Hello, I’ve attempted my first window farm this week as a prototype for class. It’s been a bit difficult to find proper supplies in Hong Kong due to language barriers. Challenges and questions I’ve come across while exercising my poor engineering skills. I will be using black socks to cover the bottom of the bottles.

1. My seedlings have already been attacked twice with aphids and fungus gnats in it’s growing plugs. I had to start a fresh batch. If the seedlings are already so sensitive to the  moisture and humidity, how soon will my window farm be attacked by these pest? Anyone have experience with handling this in a humid country?

2. My tubing is too stiff to direct it away from the seedling. I’ve seen some systems using a toothpick or wooden chopstick, but my result was a moldy chopstick. I ended up using a fishing wire just to hold it down and a tape to keep the tube in place. I obviously need to find a better alternative. 

3. Reservoir problem. Due to the limited space in HK, I don’t have the luxury to have a big bottle for reservoir so I attempted to use a ketchup bottle on the bottom. I found the tip was a good way to plug the tubing in (I still need to reinforce it with plumbers tape, but haven’t found it yet).

4. Cutting through plastic was the biggest challenge.  I am not a very handy person, but I attempted to use the drill to make some holes on the bottom of the bottles but the bottom is thicker than the rest of the bottle, so I am not able to cut through it. In the end, I made a big circle but the bottles don’t fit perfectly. Any suggestions? I thought about using sticks to reinforce it.

5.I wanted to try out using water beads instead of clay pellets. Anyone have any success in it?

I have only done this outside but it probably works good inside too. The advantages are, no pump, can use dirty water, very low tech, can work for a long time unattended.
Best vid for understanding it is http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3yQOVUR1TpQ

Playlist is at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkzXlmAwZTZdjGtjJpCYm2gSGVGwA033M&feature=view_all
Brian

I’ve recently finished my second windowfarm project with fourth grade elementary school children, and I’ve discovered an incredible new world. After seeing  Britta Riley’s TED lecture, I figured I really should try and build an aquaponic windowfarm system with the children I teach.

The difference this time was that we’ve decided to go at it as a project based course (PBL). 14 meetings, 75 minutes each. We’ve started by planning the system together, acquiring the materials, building the system- including a wooden hanging rack, taking care of the plants, the fish, and the pumps. After the system was set up we’ve started following the plants’ growth. We’ve had 2 columns  running to a fish aquarium with 5 goldfish, and one column with a bucket with water and fertilizer. Each column had different types of plants to compare their growth rate. The children were in charge of everything – taking care of the windowfarm, following the farm as it evolves (plants & fish), documenting the process, and finally presenting all they did to their parents over a glass of farm-grown mint tea .

It was an incredible success.

I’d love to share with you some of the insights

Nadav

Hello Fellow Window Farmers!

On May 17th from 6 to 11 there will be a skill share event that will include eco vending, arts, crafts, food and music.  We are looking for someone to host a 30 minute skill share on how to set up a window farm and maybe talk a little bit about your experience with windowfarms.org.  If anyone is interested please contact me at your earliest convenience. Also if anyone is interested in participating in the event regarding our various offerings..please also feel free to contact me.

Thanks,

Kelly

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 →

Windowfarms recommend a 4 outlet pump but many people already have a 1 outlet pump and probably would like to use the one they have.  So here I have a video about a method to split the air stream to work 2 or more columns. If you just split the air with a Y or T splitter (even if both airlift tubes are exactly the same), the air will “choose” one tube (or the other one) and then all or most of the air will go up that one with zero or almost zero airlift happening in the other one.  This is because the “starting pressure”  is higher than the “running pressure” for any airlift pump.  So whichever one starts first will probably stay running really well at the expense of the second one (which will be either really slow or not running at all!)

The method I show to prevent this is to throttle both of them.  In the video, I use little “taps” to tighten and restrict the airflow to both sides until both sides run. AND stay running!   For this to work, both airlifts should have similar submergence (but they do not need to go to the same height).  You might also be able to see from the video that you can have one going a bit faster than the other.  So possibly, you can supply more water to some plants when they are big while in the other airlift supplying just a little to them because they are tinier.

There are other methods too but this one should be easy to do and to adjust.

2  airlift columns from a single outlet air pump!

I only did 2 columns because I didn’t have enough tubing to show 3 working.

3 columns  might work in my case (my pump is an old aquarium pump that I found dumped on the side of the road so it is probably not such a good model)

Update 2nd Jan 2012.  3 columns works too but in the case of my pump it is the limit.  Video Jan 3 2012. 3 airlift tubes working from a one outlet aquarium bubble pump

Youtube now allows you to edit videos so if I am not too busy, I will “upgrade” the video (and this post)  over the next week or 2 and show methods to measure the flow or at least compare flows under different conditions too. Brian

seems like there are quite a few things i need to know B4 i start building the window farm…i could just go ahead and build it following the instructions but i wanna do some research first…

mainly on:

-Hydroponic systerms and its nutrient solutions

-Design and the nitty gritty details to customise it according to my window and the physics

PLANTS-its life! Therefore proper responsibility should be taken B4 i start up the farm

ima take my time with this….its gonna pay off for sure!!

I learned about this project through the feature on TED, and have just pledged for a four-column windowfarm through the kickstart page.  Now I want to spread the word.  Has anyone created a PDF or other poster or handout that can be used to let people know about this?  My mum would put one up in her flower shop (she’s very excited too, and is helping me to pay for my farm as my christmas present) and there are a few other stores I’d like to show them to — an organic cafe and a specialty kitchen shop come to mind immediately, and there are a few more.  It’s getting hard to pass on information to people who you only know in real life, and don’t have any e-mail contact information for!

If nothing exists yet, would it be okay for me to create a PDF, and share it here for other people to use?

I made another video and basically I ran out of pipe and ladder and because of that I couldn’t pump any higher but I am curious. How high can you go? I went 13 ft but there was no problem whatsoever pumping that high! So, maybe, if you have a 2 story house or an available high place you could find out how high it is possible to go? So the contest rules are in the picture below and in a video
(You might get some extra hints and ideas if you watch the video)
Basically you use your aquarium air pump, and a T joint set at 2 ft below your liquid reservoir height.

Contest rules for unbelievably high airlift powered by puny aquarium air pump

So the rest of the post is from a couple of days ago and has a little different version of the video. (I am too Lazy to write a new post)

I made a new video about the pulser pump and Eileen suggested that a “pulser pump nano” (a smaller version) might be useful. The pulser pump is my little “invention” from over 20 years ago. Anyway, I no longer live near a river so I cannot do a nano. But because of my involvement in windowfarms, I can at least test how high a tiny pulser pump can pump. Today I used the T-joint method and an extendable ladder to go pretty high. With an aquarium air pump and 22 inches of submergence, I pumped to 13 ft high today! I bet it can go a lot higher but thats it for me.
Here is the video (which may be of some use to windowfarmers)

If this is in the wrong space, let me know, and I’ll publish further steps of construction somewhere else.

I had a productive weekend, and things worked the way they should have.  I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked, but there you go.  That’s doing things for the first time for you.  You learn all sorts of stuff about unrealistic expectations. Read the rest of this entry →