We plan on helping out spreading the WindowFarm idea through Colorado. By hopefully sometime be able to set up some time to traveling to elementary, middle, and high schools and presenting our WindowFarm project we made from scratch. Using tools that anyone can buy from a local store and such. In order to do this we have created a mobile WindowFarm system (as you can see in my profile picture) to help maneuver the WindowFarm around. Here are some other pictures as well of our just 1-3 bottle system we have set up for it.

Here as you can see are some microgreens and some zuchinni growing and yes we are switching out the zuchinni to a smaller plant. We also have the main tubing right in front as well.

Here you see the set up we have with the main air tube, we have the straws for covering the chains we used so they dont rust.

We have a ten gallon tub filled with liquid nutrients. And you can see the setup we have in the water of our siphening system.

Here is I say a rough draft of our mobile WindowFarm. We are looking to simplify it down a little bit but this is just a start for now. The mobile system main use is to use for travleing to school to school without having to carry everything. It can also be used to move from window to window if necessary and I’m sure many other reasons. But I’m hoping for everybody who see’s this to spread the word so we try and kick this mobile system off the ground.

If any questions please email me at fcchavez10@yahoo.com, or message me on my profile.

For the moment I’m using a small plastic bottle that I have hung upside down above the garden bottles, it has a small hole made by a pin and the bottom sawed of. I fill it with water and because the hole is so small it drips really slowly.I am starting to think that maybe I do not need to use a pump at all. It would be nice to know how constant the flow of water has to be through a hanging garden system? Will it damage the roots of the plants if there is no water running through it a few hours every day?

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.

Setting up the column(s).  I would prefer not to suspend it from the ceiling.  I think the metal columns look more structured, which is very appealing.  Also, there are a lot of opportunities to grow vining plants, and upon obsessing on how to manage creating this look, the following items have been picked out:

1. Welded Wire Fencing, that can be shaped in a wave pattern; meaning that it would curve to the south on one side and then curve to the north on the other side, making semi-circular curves in which to suspend the bottles on one or both sides.  The way the fencing is, it would be so easy to use plant tape to train or trail the plant, make a  modular system and it would keep the tubing very straight.
2. Acrylic Rods, 1/4 inch,  9″ wide to slide through the bottles and suspend them on the fencing.
3. 1/4 inch rubber gaskets, on the inner and outer side of the fencing to keep the rods from sliding around.

I found an online hydroponics.net store and bought the following materials (Pargro Rockwool is for sprouting seeds):

From Amazon, I ordered a  few remaining supplies that were listed in Rama’s double mod.  More tubing as I wasn’t sure if I had enough – better too much than not enough – my son may get in on this too – who knows!:

Still missing the  3/8″ OD 1/4″ rigid tubing. All online places are either too expensive or have short pipes.  Still working on that.  No worries, I still have to hunt down the water bottles…  Anyone have tips or comments?

I like Rama’s cable wire over the bead chain and the double openings for the plants.  Am I missing anything aside from the rigid tubing and water bottles?

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!

The water/nutrient source is from an already established planted aquarium that is also my coffee table.

Indoor aquaponic window farm

I’ll be adding 4 more columns, 2 in each of the side windows.  The water supply line is extra high above the pots to allow room for additional pots later.  The completed system allows for 24-30 pots.

Custom hanging design

I used alligator clips with S hooks to hang the pots.  I went with white nylon cord to match the white pots.  The cord can be found at general Walmart type stores for really cheap, it’s more expensive at hardware stores.

Close up of pot and drip tube.

I went with an open pot design for aesthetic reasons.  I shopped around for something better looking than bottles, but I couldn’t find anything I liked that wasn’t overly expensive.  To take care of the splashing issue of water dropping from pot to pot, I added air tubing to guide the water flow.  This also allows me to place seedlings in the center of the pot, and place the water outlet to the side, to keep the seedlings from getting beaten up from the impact of the dripping water.

Closeup of how I added a reflector to the fluorescent light.

For an extra kick of light during the fall/winter session I added a T5 florescent light.  To keep the light from lighting up my entire place, I added a reflector to direct the light out sideways which also pushes more light towards the plants.  Using 2 elbow brackets, and a piece of roof flashing from the hardware store, it was easy to put together.  I’m going to spray paint the reflector with white primer to match the rest of the design.

More info coming soon….

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!

any advice?

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