New Pictures:

I took some more pictures of my farm as it’s evolved. The reservoir, airlift and lighting are the biggest changes. I also included some detailed shots of materials I’ve used.

My reservoir is suspended from the steel wires that hold my bottles and stabilizes the whole thing. It's 2 centimeters above ground.

This shows my happy beans and thriving tomatoes. They really seem to like the led's I installed.

This is my version of the pulser pump. It works best of all the attempts I undertook.

These are the different sizes of tubing used in the pulser pump. The brand is Gardena

The check valve. I found this in an aquarium store

detail of the suspended reservoir

top of the farm, they sure love that bulb

as they grow too close to the bulbs, they burn their leaves even though there's hardly any heat emitted by the led's

Hi all

I have quite some experience with my farm so far which I’d like to share. As you can see from the picture, it grew. I now have 8 containers made from 2l fanta bottles with net pots in them. The reservoir is made from an Ikea container named Rationell. They make it from recyled plastic bottles. It has a lid that closes perfectly and blocks out any light. The airlift tubes are wrapped around a net pot and sunk into the reservoir by a stone i put into the net pot. I have strawberries, peppers, cherry tomatoes and beans growing, the 2 remaining containers will get more tomatoes and another sort of beans. After experimenting with wine bottles and using a mixture of techniques taken from @eloinen and @jamesnutter, I went back to plastic bottles, but keeping the 2mm steel cables for suspending the bottles. In my opinion, it looks beautiful and is incredibly sturdy. With the wine bottles, it all wasn’t holding together very well and I experienced quite some leakage. I had some ph problems with my old setup, but it all seems fine now.

Pump

I have my pump on a day timer. It runs for 15 minutes every 2 hours. It has a break between 1am and 7am. For the end and the start of the cycle, I let the pump run for 30 minutes.

Airlift

I have two individual t-joint airlifts installed. What I noticed is that they take a while before they start performing well when installed for the first time or after changing the water in the reservoir (i.e. they come out of the water). I guess this is due to air in wrong parts of the hoses. In the beginning, I always fiddled around with the installation because I thought something was wrong. However my finding is to just let it run for an hour or so and see if it sorts itself out.

Water exit on top

You may see on the pics that they’re not identical on the 2 columns. Actually this was unintended but proves as a good solution for my pepper. It doesn’t like to much water, and the short end shoots most of the water  on the bottles wall, making it flow down directly to the next bottle while only a few drops now and then actually get into the container.

Water and nutrients

I’m running my farm on some bought nutrients which seem to work fine. I change the water about every week to 10 days, checking the pH every now and then. It’s usually between 7.2 and 7.8. Once, I had it hitting 8, don’t know why and after a water change it never happened again.

Fortunately, we don’t have chlorine in tap water here in Switzerland, so no need to air it out first.

On my to-do list:

• Adding lighting. I ordered a 20W solar kit with a battery, charger, alternating-current converter and a bunch of red-and-blue LED growing bulbs which should arrive any day now. I want my garden to be independent from the power grid. It is quite an investment and I will have to grow a lot of veggies for a return on investment. But for me, it makes no sense having to buy a lot of electricity to grow plants.
• Starting a worm-tea manufacturing process.

Edit: I put a lot of info in the pic’s descriptions, but don’t know why it’s not displaying. Anyone know what went wrong?

Which system would work better in a greenhouse?  The home or school?

Hello Windowfarmers!

We recently posted some ideas for added functionality to the Windowfarms community website.  We had some good feedback about what people thought would be helpful but we need more!  We really appreciate your insight and suggestions for making the this site an easy resource to turn to for find answers to all your Windowfarming questions.

We’d ultimately like to create a tool which will allow Farmers to better track the life of their farm, plants, and harvests.  We’d also like to display the information from posts in a way that makes it easier to find answers to questions, learn from the experience of others, and stay in touch with the rest of the community.

Take a look at our layout below.  In this version, we’ve provided ways for you to enter in more detailed information. The top Windowfarm graphic allows you to keep track of which plants are in which position in your farm.  By hovering over a plant you would be able to see information about that species of plant.

Down below you can see the layout for the “Post” section.  We’d like to encourage picture uploading so farmers will have a visual reference for issues/questions/success stories.  We’re thinking this will make it easier to associate individual problems with problems that have been raised by other farmers.  Of course you can still upload if you don’t have a camera on hand but we feel that pictures are very helpful.

On the right there is a sidebar displaying activity from other Farmers.  This way everyone can stay connected, see what other people are talking about and offer input.

Let us know your thoughts and thank you!

Oh I am SO excited to have this plan in place, and it’s far more affordable than I thought it would be!!!  I built a raise bed garden outside a few years ago and really caught the bug!  Together with my Parents (we rent out their upper, I have a medically complex kiddo- had to sell my condo ) we thought about putting in an aquaponics farm, but our city stonewalled that one   So, I came across this and was so excited to get it going as we have SO MANY windows!!!  The plan is to put 4 columns in each room listed- my room, Parker’s room, Kitchen (but this is going to be a 6 column possibly in the picture window!), and great room.  That hits all angles, north, south, east, and west.  Yes, there will be supplemental lighting where applicable.  We do live in Wisconsin, so the concern is if we need a heating element in the winter time.   I just need to find the darn bottles!!  Has anyone had success contacting like a recycling center?  Has anyone used 2L bottles like for soda I hate soda, but I’d buy it for the bottles!  And then what size netpots do you use?  My grow cubes should be here today!  I’m getting seeds and such going this afternoon.  I want the whole thing built and up atleast in the kitchen by two weeks from now.  Our growing season in WI is alittle more than half over, but if we can have fresh veggies and herbs year round, it will be incredible!!!  I’ve had quite a bit of success in my outside garden, though, this year is a hard one.  I’m used to hand pollenating everything, because we have no bees.  (We are actually considering keeping bees!) So, any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

Oh, and Will Allen and Growing Power is about 15 minutes from my house   Check out his website because I’m going to reach out to him and Sweet Water Organics for any help they can give or good nutrient mixes!!

Hello Everyone!

We’re working through some ideas on how to make the site more helpful.  We have some ideas about how to make information more accessible, which we hope will make it more useful and easier to learn from other people’s experience.

We’ll be continuing to roll out ideas for testing and we hope the community will comment and provide their thoughts and input so we can figure out what would be valuable for everyone.

Here’s one direction for a series of “posts” and uploaded images.  What questions would you want asked and answered initially vs. in the comments/response section so that troubleshooting would become more beneficial?  What would a helpful response look like?  What do you think is missing currently?  We’d love your input!

The weak point of my low water level pulser design has always been the single part that actually made it work so well: the check valve. If you don’t know what this low water level pulser thing is, you can visit the post/blog on windowfarms which I try to keep up to date right here: http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/01/26/low-water-level-pulser-pump/ This post is mainly about the check valve that finally made the system work consistenlty.

The type of check valve I use now, has also been the biggest “invisible” change to my windowfarm as of yet. I can not stress enough the importance of check valves that WANT to let through water and air with little to no effort. After DIY’ing a couple, testing some others and a lot of frustration, I finally found one on ebay that works! Just look for “Plastic check valve” on ebay and look for the ones in the pictures below (the full name of the ones I bought was “plastic check valve water air gas unilateral model new”.

The cool thing about these is that you can screw them apart and actually make the opening in the rubber thing bigger so that it lets through the amount you need. FINALLY check valves that keep on working.

It took me quite some effort but I’m happy with how it’s working now. And of course the fact that it’s working continuously. The pump is on its lowest setting. And the system actually started dripping on it’s own within 1 minute. Never had that with the other check valves. Anyway, we’re also getting really good at getting the little pulsers out of the tube and in again, hope we don’t have to do it again any-time soon though.

We’ve just finished all the bottles to our giant windowfarm that’s going to be hanging at Kulturhuset during June.

The rawmaterial to the windowfarm. 150 soda bottles.

We drilled holes in the bottom with a sawdrill. This gave us really nice equally round holes to fit the bottles in. We also cut out two holes for the plants since we’re going to plant double in some bottles and we want the plants to be visible from both sides. Instead of cutting the holes with a knife we used a soldering iron and melted the plastic into shape we wanted. This gave a really nice edge to the holes that’s a lot softer, rounder and kinder to the plants. I can really recommend it. We also made two small holes in the sides where the crossbars that are going to hold the bottles attached to the bars will go.

Hanging out the laundry.

We’re using two different types of bottles: 1,5 liter soda-bottles from Coca-cola that will hold the netcups and the plants and 0,5 liter Plantbottles, a new type of recyclable PET bottles that are partly made of organic materials which reduce the carbon footprint. The smaller bottles will not have plants in them but will be inserted in the columns so that the people looking at the windowfarm cen see the water dripping through the system.

After this we cleaned all the bottles, hung them out to dry and started painting. We dipped the bottles in paint to get a even coat and minimum hassle with spill on to the parts of the bottles that shouldn’t be painted. We chose a nice gray colour that will make the green from the plants stand out! After that all we had to do was watch the paint dry…

Check out the video of the painting process.

The finished result.

/Daniel & Kristoffer

http://KONSTruktioner.info

Hello!

Me and a friend have been following the windowfarm movement for about a year and last summer we built a small six-bottle air-lift system to test it out. I’d like to start by appologizing for not giving enough back to the community but I intend to make amends with this and the next posts.

We really love the idea of growing our own vegetables and also like to build an develop stuff so we had a great time building and maintaing our small system. What we realized was that the windowfarm community in Sweden isn’t that flourishing and therefor we had difficulties in getting input on what materials to use and the quality of different nutrients.

That’s why we’ve set out to enlighten the Swedish people  on the wonders of windowfarming. We are proud to say that we’re going to build a giant windowfarm at Kulturhuset, the centre for culture in Stockholm. It will be exibited at ekoteket, Kulturhusets own ecological café and display-hall.

The system will actually be two systems to allow for a wide range of plants and consist of 80 bottle divided into ten columns. We’re going to post on this blog as regularly as we can during the build and throughout the exibition. It premiers on June 1 and will hang until June 30. We hope that all who can will come past and those that won’t make it enjoy our findings and posts on this blog and the videos we upload to our youtube channel.

Cheers!

/Daniel and Kristoffer

A couple of bottles from our prototype.

Our giant system:

We decided to go for the water-pump system to supply all of our 80 bottles with nutritious water. The reason for this was that we thought it to be more practical for a large scale system and that the airlift system we built before wasn’t that reliable. We also decided to make the one system into two parallel systems to allow for a wider range of vegetables since we can have different PH and EC levels in both systems.

The system will be 7 meters wide and aprox. 3.5 meters tall with 10 columns with 8 bottles in each column. It will be hanging in a large window on the third floor of Kulturhuset facing north o we will probably add som lighting to assist the plants growth.

Seedbox for our prototype. Chress, tomato and beans.

Prototyping:

Since we hadn’t built a water-pump system before we decided to build a prototype system in Kristoffers apartment. This system would function as the testing ground for different techniques and as a growing house for the plants that will be transplanted in to the big system.

The system consists of one long reservoir built out of plumbing pipes 10cm diameter and 2 meters long and one large square water container.  They hold aprox 20 liters of water each. We use a galley-pump that has a capacity of 17 l/min at hight of 5 meters.

Instead of a timer to control the pump we decided to use a floatation device in the top tank that would turn on the pump when the level became two low. This proved more difficult than we thought since neither me or Kristoffer are very skilled in installing electrical stuff but after a couple of tries and a few leaks we managed to build a system that worked. The trick was using a relay system that made sure the flotation device didn’t get to high current once the pump was on.

We added 6 columns with four bottles in each to start our farm. We’ve been growing a wide range of vegetables to try what works and what doesn’t. The ones having the most difficulties coping were the bigger plants that allready had fruits on them when we transplanted them into the system. The ones that we’ve grown from seeds in small seedhouses work fine and are realy thriving.

Transplanting peppers into the system.

Building our system:

We’ve just started building our system and what we’ve found out is that it’s a lot of work. 80 bottles is truly a giant windowfarm and the scale of all the differnt tasks that need to be done can sometimes be overwhelming.

We’ve added to video clips to our Youtube channel. One were Kristoffer shows all the different components ofthe system and one where he goes through the electrical components. More will follow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdpdb-ct_GE&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W4m-p4Ut-E

/Daniel & Kristoffer

Tuesday, May 10th 2011

I got the bug today to plant a garden, after some investigation I found this site and I have decided to accumulate the proper materials and build one.

I only know I am going to grow Dill and peppers, I will talk with my roommate, when I have all the right parts, to determine what else to plant.

Anyone have suggestions for plants that will grow in the same timeframe as Dill or Peppers?

Any tips on growing Dill or Peppers?

I’d like to get some basic idea of anything that others have learned working with these 2 plants, I always do a lot of investigating before I jump into things.

Thursday, May 12th 2011

I drank most of a 2L bottle of Dr. Pepper today so I could get my first piece of the puzzle! 1 bottle down, 11 more to go. I also looked through my odds and ends and found some suitable materials to use as supports for the first column. It was an odd bit of chain, about 5ft in length, that I intend to lash the bottles to with hemp that I have for wrapping bottles with.

I looked at the size of a 2L bottle and the height of the window in my room and I calculated that I could fit 5 bottles for plants and a reservoir bottle in each column. I will be starting with 1 column and expanding from there. I would like to have 2 columns up and running before my birthday July 1st. Depending on how long I stay in this apartment and just how many different things I can plant to use effectively, I plan to go as many as 5-7 columns.  The window in my room is roughly 70′ x 70′ with 6′ of usable window sill. I am not sure if I want to invest in a big pump now and plan ahead for many columns or if I want to get a small pump and get additional pumps for each column. The additional upkeep on more equipment isn’t exactly what I am looking for, but it would mean I am less likely to lose all of the plants if one of them fails.

I looked into a mechanical idea today, maybe using a strange set of gears and mechanisms to force the water from a lower reservoirs to a single higher one. I will have to do further research on it to see how viable this idea is.