut off so water will get in when on the bottom of the tank.  A small piece of 3/8″ tube goes in the middle tee and then the 1/4″ tube from the air pump fits snug inside it.

I sprouted some seeds and put them in it, but they died.   I think they died since the leaves were too small and stayed wet all the time and I do not have any hydroponic solutions yet as well.  I enjoy the experimentation and will try again.

Big changes this week in Brooklyn and the windowfarm is beginning to feel like a stable viable thing in my home. Plants have grown a couple inches, timer, pump and valves working steady.

Recently I added liquid organic fish fertilizer (Neptune’s Harvest 2-4-1) – about 1 Tbs diluted in 1 gallon water added to resevoir that already had a gallon or two in it. There’s definitely a bit of a smell. I think I’ll probably drain the resevoir and try a different fertilizer at some point for a comparison. I really need the windowfarm to be as smell-free as possible as the guestroom of our apt will soon be occupied and so I need to tone down the workshop/mad scientist aspects of the project.

After reading Britta’s post about lights yesterday I suspect that my baby mint and thyme plants are looking leggy so I’ve added linear flourescent shop lights balanced vertically in the corners of the windowframe. I put these on the same 14 hour on timer that I’m using with my seed germination light. Since I’m not trying to induce flowering (I’m growing leafy kitchen herbs.) does anyone know if I should be using a dawn to dusk light cycle instead with the lights?

Hopefully by next week plants will be big enough to show up in a photo. I swear they are there.

Check out this little video of the latest windowfarm design on our Youtube channel.

Kits will be a lot like this.

Please check out the excellent work of the Finnish Windowfarms team. This shot is a sneak preview of them installing the first few LED lights on the windowfarm they made out of Finnish recyclables in the window of the Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum in Helsinki.

Their work on adapting the Windowfarms Project for Finland is part of a larger program called Herbologies/Foraging Networks at the Pixelache festival happening this month in Helsinki.

Niko Punin was responsible for development of the grow spectrum LEDs and has some very interesting ideas that we will be watching closely in the future!

More pictures here:

Windowfarms Finland on Facebook

I’ve taken the plunge, set up a timer, got the water flowing, and have planted out my tiny tiny seedlings. Sorry plants are such babies that they’re barely visible in this photo but it’s mostly spearmint and thyme. As other things germinate I’ll plant out different herbs, hope to have oregano, spicy globe basil, marjoram, dill, and nasturtiums.  The first generation of plants have been in the windowfarm for a couple days now and they seem to be happy.

Had some minor issues when I started the system pumping on a regular basis where one column was dripping beautifully and the other dripped in fits and starts. Turned out the top reservoir was not level. Now I have about three gallons of water in the system, timer set to run the pump for three minutes every two hours, and water flow seems constant.

Next big step is adding nutrients to the water in the system. I’m worried about the smell of the organic fertilizer I’ve used in my regular garden in the past. I’ve spilled so much water on the floor during setup that I’m worried the room will soon reek of fish fertilizer. But I’m going to start with a small amount and hope that the smell won’t be too strong.

Once things are growing well I’m hoping to upgrade the system to using an electronic float switch and relay to power the pump when the bottom reservoir reaches a certain level. I’m really eager to get an Arduino attached to my system in hopes of learning to monitor environmental data. I want to use the windowfarm as a testbed for a data gathering and  control system that I can eventually use with my rooftop chile garden for remote monitoring and hopefully remote control of watering and fertilization.

I’ve got my windowfarm working manually, i.e. the main delay at this point is lack of a timer, so I’m close. Since I originally posted I’ve made a few changes. I cut the resevoir tubes down to 48″ to reduce weight, and have suspended them from separate pairs of hooks screwed into the drywall ceiling. Two columns of four bottles each are suspended with alligator clips and 1/8″ dowels from the baling wire supporting the bottom resevoir. This setup makes it possible to remove the resevoirs separately and seems to be working pretty well. Pump is inside the bottom resevoir and once realized which was the input and which the output is worked pretty well. In initial test I had 5′ of head and that was a bit too much but lowering the top resevoir by six inches made a difference and now pumping works well.

Biggest issue I had was how to attach the drip line. Inserting the adjustable valve directly into the top resevoir seemed like it would leak so I put a 1/4″ transfer barb into the resevoir and put a blob of silicone sealant around it. Then a few inches of 1/4″ tube to the adjustable valve, then another piece of 1/4″ tube down to the top of the first bottle. Seems to work great without leaks.

My seedling are a couple inches high and I can’t wait to transplant them. Need to get a great timer and wondering if arduino is too much for a non-programmer to try. But I really want maximum flexibility with the timer.

Questions:

Is anyone using organic fertilizer in their windowfarm? What kind? How big should seedlings be before “planting them out” in the windowfarm?

I’m attempting to build a version of the Airlift Window Farm without plastic parts.

The initial version uses stainless steel tumblers, sisal rope, metal crimps, a glass reservoir, and natural latex tubing. The only plastic part is the air pump. Everything was purchased fairly inexpensively (mostly on the Bowery in NYC).

You can find images of the project in progress HERE.

If I can get this one to work, I will build a second system next to this one using Chinese bottle gourds, coated in beeswax (see diagram). We’ll see.

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PROBLEMS:

1. I’m currently having problems getting the pump to push the water up the airlift tube. I’ve noticed others have had this problem and see that Britta posted some suggestions, which I tried– but they haven’t worked. The air forced into the air lift tube doesn’t seem strong enough to move the water up vertically. It goes for about 6 inches and falls back down again. It also makes a loud bubbling/spattering noise. The pump tubes are dry and the air lift tube is fully submerged and mostly straight. I have an ActiveAqua AAPA7.8L pump. — ANY SUGGESTIONS?

I wrote an article bout Windowfarms and the fundraiser on Examiner.com in Austin, TX

So I’m ready to get started. I have pictures of my windows in my kitchen and am trying to post them. I want to grow herbs for soups and maybe salad greens. I have two and maybe three windows 2’x4’ and if it does really well then maybe we will remove the stylish faux stained glass window that my girlfriend made and grow herbs there too.

I started my WindowFarm about a month ago, working on it in my spare time. I wanted to interface it with a microcontroller for automation and used the ATMega168 (same as on the Arduino) to control a windshield wiper pump to move water through the system for 4 seconds every 10 minutes.

The construction of the actual WindowFarm setup is IMO pretty terrible-looking and very sloppy. I just wanted to get something working though, and the plants don’t seem to mind.

Here is a picture of the circuit:

And here is a picture of the complete WindowFarm:

I wrote a little bit of code for a Fonera Fon2100 router I had lying around, making the modifications to the OpenWRT firmware (version 8.09.1) running on there. It gives its web-interface a ‘Sensors’ link that AJAX-updates the analog pin values from the Arduino. Right now on my setup it is all just noise except pin 0 which has a photosensor on it that gives light readings near the window. It is the plan to turn on the lights in an 18-hour window if the light value falls below some threshold.

Here is a screenshot of OpenWRT’s modified web-interface:

I have the code for the Arduino sketch as well as the OpenWRT changes here: http://github.com/nemik/arduinoponics and more photos of the setup on my Flickr set here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nemik/sets/72157622608195083/

I’m going to try to automate this more and more, hopefully also fix the construction.

Open to any suggestions or criticisms!