Hi! I want to have a window farm in the future and I have three big questions to ask for planning. I know I’m a bit rambly, so if you’re a lazy reader, the first bit of #1 is the most important.

1: What plants have you successfully grown and harvested for several months? Everywhere I look, I see people reporting on what they STARTED planting as an experiment, and maybe on what grew fastest right away or one specific problem they had, and then people seem to go silent. Window farms are a lot of time and — despite what some people say — money, for me to spend on a one month experiment. Meanwhile people are talking about things like strawberries, which I thought needed bees in order to even produce fruit. And beans, see below. Some people explain why simple leafy plants do the best, while others talk about getting complete nutrition out of their farms. I know your luck is not my luck, but what do you know can actually produce food in one of these things six months on?

2: Some foods, like cucumbers and big tomatoes, are kinda heavy. One guy is even trying watermelon! Do you have problems with towers falling over or bottles sliding sideways from the weight? Or does the weight of everything else (like the growing…pebble thingies and support beams) usually make the weight of the food itself irrelevant? Building is already complicated for me because plastic drink bottles are the one kind of container which no one I know ever buys. Later on, I’ll probably make another big post asking about all the materials I DO have.

3: Bean plants. I know nothing of them. How much food do they actually make? Since I know there’s quite a variety, let’s limit it for now to things that are non-toxic when undercooked (I AM going to undercook them at some point, I promise you), and fairly easy to find seeds for offline in the US.

Come to think of it, has anyone ever tried to make a list or database of common plants and how they do in windowfarms? It would be tedious, and handy.

Sorry to be bombarding you with these pictures, if you’re uninterested.

So, I’m just a few days away from the science fair, and I’m already disappointed in how rigourous I was not.  If I do this for next year, I’ve got some ideas of how to really science this up.

That having been said, I’ve got the

This pea blossom is in one of the 2 "just fish water" columns.

This pea blossom is in the "CO2" column.

first blossoms from my pea plants!

The first pic, you can’t really see the blossom, but it’s in there.  It’s the whitish ‘leaf’ right just up and left from centre.

The CO2 column has only been getting CO2 for the last 4 or 5 days, so there shouldn’t be loads of difference yet, even if I’m getting a meaningful amount in there.

How am I putting CO2 into this column of plants, you ask?

Read on…

If you have an aquarium that’s heavily planted with real plants, you have a nice, natural support to your filtration.  Unfortunately, the heavier the plant load, the more you run up against a limit on the plants’ growth – the amount of available CO2 in the water.  Since the concentration of CO2 will be roughly equivalent to that in the atmosphere, since the fish are not as great producer of CO2 as land animals, CO2 supplementation helps encourage plant growth.  Now you can spend LOADS of cash on a CO2 canister with all the bells and whistles ($00s of dollars) or you can have some soda pop, and DIY a CO2 generator.

2 cups of brown sugar, spooned oh-so-slowly into a pop bottle

drill a hole 1/16" smaller than the outer diameter of the airline. Cut the airline at an angle to make threading easier. Once you've got it in, hot glue a seal on both sides of the cap.

1 tsp of quick yeast (you can go as high as 1 tbsp, some say) and 1 litre of water. Don't slop the yeast on the sides of the bottle, it won't do much good there.

One nice thing about doing this instead for hydroponics instead of for an aquarium is that for the latter you need a fancy diffuser (there are, of course, DIY options).

So I just have the other end of the CO2 airline going into the top of the bag that’s around one of my plant columns.  Simple.

So, my experiment was ‘is fish water as  good as commercial hydroponics fertilizer’.  There are a few caveats to my investigation.  #1 is that I’m not stocking at true Aquaponics densities.  They fill their tanks to the gills (heh.  Get it?  To the gills.  It’s about fish) and so have a much higher nitrogen level than I have.   They would also spread this over many more plants than I am.  There’s a lot of variables, is what I’m saying.  At any rate, here’s a few examples of the growth.

taken March 23rd

taken April 3rd

Not a bad amount of growth for… what, 12 days?

That’s it for tonight. Thanks for your interest, and have a good night. Good luck with your veggies.

So, she’s running a beaut now.  I’ve got 3 columns of fish water running, and 1 of retail nutrient solution (I can get the name if you care.

I germinated seeds about 3 weeks ago, and now I’ve got all four columns running 2 very substantial bean plants each (last pics are from 10 days ago.  I’m afraid to look in the silver cube) and a mediocre pea plant.

I still haven’t put in the CO2 doping yet.  TOmorrow?  So.. .

That's aluminized plastic (cheap emergency heat blanket) around the frame. Keeps the light nice and bright inside.

Tired…

I’ll type more about what you’re looking at soon.  Promise!  I’ve just been putting this off so long I have to do something.

I thought this was worth sharing.  I needed to rearrange the order of the plants in my WF.  http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/03/20/green-bean-harvest-at-8weeks/  The jalepano on top was getting real tall and was hitting the ceiling and growing out of the sun.  The green beans grew well and were covering up the bottle beneath it.  So I moved the green bean to the top since it had fallen over anyway.  The middle is now empty and is covered by the fallen beans.  The jalepano now has the bottom and has more room to grow up. 

This is a picture of the bean roots that had grown out of the net pot.  I pruned them off and the plant is just fine.  Don’t assume your roots will stay in the net pot.  They will try to go anywhere there is mousture.  As you can tell by the shape, they collected in the bottle nozzle and a few actually were traveling down the tube that drops the nutrients from one bottle to the next.

Green Bean Roots

Updated 5/5/2011

Just to clarify, the roots above that I cut off were only the root sticking out of the net pot.  The picture below is of the netpot 2 weeks after the root pruning.   You can tell by the shape of the roots that they were starting to fill in the nozzle of the bottle again.  In general the plant was still growing ok and was starting to flower some more.  However, it was getting way to big.  I have a jalenpano in the same WF and I wanted to give it a chance and the bean was shading it to much.  So the bean made it’s way into the compost pile.

In general, I am pretty happy with the beans.  In late march, I harvested and ate 25 good size beans over the course of a couple weeks.  It would have kept flowering and the harvest could have continued If I hadn’t move things around.  But oh well.  I have to say again that these were the best tasting beans I have ever had.  Even raw they were good and I can not say that about the ones I grow outside.  If I were to do them again, I would only put one or maybe two plants in the net pot.  four was too many.

Bean Roots 2 week Followup

Beans Before Going Into Compost Bin

Here is what I did with my third window farm.  http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/01/17/shower-curtain-rod-w2l-bottles/  The green beans are now at 8 weeks and I ate the first small batch yesterday for lunch.  Alot more are on the way.  The beans are in the middle spot.  I have a jalepeno in the top spot that was planted a week earlier than the beans, but took 4 weeks to germinate, wereas the beans germinated in a matter of about 4 days.  So the jalepeno is much smaller.   I have found that any pepper plant takes long to germinate.   The bottom spot I put in radishes as an experiment.  That did not turn out so go and that I’ll document in another post.

Bean Harvest

Bean & Jalepeno

The beans are 4 plants in one pot.  At first they grew upward and were leaning on the glass, but eventually with the weight of the beans they slid down and are now hanging below the pot.  They are now covering the lower pot completely.  In retrospect, the beans would have work better lower in the WF and I don’t think I would do 4 in a pot again, maybe 2 at the most.

Bean - CloseUp

Bean Malnutrition

With this WF, I used declorinated tap water.  I filled a bucket and let it sit out for a week.  My other WFs have all been using rain water that I had stored over the winter.  This one was out of luck since I did not save enough.  As a matter of fact, just this last week and in the nick of time I set the rain barrel back up and now have rain water for all of them.

This WF has a 2 gallon resevoir and At first I was changing the nutrients out every 2 weeks.  But as they were growing larger, a few of the older leaves would turn yellow and die in a matter of a few days.  I switched to once a week, but this really did not seem to help.  Then I started checking the ph more often and noticed that it really was jumping up too high during the week, as in getting way above 7 in only a day or two.  I want to keep it around 6 and am now checking and adjusting it a few times a week.   Now that I can use the rain water I am hoping the ph creep will not be as bad.  I will also try and stretch the change over back to two weeks.

Beans At 40 Days

Chicago Blizzard

Beans At 12 days

Another thing I was trying on this WF are root covers.  I made them out of reused cottage cheese container covers.  This has really cut down on the amout of algea growing on the top of the rockwool as compared to the other WFs without them.

Beans Sprouting

Hello everyone.

I have posted a bunch of updates on my blog for all that are interested. There have been some problems with my window farm, mostly pH/nutrient lockout issues and algae.

There are still a few weeks to be posted, but I am slowly getting caught up.

Here are the links to the individual posts:

Week 3.1 - Planting the new column: http://melissawindowfarm.blogspot.com/2011/03/week-31-planting-new-column.html
Week 4 – Holy cow a BEAN!: http://melissawindowfarm.blogspot.com/2011/03/week-4-holy-cow-bean.html
Week 5 – Problems starting to manifest: http://melissawindowfarm.blogspot.com/2011/03/week-5-problems-starting-to-manifest.html
Week 6 – Bountiful Beans: http://melissawindowfarm.blogspot.com/2011/03/week-6-bountiful-beans.html
Week 7 – Attack of the algae!: http://melissawindowfarm.blogspot.com/2011/03/week-7-attack-of-algae.html

This gets me caught up to March 4. I have been taking pictures every weekend of my progress.

</shameless self promotion>

Ha ha, anyway, let me know what you think.

Thanks!!!

-Melissa

I noticed that the bean plant’s leaves started to look pretty bad. Something is definitely wrong and it doesn’t appear to be pest damage, so I’m assuming either too much or too little nutrients (too much is more likely) or too much water.

After testing, it seems like the pH was a bit low (5.5-6), and the water was probably running too frequently. One bean rotted off and died. I cut the total watering time per day in half, spaced farther apart and the starting sponges are still staying damp all day. Hopefully this helps the plants improve. I might have to cut back on the watering even more on colder/damper days.

I also took the vertical hoses down and cleaned them, washed out the bottom bottles and added new water, and a weaker nutrient solution. I need to be more vigilant about refreshing the water… but can no longer get the bottom caps off the reservoir bottles! I torqued at the lids trying to get them off for what seemed like an hour while the water dribbled out slowly. Finally had to remove the cap and chain support and force the bottom bottle off (didn’t twist off like it twisted on). The result, got it clean, but flaked off a ton of the paint. Lame.

Photos of the Beans:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mookmonkey/5489671051/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mookmonkey/5503582238/

This is the windowfarm I made, very fast with materials on hand, too excited with the project to take my time and work diligently. So it looks awkward and I’m growingly fund of it, because it looks like a big sail on a child’s boat.

I discovered two structural defects after the construction (apart from it’s lack of symetry – which is only an aesthetic issue), and one missing component.

1. If you look closely at the two upper bottles, you will notice that I cut two windows in each bottles and I positionned them one behind the other to face the window pane. A 90 degree turn would have been necessary in order to position them sideways. The result ? One plant is placed behind the other and I’ll have to force it to make a detour to get out through its back window.

As I’m not willing to remove my treillis, it’ll have to stay like this, though.

2. Speaking of the treillis, which is made of three wooden dowels about two and a half foot long, and some bits of yarn, I first pierced holes in two of the bottles so my dowel would get through the bottle right along the diameter’s line. This is a mistake, as I realized as soon as I put the dripping system back on.

Each drop just landed directly over the dowel, soaking it and exploding in small droplets. So I had to modify the holes in the bottles in order to push the dowels aside and allow the droplets to fall where they were intended to.

3. Finally, the missing components are simply the bottle caps. Perforated right in their middle, they would direct the droplets to make them fall in the middle of the next bottle. Right now, a small amount of water is splashing  a little bit on the outer sides of the second and third bottle. As I didn ‘t have the bottle caps to begin with, no regrets there, but they would have been handy.

The plants growing in there are (from bottle to top) one Blue Lake climbing bean (germination date : January 27th) and one Trionfo Violet climbing bean (February 5th), two Jewel Mixed nasturtiums in the middle bottle (February 7th) and two tomato plants up there, one Christmas Grape cultivar and one Yellow Pearshaped (February 5th).

The beans are real giants (I expect them to reach 6 foot high or more – I will have to train them down at one point), and the tomatoes are more compact training varieties of an undeterminated habit (e.g. they produce a succession of fruits over a long period of time instead of one main harvest).

The nasturtiums are supposed to grow “only” 16in. high. By the way, nasturtiums are interesting edible plants because you can eat their young leaves and stems as well as their flowers and their seeds (when  harvested from the plant while still fresh). All these parts have a peppery taste and the seeds may be used as a good (and economical) substitute to capers, fresh or pickled.

You can grow anything but root vegetables.

Here is a list of plants we have grown in windowfarms using supplemental lighting from CFL bulbs:

Fruiting Plants
Okra, cherry tomatoes, scallop squash, small cucumbers, beans, strawberries, peppers, peas, japanese eggplant.

Leafy Greens
Arugula, bok choy, brocolli rabe, kale, chard, radicchio, watercress, chives, various microgreens, and many varieties of lettuce.

Herbs
Rosemary, cilantro, basil, thyme, oregano, parsley, mint, and sage.

Edible Flowers
Nasturtium, violets, and marigolds.

We have had varying degrees of success with each depending on the particular microclimate of the window, the amount of natural sunlight available, the drip rate, the type of nutrients, our ability to fight pests, the source of the seeds, and the particular variety of each species.

You can actually grow some pretty big, productive plants even though the containers are small because plants growing in hydroponic systems grow differently from dirt plants. Instead of growing large long roots that have to grow far from the plant to find new water and nutrients in the soil, plants grow more compact rootballs that grow a lot of root hairs for more surface area to absorb more of the water and nutrients you are sending directly to the roots.

Check out how big and healthy some of the plants in this early system were.

Many more varieties of plants are certainly possible but we need your help testing what works because we can only grow so much ourselves. We need you to try out different plants and techniques and share your knowledge about what works. The goal is to get the most nutrients and the most variety for the carbon footprint of the systems.

As we refine the website, we will create ways that you can track and share your results. In the meantime, please focus on getting your system ready and working well and in the meantime, just please be sure to make posts and tag them well. We strongly encourage new users to start with the simple 3-plant airlift system (there are some chronic problems with the reservoir system so we are moving away from it).

This video was taken more recently on March 30th, 2010:

silox – 1st Week Progress and 2nd Vertical Plant Tower w/ New Plants – March 30th, 2010

This is an update after the 1st week of growing in the 1st vertical plant tower and after building/planting in the 2nd vertical tower of our hydroponic window farm.

We have learned a few things just in the 1st week of setting up, planting and running our hydroponic window farm that I would like to share with you.

*  Mentioned it in my last post, but I cannot stress enough, water quality is VERY IMPORTANT.  The first couple of days I used our city tap water to power the 1st vertical plant tower(before my first video/blog until 3/22/2010).  This was also before I purchased a simple PH testing kit.  The electronic ones are nice, but I stuck with the manual method using a small container and drops to gauge the PH for costs reasons, plus I don’t think I’ll have to use it that often due to the reservoir sizes and the water I use now.  I tested the PH of the city tap water I was using and it was over 7 which is not good. Aside from an unbalance PH, the city tap water also contains chlorine, flouride, other chemicals and various minerals.  Even though water can be naturally dechlorinated by letting it sit 24-48hrs in an uncovered bucket, you still have to worry about all of the other nasty stuff and the PH of the water.  Now, I could go through the trouble of filtering my water which I may do in some form or fashion in the future, but I find it easier and cheaper to purchase RO(Reverse Osmosis) water locally from 1 of the 2 sources less than a mile away which I did and I can happily say I’m now using it.  Right out of the gate, the PH was perfect and no impurities whatsoever.  An unbalanced PH can cause the plants to stop uptaking some or all nutrients in order to protect itself(from what I’ve read), same with all of the other chemicals inside the water.  We do have some indoor AC units that collect several gallons of condensation daily in collection containers when they are working hard all day to cool down the apartment, so we will probably look into using that water instead when the time comes to keep them on.  We are also considering purchasing an atmospheric water generator such as an Ecoloblue which also collects water from the atmosphere/humidity in the air, but also filters it afterwards which allows it to be used for drinking/cooking etc(7-8 gallons a day!) and the hydro reservoirs.

* Adequate lighting is also very important to keep the plants photosynthesizing which equals produce!  I think it’s probably safe to say that most window farms will probably not have 100% of the needed light to produce as quickly or as much as most people desire, but I could be wrong here.  That is certainly the situation in our setup and while we try to use the natural sunlight when it’s available for a few hours a day, we’ve supplemented to make up for the lack of desired light.  We added a 4ft 54W florescent bulb complete with reflector to our window farm and attached to the sliding glass door facing the vertical plant towers.  We reshaped the reflector to open up and allow for light to be casted almost 180 degrees towards the side of the plants which I believe really helps the light be as efficient as possible and keeping unwanted light from shining out of our window towards the neighbors.  You can tell the plants really are reaching to grow towards the light, so much that I’m going to need to move the vertical plant tower back just a hair to keep them from touching it, hehe.  I have the light on a timer for 12hr on/12hr off(6:30am to 6:30pm).

* Attaching the wooden dowels that support all of the plant containers on the vertical plant tower to the reservior for extra support sounded like a good idea at first, but presented some logistical maintenance problems later on.  We corrected this by mounting a aluminum L bracket (the kind designed to hold up a simple shelf) to the top of the window area so they wooden dowels can held straight up via a hook driven into the top of the dowel and inserted into a hole on the end of the L bracket.  All of the weight of the plants/dowel is resting on the floor via the bottom of the wooden dowel and the hook/L bracket assembly is to keep it from tipping over.  This allows for us to easily move or rotate the vertical plant tower and remove the reservior for water maintenance(water replacment and cleaning).  This will also allow me to move the vertical plant towers back some from the light as I mentioned above with a simple modification or two.

* We are using the caps that came with the bottles and recreated the holes in them to be smaller directly in the middle of the cap.  The plan does not call for these caps AFAIK.  Why did I use them?  To keep water from splashing out of the containers onto the floor.  Without the caps or using caps with large holes in them allows for water to flow unevenly which results in droplets that are thrown out the container and that adds up quickly over a few days.  I recut the caps to use a smaller hole(5mm) and this seems to work very well.

Recap of plants we have growing, locations and dates planted

Plants on 1st vertical tower(far left) from top to bottom – planted on 20100321:
1. Butterleaf Lettuce
2. Green Beans
3. Strawberries
4. Jalapenos

Plants on 2nd vertical tower(middle or right) from top to bottom – planted on 20100330:
1. Brussel Sprouts
2. Cauliflower
3. Broccoli
4. Eggplant

I thought it would be interesting to do a little math on the cost to run the light and pump.  With my current setup(1x 54W florescent light and 1x Petco 9904 pump), assuming a 30day month and $0.15/KWh power rate, it costs a mere approximate of $3.50 a month to run the light 12hrs a day and the pump non-stop.  Not bad!!

Our future plan is to put a 3 vertical plant tower in the same window on the far right.  In order to do so, we will need to purchase another 4ft 54W florescent light w/ reflector(lights can be daisy-chained together out of the box), another air pump and 4 more 1.5L Ozarka water bottles.  We pre-purchased all of the other materials with the expectations of creating at least 3 vertical plant towers total.

Will try to post an update in about a week’s time.  Happy window farming!