I’m about to build my first WF. While I generally love the idea of growing food at home, the free design of WF 3.0 is a bit of an eyesore as such. I wanted to come up with something that’ll still be a full grown window farm, but is still approved by the wife.

Update: Second Draft

Thanks for the input everyone. I came up with a simpler less work intensive solution: flower pots. I went to a hardware store to look at PVC pipes, and stumbled upon some plastic orchid flower pots. They seemed right size and only cost 1,99 a piece, so I got two for testing. The pots have a dent in the bottom, kinda like wine bottles. See the drawing. This type of construction prevents the container from draining out completely. Not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

I also decided to try string instead of metal wire, since I couldn’t find proper parts for attaching the wire to the pots. Here’s a picture with initial string based suspension:

Drawing:

First Draft

Here’s my first draft on an improved design. I didn’t bother drawing the irrigation system in detail since it’s not really important in this context. The main idea is that we’ll encase the water bottle, suspension system and the irrigation system in painted PVC pipe. Any other pipe should do as well. My first draft doesn’t depict how exactly the pipe and bottle are attached to the suspension system. I haven’t really made up my mind on how I should implement it. Anyway, the PVC pipe should be sort of fixed into the suspension wire system, while the bottle and the plant are easy to remove. It’s not really feasible to remove the pipe, since the wires and the irrigation hose run through the pipe.

Comments and improvement ideas welcome

See the next post for construction details and pics.

I’m new to this and have yet to make my own windowfarm; born, bred and living in Reykjavik, Iceland.  The idea of using my time and resources to grow my own vegetables, greens and fruit is very exciting to me.

But after researching the articles here a little, there is one BIG thing bugging me about the whole thing.  Why use all those synthetic materials to grow food?  Why not try to design a system that uses natural materials like glass, wood etc. as much as possible?  Best would be to use only natural materials, of course!  Don’t know if that is practical though.

What are your suggestions and ideas on this issue?  I would love to get some feedback on the use of natural materials only.

New Pictures:

I took some more pictures of my farm as it’s evolved. The reservoir, airlift and lighting are the biggest changes. I also included some detailed shots of materials I’ve used.

My reservoir is suspended from the steel wires that hold my bottles and stabilizes the whole thing. It's 2 centimeters above ground.

This shows my happy beans and thriving tomatoes. They really seem to like the led's I installed.

This is my version of the pulser pump. It works best of all the attempts I undertook.

These are the different sizes of tubing used in the pulser pump. The brand is Gardena

The check valve. I found this in an aquarium store

detail of the suspended reservoir

top of the farm, they sure love that bulb

as they grow too close to the bulbs, they burn their leaves even though there's hardly any heat emitted by the led's

Hi all

I have quite some experience with my farm so far which I’d like to share. As you can see from the picture, it grew. I now have 8 containers made from 2l fanta bottles with net pots in them. The reservoir is made from an Ikea container named Rationell. They make it from recyled plastic bottles. It has a lid that closes perfectly and blocks out any light. The airlift tubes are wrapped around a net pot and sunk into the reservoir by a stone i put into the net pot. I have strawberries, peppers, cherry tomatoes and beans growing, the 2 remaining containers will get more tomatoes and another sort of beans. After experimenting with wine bottles and using a mixture of techniques taken from @eloinen and @jamesnutter, I went back to plastic bottles, but keeping the 2mm steel cables for suspending the bottles. In my opinion, it looks beautiful and is incredibly sturdy. With the wine bottles, it all wasn’t holding together very well and I experienced quite some leakage. I had some ph problems with my old setup, but it all seems fine now.

Pump

I have my pump on a day timer. It runs for 15 minutes every 2 hours. It has a break between 1am and 7am. For the end and the start of the cycle, I let the pump run for 30 minutes.

Airlift

I have two individual t-joint airlifts installed. What I noticed is that they take a while before they start performing well when installed for the first time or after changing the water in the reservoir (i.e. they come out of the water). I guess this is due to air in wrong parts of the hoses. In the beginning, I always fiddled around with the installation because I thought something was wrong. However my finding is to just let it run for an hour or so and see if it sorts itself out.

Water exit on top

You may see on the pics that they’re not identical on the 2 columns. Actually this was unintended but proves as a good solution for my pepper. It doesn’t like to much water, and the short end shoots most of the water  on the bottles wall, making it flow down directly to the next bottle while only a few drops now and then actually get into the container.

Water and nutrients

I’m running my farm on some bought nutrients which seem to work fine. I change the water about every week to 10 days, checking the pH every now and then. It’s usually between 7.2 and 7.8. Once, I had it hitting 8, don’t know why and after a water change it never happened again.

Fortunately, we don’t have chlorine in tap water here in Switzerland, so no need to air it out first.

On my to-do list:

• Adding lighting. I ordered a 20W solar kit with a battery, charger, alternating-current converter and a bunch of red-and-blue LED growing bulbs which should arrive any day now. I want my garden to be independent from the power grid. It is quite an investment and I will have to grow a lot of veggies for a return on investment. But for me, it makes no sense having to buy a lot of electricity to grow plants.
• Starting a worm-tea manufacturing process.

Edit: I put a lot of info in the pic’s descriptions, but don’t know why it’s not displaying. Anyone know what went wrong?

Hello. I just received my kit and have begun getting my window farm together. A couple questions…

I spray painted the sections of the water bottles with a couple of coats of white primer. Though I can not see through it, when I put my hand behind the bottle, I can see the shadow of my fingers. Is this enough coverage to prevent damage to the roots?

Also, what are some good and productive plants to grow? I would like to stick with vegetables.  Are peas, bean, cherry tomatoes, baby squash too difficult to grow as they are bigger plants? Also, what types of lettuces would be good to grow? Ideally, I would like continuous growing (so I would pick some and they will continue to regenerate or grow as) as opposed to heads that I would pick and then have to replant.  I am thinking of growing swiss chard, arugula, and kale for sure, possibly bok choy, and the items I listed above. Basically, any help, advice, or tips would be greatly appreciated!! Thanks.

Hey guys, newbie with a quick question here.

I’m building my first window farm and when i wrap the template around the bottles the support holes aren’t across from one another.  They’re a little closer than 180 degrees from each other.  Is that how they’re supposed to be?  Or is maybe my printer fudging the template a little.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

-KikoB

We’ve just finished all the bottles to our giant windowfarm that’s going to be hanging at Kulturhuset during June.

The rawmaterial to the windowfarm. 150 soda bottles.

We drilled holes in the bottom with a sawdrill. This gave us really nice equally round holes to fit the bottles in. We also cut out two holes for the plants since we’re going to plant double in some bottles and we want the plants to be visible from both sides. Instead of cutting the holes with a knife we used a soldering iron and melted the plastic into shape we wanted. This gave a really nice edge to the holes that’s a lot softer, rounder and kinder to the plants. I can really recommend it. We also made two small holes in the sides where the crossbars that are going to hold the bottles attached to the bars will go.

Hanging out the laundry.

We’re using two different types of bottles: 1,5 liter soda-bottles from Coca-cola that will hold the netcups and the plants and 0,5 liter Plantbottles, a new type of recyclable PET bottles that are partly made of organic materials which reduce the carbon footprint. The smaller bottles will not have plants in them but will be inserted in the columns so that the people looking at the windowfarm cen see the water dripping through the system.

After this we cleaned all the bottles, hung them out to dry and started painting. We dipped the bottles in paint to get a even coat and minimum hassle with spill on to the parts of the bottles that shouldn’t be painted. We chose a nice gray colour that will make the green from the plants stand out! After that all we had to do was watch the paint dry…

Check out the video of the painting process.

The finished result.

/Daniel & Kristoffer

http://KONSTruktioner.info

Seems like we aren’t the only ones who can come up with interesting thing to make out of plastic bottles:

Few ! It seems it took me as much time to post this one as to build the real thing. But here it is.  I wanted to make a plastic-free windowfarm that would be appealing to the eye and would blend nicely with our Victorian house, from the inside as well as from the outside. (In French, I like to call it “potager vertical” – vertical vegetable garden).

I wanted a sustainable system, sturdy, easy to handle and that I could easily push away from the window, just like shutters.  At first, I envisioned to pump up the water with an airlift system and maybe l’ll come back to the idea, after all. But having free access to those slow drip tubes made me dream of an electric-free system as well. And how about autonomy : a system that would run by itself or with very few maintenance for up to five or six days ?

Finally, I wanted to nourish my plants with the manure from my earthworm composter.

In the beginnings of my experimentation, my slow-drip system  allowed me 3 to 4 days of autonomy, providing that I readjusted the dripping flow once or twice a day. But then, I discovered that  my plants didn’t need as much water (I have rock wool in my pots as well as clay pellets). So, I’m slowing the flow and closing it off completely during the night. That way, I expect to make my upper reservoirs last for more than seven days before having to refill them (with fresh water and nutrients – the old water will be fed to my ornemental plants, which are planted in soil).

No splashing problems so far : My pots are only 5” to 6” apart, one under the other. Each drop don’t gather enough speed to explode into many droplets and splash everywhere. Also, to direct each drop towards the middle of the pot right under it, I took a Hydroton pellet of just the right size and blocked up the draining hole of the pots with it, making sure that it would protrude outside of (under) the pot. The droplets then gather at the lower part of the clay pellet and are therefore nicely centered before making their dive into the next level of the installation. Eventually, I suspect I will have to introduce a mesh between the clay pellet and the pot’s hole (a short shoe lace should do the thing) to prevent the plants’ foliage from diverting the flow of water outside the pots. We’ll see…

When you click on photos, you have further explanations. After the photos, you’ll find a list of materials and a few more explanations.

The tools I used : hammer, screwdriver, long-nose plier, nail.

I thought the shower rod design http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/01/07/my-manhattan-windowfarm/ by Dave, @dhult was brilliant so I “borrowed” the idea for my next one.  I had an old shower rod laying around and it fits perfectly in my bay window.  My other two WFs use 2L pop bottles and so does this one.  The 4″ net pot fits in well into the 2L bottle.   My Home Depot had the ground clamp ($1.46), however it did not have that style pipe hanger and neither did the Menards store.  I had to improvise.  I used a 4″-5″ adjustable hose clamp ($1.49) in its place and drilled a hole in it to connect it to the ground clamp.

The other change that is different than my others is that I drilled a 1.5″ hole in the top of the bottles in stead of the 1″.  The 1″ allowed the bottles to be screwed together for some additional support, but the extra support is not needed here.  The 1.5″ hole allows the neck of the upper bottle to fit deeper into the lower bottle making the column a little more compact and easier to disassemble.

I still have to cover the bottles and resevoir to keep out the light, but I have to figure out what to plant next.  Overall, I like this design more than my last two since it has the advantage of easily taking the resevoir out.

Shower Curtain Rod WF Overall View

Shower Rod mouting w/Pipe Clamp

2L Bottlw w/4" Net Pot

1/18/2011 Update – Here is a video of the pump in action.    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKjkFIcBLj4   This is the same “Tee” style pump I have been using on all my WFs.   There’s a good picture of it in this post.  http://our.windowfarms.org/2010/12/04/strawberries-9-months-new-wf-first-snow-of-the-year/  The water does go up and around the rod pretty well and its fun to watch.  The total lift is only 42 inches.  Later on when it is full of algae it will be less interesting and I’ll probably straighten it out then.

I have checked with the local ice mountain and they don’t distribute these and the local recycling center will not let me look through the plastic they have. If I had the $ I would by from the project.