My basil is coming along, slowly but surely. The uploader keeps tilting this photo so it’s on its side.

Cherry tomatoes. They’re also soldiering on.

I’m worried about my lettuce, which is sort of scraggly and sad-seeming. I think it might be the constant temperature changes in the apartment, as the weather here in Alabama has been cycling between mild and cold. I added another cube with some snow peas in it. I think they might help provide some shade for when it warms up again and stays warm. Any advice would be very welcome.

The pattypan squash is my favorite. It’s vigorous and seems very happy.

Advice for my scraggly lettuce? The pump system still isn’t perfect. I really need waterproof tape, but I think it’s gotten better since I increased the size of my reservoir and cable-tied the intake tube to a rock to keep it at the bottom.

some lettuce and eatable flowers:

a windowfarm in vienna

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

I’ve got a east facing window in the Sunset district of San Francisco and I just started growing Oregano, Freckled Lettuce and Peas! I’m very excited and thankful to this whole community for helping me get up and going. I’ve posted a picture below (pre-planting of lettuce and peas).

I just purchased a timer for my air pump and I’m trying to figure out, well… the timing. Right now I have 3 starter plants, 3L of water to 3.75mL of FloraNova7-4-10 nutrient, a pH right around 7.0 and blues eyes and blonde… oh sorry, wrong forum. I have been watering on a 1 hr on/30min off cycle which, as far as I can tell, has not caused any serious natural disasters. My timer has 20 on/off settings.

So first question, how long can I let these guys dry out for? I’ve heard some people turn their pump off overnight (such as my anti-bubbling couchsurfers yesterday). I know this can vary a lot, but anyone have any advice?

Second, how often do I need to change out my water/nutrient solution? When it evaporates? Every full moon?

Thanks again everyone, what an awesome resource you have created!

Eric

I heard about window farm from one of the TEDx video and felt it’s a nice idea to do. I live in an apartment (Hartford, CT, USA) and I’m interested to get started on this. A short intro, I have no knowledge on farming except having interest to grow something for myself.

Is this enough to get started? Will it be profitable to get it started for growing strawberries or beans…etc? Suggestions and advise please, of course I will be buying the kit from windowfarm due to lack of time to setup the whole thing.

Thanks in advance for getting this group together.

Thanks to everyone’s advice, experiments, and idea-sharing, I have completed my first system (version 2.0 airlift)! But I have a few questions:

1. When I watch YouTube videos of other folk’s systems, the water seems to be really flowing. I get a drip every few seconds, but the airlift tube is definitely mostly air, pushing up the occasional bead of water. The tubes in the videos seem to be mostly water, with the occasional bubble of air. I have incorporated the suggestions from other similar troubleshooting posts and comments, but I still feel like I have a suction problem. Below is a photo including design notes. I would really appreciate any thoughts (or directions to earlier posts which address this).

2. My pump is very quiet but the tube gurgling sound is obnoxiously loud. I inserted the top tube into a small bottle with holes per the “silencer” instructions, but this only seemed to magnify the echo noise. Has this happened to anyone? Is there an alternative to the silencer bottle?

Thank you all for your help and support! Sincerely,

Mark

Bloomington, Indiana

I just finished my second windowfarm, but first I will summarize last year’s windowfarm.  It was based on the V2 airlift.  My new system is based on the t-joint, and I’ll make another post for that system.

I have nice tall windows, so I figured I would need a deep reservoir to push the water all the way up.  I picked up this 18″ glass vase at Ikea:

V2 airlift in Ikea's Bladet vase. A bit pricey, but a nice deep reservoir.

With this reservoir and a rigid tube, I was able to get over 8 feet of lift.  I had occasional trouble with air flowing back into the reservoir, rather than the tube.  In the picture, you can see the curvature in the bottom flexible tube that I inserted my needles into.  Keeping this straight was important to keeping the air flowing upwards.

The rigid tube was fixed to a 4 foot wooden dowel and taped to the outside of the reservoir.  At the top, I zip-tied the tube to a cheap curtain rod.  The bottles were initially fixed to the rigid tube, but later the plants became too heavy,  so I separated the bottles from the tube and hung them on their own:

An old eye-drop bottle worked as a great muffler:

Gurgle silencer.

I potted a couple plants per net cup, and would remove any slow growers as needed.  The goal was two plants per cup:

One cup of jalapenos.

3 cups total of tomatoes.

The large reservoir also made it easy to add nutrients, and measure and adjust pH levels with baking soda.

The tomatoes where cherry tomatoes, but not dwarf plants.  I didn’t realize this, but 2 full size cherry tomato plants per cup was too many.  By the time the 6 tomato plants grew to 3 feet tall each, I realized my windowfarm was headed for trouble:

About a month's worth of growing.

I was also having airlift issues at this time.  I never really figured out why.  I made a few attempts at re-configuring the system by removing tomato plants to make it shorter.  The tomatoes had relied upon each other and their particular position in the window for support.  This made removing plants a debacle, and in the end I had to take them out, leaving the jalapenos.  With only one bottle in my farm, I could use a smaller reservoir, which was a 3 liter water bottle:

Reconfigured WF, leaving only the jalapenos.

In this new configuration, the jalapenos grew just fine, but I’m going to try tomatoes again.  Any tips on growing tomatoes in a windowfarm would be appreciated!

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.

I did cut off some of the dead/wilted leaves from the pea stalk, but while it’s not “leaning” as bad as it was, it’s not sticking back up yet and it’s been a week (Maybe i’m rushing things?)

Since they initially sprouted out of the growing material, I’ve been adding recommended amounts of Pure Blend Pro Grow (3-2-4) in the reservoir water (Mixing 3 – 5mL in a 2L bottle before adding to/topping up the reservoir). I don’t yet have a way to measure the PH in the water, but plan to pick up a test kit during the week. (Would an Aquarium PH test kit work well?)

Any recommendations anybody has to save my plants would be helpful!