I have been browsing many a seed catalogue, and I am sure that I’m going to buy a bajillion different kinds of seeds. Just to grow one plant of each variety… so…

Let’s swap seeds!!!

Is anyone else interested?

I’ll be posting some information on my second WF hopefully by this weekend, but I wanted to throw this out to see what you think.  I have peas on the bottom level and lettuce on the next level up.  The peas are about 60 days old now and doing well, and these small bugs just showed up!  They look like some type of borer. They have a white/clear body and a black head.  Any ideas what they are and how they might get here?  On the seeds? In my rock wool supply? In my rain water?

Am I the only one with bug problems?  At least my spider mites are gone now…

Bugs In My Peas

 A big THANKS to @samenrahmen for knowing what these little buggers were.  Knowing what you are dealing with is half the battle and it all makes sense now.

To document this a bit more, I am adding a few more pictures to this post and changing the title.   Here is an example of the adult that has been buzing around that I just smashed.  I am surprised that my camera took a decent picture of it as it is only about 1 mm long.

Fungus Gnat Adult

 This now explains the dying leaves on the plant.   The lower leaves are drying out and dying and this symptom is slowly working its way up the vine.  I assume this can be caused by them  feeding on my roots.  Hopefully, I have caught this in time as the upper part of the plant is flowering nicely and peas are starting to grow.

Gnat Fly Leaf Damage

 In reading up on these gnats, I see that they like really wet conditions so I am going to cut way back on the watering cycles.  I had been thinking it was a bit too wet.  I had gotten a new air pump when I started this second WF and have not gotten a good feel for how much water the peas and lettuce like.

Adult Gnat Flies on Fly Paper

I bought some fly paper type stuff from HomeDepot.  It is the darker part of the image above.  It is a long piece of sticky plastic and came all rolled up in a tube.  It is incredibly sticky and does not want to straighten out.  To make it easier to work with I cut it into smaller strips and put it on some yellow construction paper.   It naturally wanted to curl up so I made in into a cylindar and put the tie on it.   I quickly learned to use rubber gloves.  In a matter of 24 hours, there were 12 flies stuck on it. 

I am giving them less water and I have also taken out as much of the rockwool as possible to give them a smaller home.  The majority of the roots on this one are actually in the resevoir below.  It had turned itself into a deep water culture.  I have also tried some hydrogen peroxide since that is what I had already in the house.  

As a side note, everything I have been doing has been with rockwool.  When I first started and went to the hydroponics store, they were out of the small bags of the clay pellets and I did not want to buy the big “life time” supply bag.  So this is what the recommended instead.  The one advantage has been that I can “accidentally” unplug the pump for a day and the plants don’t die.

Hello!

I am very excited to set up my window farm!

I managed to play around with my air lift with a airflow valve, and I have quite a range of drips.

My question is how much water should I be cycling through my window farm in a given period of time?

Also, is it better to have a steady slow drip or to have the pump on a timer and just run the water at certain intervals?

Thanks for your help.

Melissa

Hey everyone.  I just built my first airlift windowfarm using the V2 instructions on the our.windowfarms.org home page.  There is a local hydroponics store in my town so I was able to get all of the stuff I needed from there.  They pointed me towards some nutrient solution called Envy Part A and Envy Part B.  I had initially planned to get all organic nutrients since I will be growing vegetables to eat, but it was just too expensive.  Anyway, I’ve read some about “flushing” before harvesting the vegetables, and the guys at the hydroponics store offered some flushing solution, but I was wondering if just flushing with water for 7 days would work as well.  I don’t know that much about flushing and hydroponics so any information would be nice.  Thanks!

Is any body using the juice from an earthworm farm as the nutrients for their window farm? We are planning to have both within flats in Pretoria, South Africa. We are hoping to use them both in combination not only feeding an urban population but also limiting food waste in this way.

Hi I’m Mickey and I’m building a window farm for my senior project. My kit came with butter crunch lettuce, romaine lettuce, basil, and rosemary seeds. I’m looking for an effective and easy way to germinate them before I put them in my window farm. I can find the instructions for constructing the whole window farm system but can’t locate the instructions for germinating the seeds. I remember something about putting them in a mixture of water and hydrogen-peroxide, but I can’t recall for how long. Thank you for your help.

Plants roots are suspended in clay pellets so that we can run a liquid nutrient solution over the roots without leaving them in a bunch of soggy rotting muck.

Roots bathed in liquid nutrients grow into compact hairy root networks, rather than long big roots you find in soil where plants are out searching for water below ground. The hairs  grab hold of droplets of the liquid nutrients and grow into the porous cavities of the clay pellets to find tasty little juice pockets waiting for them even when the pump is turned off.

Dandelion green roots growing around and into clay pellets

The clay pellets are a great match for drip irrigation because they hold just the right amount of this stuff around the plants’ roots. No killer sog because, like rocks or pebbles, they shed water. But way better than rocks because they hold just a little bit of moisture close by for the hairs to reeeeeach out and ahhhhha get a little sip when they need it.

Clay pellets provide no nutritional value for the plant; it all comes from the nutrient solution. However, they are not made of lava rock, which would react and change the chemical composition of the nutrient solution. They are “inert,” meaning they don’t react.

Clay pellets shed water like pebbles, but their porous interior pockets hold little droplets of liquid nutrients for plants' root hairs to find

I like them because they can be reused, so I don’t have to add to the landfill with every crop. You can clean them and dip them in boiling water between crops to sterilize them.

Nothing is ever sacred and in the spirit of R&D-I-Y, it would be great to find ways of replacing clay pellets with something that was not shipped all over the world from Germany.

However, if you are new to windowfarming, I don’t recommend that these be one of the first things you start experimenting with substituting out.  Wait until you get the hang of dealing with nutrient solution first– there are plenty of other variables to change out as you get to know the microclimate of your window.

This is why we include them in the kits for new windowfarmers.

-Britta

Does anyone have any experience with Squash / Succhini?

I have two of a ‘midnight’(miniature) variety in my WF.
(Picture in this post: http://our.windowfarms.org/2010/10/23/update-on-my-wf/ )

Both have grown to decent size and bloomed many times, but I have been unable to get them pollinated.

Is there a special trick to this?

My experience with airlift goes back to fall 1983 when I worked in a pesticides lab in Ireland.  Distilling hexane. YUCK! Stinky boring job.

I was just amazed by the air bubbles going slowly through the cooling tubes on the distillation apparatus.  There was almost total hold up of liquid as the airbubbles slowly went through the clear plastic tubes. I am not sure exactly why but it reminded me of the “perfection” that is in the krebs cycle.

It was 4 or 5 years before I put this to any use in a coffee jar vacuum pump.  That was replaced by a combined tromp and airlift pump (the pulser pump) which also depended on almost exactly the same physics as you are using now in window farms! I found the pulser effect totally by accident.  If I had not found it, I am sure I would have done something very similar to the “biofueled pump” (without biofuel) next. In fact, I did use the pulser pump to pump water from a 50 gallon barrel in a very similar way way back then.   I just found the combination of tromp and airlift more adaptable so i stuck with it.

Anyway, I just put some videos on youtube that I think can help window farmers a lot.  I do not have a windowfarm but maybe you can adapt what I show and incorporate it into your experimental systems.

The bio fueled pump might be too slow for a windowfarm, but anyway, it is here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y1p2pZaYTM  You can power it with an aquarium pump too and that is here (But then it is not biofueled anymore)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6pfE_IxVgQ It should be able to pump to 20 or 30 inches but you need the you tube to go down that much lower if you pump higher.

My little experiment with the t-joint and airlift pump is here

I did not produce any figures but if you see the videos, I am sure you can see that the  aquarium pump powered things pump fairly quickly.

The biofueled option has potential to spread the windowfarm concept to places where they have no electricity.

Greetings from sunny Florida.

I have a 2 tier/3 module per tier (6 plants) system growing cukes, cherry toms and Basil. I am about to make a DIY Co2 generator and was considering the best way to get the gas into my farm….has anyone tried this yet?

To generate Co2 I am going to use the simple yeast/sugar method.

1 gallon milk jug, tubing drilled tightly into the lid, 1 cup sugar, 1 heaping tbsp yeast, warm water.

This will generate plenty of Carbon Dioxide, no problem. My concern is distribution….has anyone used this and if so how’d you get it distributed to your farm and was it pretty even? I am considering running the tubing out of the bottles (I’ll make 2 of course)  straight up to the top of each tier with T’s attached to small lengths of tubing inserted into each plant along the way. Anyone?

Also, in my DIY Co2 generator research I found a couple of different plans that called for ”CO2 proof Tubing”….what is that? Is it necessary for tubing to be Co2 PROOF? Does the gas eat away at the tubing or something?