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’ve started tomatoes and peppers in the past using cheap florescent lights, I’ve read good and bad regarding the LED so I decided to reuse the florescent lights for my Window Farm – so far it’s working well…  Growing Tomatoes and Cilantro.

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!

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?

Here we are at 5 months since building my window farm and want to give a general update.   Strawberries are growing well and have been flowering and fruiting.   The plants are growing in rockwell cubes and lately I have the airpump timer running three times a day for about 3hours at a time.  The rockwool holds alot of moisture.  I have a small fan that runs when the airpump runs to help with pollination.  I had tried hand pollinating for awhile, but I do not want to spend the time.

This last month (July)  I have been having bug problems and want to get peoples opinions on how to solve them. The first I believe are spidermites. I can see the little white bugs and the little webs on the leaves. All I have been doing to control them is to take the plants outside and hose the leaves and roots off. However, a few weeks later they are back.

The second are little white larvae like bugs (1-2 mm long) that I see floating in the resevoir and have seen them on the roots. The photo below shows them and am not sure if they are related to the mites. They apeared around the same time, but I think they are unrelated. Maybe they are coming in with the rain water I am using.  I clean and refill the resevoir once a week and they still show up.

In one of the bottles, I had made a simple net cup out of a yogart cup with holes drilled in it. I think the cup is too small for the strawberries. The roots have grown out of the cup and circle in the bottle cap below.

In the other two bottles, I have regular net cups which are much larger than the yogart cup and the roots have never ventured beyond the cup itself.