February 10, 2012

Hi all!

I was in desperate search of more information for Plants I could grow, and I found quite a measure of information. I will just post all the plants I found information on, but not all of them can be grown hydroponically (like root plants). I hope I will be able to add even more information in time (please help gather more information which I can add) and it would be great to add a section ‘tested by window farms’ or something to verify the information.

Hope you want to help and have fun researching and using this information.

1.      Electro-conductivity (EC) or Conductivity factor (cF) can be expressed as either millisiemens (mS), cF or parts per million (PPM) 1 mS(/cm?) = 10cF = 700ppm

2.      The pH and electro~conductivity values specified here are given as a broad range. It should be noted that specific plant requirements will vary according to regional climatic conditions, and from season to season within that region.

3.      As a general rule, plants will have a higher nutrient requirement during cooler months, and a lower requirement In the hottest months.  Therefore, a stronger nutrient solution should be maintained during winter, With a weaker solution during summer when plants take up and transpire more water than nutrients.

4.      KNOW YOUR CROP.     Plant EC or cF may vary according to the stage of growth. For example, cucumber prefer cF 20 when establishing, and cF 25 after the first harvest. Between and 7 weeks after first harvest, the optimum cF is 17.

5.      For easy growing reference, plants that share broad groupings of low (L), medium (M) or high (H) can be grown together using the same nutrient electro- conductivity, providing middle ground cF and ph are adopted.

6.      The nutrient solution should be discarded at regular intervals. Should there be a requirement to flush the growing bed, the system should be flushed with fresh nutrients (run-to-waste) rather than water to avoid starving or stressing the plant.

 
The Column ‘Light’ is for the Day- / Night ratio needed (or helpful) for flowering
‘Water’ should someday contain Tipps how much Water (preferred in drip her minute or something) or just low, medium and a general description of that range here.
‘Sun’ will say how much sun/ Shadow the Plant likes
‘Tested’ If tested by someone in the commentary and maybe how hard it is to do it (in planing)
‘Groups’ (L,M,H) as described above, ‘Nutritions needed’ would be a suggestion of Nutrition Solution and other Tipps
Something in brackets (9) means a maximum or minimum not the optimal, something in brackets (?) with a question mark means that the sources said different things or suggested  for example that they used the same EC as for the Strawberries. So it is not born out of a sure source.
 

Read the rest of this entry →

This isn’t our first hydro build, by far, but it is our first one to be hung in a window! It’s in an east facing window in our living room & we love how it brings the same esthetic as a houseplant, but the benefits of FOOD!

This was about a week after we set it up. We started the beans & cucumbers from seed in a little greenhouse on top of the fridge. The top two pots are cucumbers and the bottom has 4 green beans.

We hung the pots with some hemp we had in our craft surplus & made the trellis out of the hemp & bamboo stakes. I’ve even made a bow and arrow out of the bamboo!

This is how the middle & bottom pot get watered. There is a piece of bamboo shoved up there to keep the tubing straight.

Here’s the reservoir, made from a cereal tupperware we got at Target & some ducting tape to make it lightproof. We took the little hinged pour spout off of the lid and ran the watering and drainage tubing through the opening. You can also see the timer there, right now we run the water pump for 15 mins every 2 hours from 6am to 6pm. As the plants get bigger we might have to adjust the schedule, but for now it works out.

We use a water pump we had around the house and it works great until the water level in the res gets down to about 25%. It’s a good reminder that it’s time for a refill without having the pump run dry.

Our first sight of beans!

Beans, beans….

….and more BEANS!!

Okay, enough beans. Here’s our first cucumber flower!

We’re getting a lot of male flowers, just waiting for that female! Well, that’s what we have so far. If you have any specific questions on what we used or how we use it leave a comment or send a message & we’d love to share!

Happy Growing!

-The Sanders

January 19, 2012

As an addition to Brittas Light Blog-Post, I want to share with you what I researched.

This Blog is about Photoperiodism, an phenomenon which we can use to influence our Plants if we want to. But there exist many other means to influence Plants like Temperature, Color of the Light,  intesity of Light, Nutritions, Ph,…

Photoperiodism is about the length of the light and dark period in 24h.  With the length of uninterrupted darkness as a critical Part.

Short-day Plants (SD) need fewer than a certain number of hours of light in 24 hours to maintain or induce a special effect.

Long-day Plants (LD) need more than a certain number of hours of Light.

Intermediate-day Plants (ID) need more than … hours of light but less then … .

Day-neutral Plants (DN) are indifferent to the length of light for the effect you want.

Temperature can influence a Plants category. And some Plants need short days for a time before they become Long-day Plants (and the other way Round). Some need their special Light periode or they wont flower (or somthing)(absolute Effect) and some just benefit from their Light period and flower more (quantitative/qualitativ Effect).

We want to influence Flowering

For that effect I have found some Tables of Plants and their categories:

If nothing noteted behind they are probably absolute (or not) but it definitly has an effect. The Latin names are from the Book and the explanation is from wikipedia and can be falsly interpreted by me.

Short-day Plants

Allium cepa (lT<8° for sev. weeks otherwise DN, q?) – Onion – ger: Zwiebel

Amarantus caudatus/graecizans (q?) – Grain alternative, vegetable
Read the rest of this entry →

I’m trying again to grow lettuce, snap peas, and green beans. I’m starting in dirt and wondering a few things.

1. How large should the plants be before moving to the WF?
2. Should I rinse off all the dirt?
3. How many plants should I put per mesh pot?
4. If I should put multiple per mesh pot, how far should I space the seedlings?

Thanks!!

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