juhu!

unfortunately it is winter but here is the first blooming tomato in a windowfarm in Vienna.

the first blooming tomatos

backside of a windowfarm in Vienna in winter (some of them are under construction):

backside of a windowfarm in Vienna

frontside of a windowfarm in Vienna in winter (some of them are under construction):

frontside of a windowfarm in Vienna

 

another view of the frontside of a windowfarm in Vienna in winter (some of them are under construction):

frontside of a windowfarm in Vienna

 

We grew our cucumber plants from seed and they just took off, they covered the trellis we built and tried to climb the walls within the first few weeks! They were producing lots of male flowers but there wasn’t a female for what seemed like forever. We ended up getting tired of waiting and assumed that if we did finally get one, then we would have one (maybe two) cucumbers. Wheeeeee!! We wanted to make some pickles and after all that work, two pickles just weren’t going to cut it. So I had the hubby take some cuttings from the tomatoes he had growing at the shop and was planning on hucking the cucs & beans for some yummy heirlooms & herbs instead. In the meantime, I had stopped checking the plants for female flowers and after a few days, he noticed that there was a full blown cucumber growing! We had read that you have to hand pollenate them since the bees usually do it, so we were especially surprised to see that it had handled it all itself. Or there was a phantom insect that did the work!

Before we had the female flowers, we weren’t sure how obvious they would be. Now we see they are totally obvious and are just popping up all over the place!

So, I guess that means the cucs are going to hang around for awhile and we will replace the green beans with tomatoes. The beans seemed to be a one hit wonder for us. Wah wah wahhhh….

We’re glad that the cucs get to stick around since they’ve made such a great window cover and really bring that corner of the room to life!

Happy Growing!

-The Sanders

***By the way, you can check out an article in the May issue of Maximum Yield Magazine featuring our hydroponics store in California!

Whenever the air pump restarts it ALWAYS sends it into my 2.5 gallon reservoir and refuses to pump any water until I blow all the water out of the uptake tube. I’m using the t-valve method. Any tips on how to make it work without a check valve?

I designed this based on posts here and then made this prototype, it turned out well IMO. I have been busy with other things so I haven’t gotten any further than this but I plan on making at least a few more 3 bottle strings like this one. These will be painted and all that and I will set net pots in them. I wanted to get the image out so as to get any feedback.

Video – Window farm in progress

I have designed a simple and elegant setup… Follow the progress on my blog www.windowfarms.dk

Hello,

I don’t really know how this site works yet,
but the windowfarms project made my day today and so I had to share it. (And I have some questions)

I’m from Belgium, Europe and I live in Antwerp.
Trying to help the environment, I spend a lot of time in our garden, growing vegetables etc.
In the winter, I have always been improvising in ways to bring as much garden as possible inside the house.
I hung up bottles with plants in it, but never came up with the idea of doing it hydropincally. Until I saw the video on TED.
And so -like a lot of you, I suppose- I printed the instructions and started to build my first windowfarm….but I still haven’t finished it.

Now comes the great part: This year is my last year in highschool. It’s just a normal school, but, according to me, it surpasses a lot of other schools by giving every student a chance to improve the schools organisation. I’ve been waiting for the bimonthly forum, where we can give our opinions, for a while now, but yesterday I finally went there.
It took me until the end before I pushed my self to tell them my idea. We have these huge windows at school, through wich a large ammount of light falls in, and they would be simply perfect for windowfarms.
I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to convince them, because in Belgium, there are berely any signs of windowfarms yet.
But I might have changed that today, because my school was really enthousiastic, in a way I couldn’t have hoped for better. They basically said ’we have no other choice but to build one’

Is there any advice I can get before I tell my entire school about this?
And what type of farm will probably best suit my plan?

This made my day.

Hello all.

I have got my bottle columns up and running now.

And am doing some tests for waterproofing, timing and P.H readings.

I have added my nutrients, clay balls, the whole shooting match is ready for the plants now.

HOWEVER.

The P.H seems to keep rising into the 7′s. Not ideal. I was wondering if this may account for the high tide marks I am getting in my bottom reservoir.

It’s a sort of brownish stain.

Could it be;

A: Clay balls not washed off prperly before using?

B: The nutrients. A Rather dark liquid called “Boi-juice”. Or.

C: The very high P.H precipitating the iron out of the water and leaving a film on the reservoir?

D: Or is it plain old algea? I thought that would be green and nasty. This is brown and kind of like a dirty water mark.

I just wanted to get the whole water flow, P.H, plumbing and timing right before putting plants in

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

And I wil try to answer any questions of yours.

Thanks in advance.

Ciaran

Windowfarm Friends,

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 traveling 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.

I signed up to windowfarms not very long ago and have already set up my small windowfarm. However I have not managed to get the pump system working, I still need a few more pieces. It seems as if people outside the US might have a bit of a problem to find the right materials atleast here in Sweden it seems difficult.

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?

Hello there,

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.