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 →

I have set up the 4 bottles, and now I’m working on my airlift. I’m trying to do the T version instead of the air needles. But I’m having trouble getting the air to lift the water and not escape through what should be the water intake tube.

Any advice for this system? I’m going to go and cut a longer piece of tube and see if that makes a difference.

Thanks,

Melissa

-EDIT- (20 minutes later)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/58467192@N06/5378581924/

So the longer tube completely helped! There is no air escaping from the system at all. Now my poor tomato plant that was without water all night is getting some.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/58467192@N06/5377983157/

I purchased the white frame from ikea and it was around 20$. I plan on having 3 or 4 columns with a string of lights in between the columns. This frame will allow me to move the window farm around and close my blinds at night. I’m going to raise it up to window height once it’s all installed.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/58467192@N06/5378580404/

Here is a short video of my airlift in action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qER-HLCHcE

-EDIT- (Later that day…)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/58467192@N06/5378590143/

So my tomato is definately looking good! http://www.flickr.com/photos/58467192@N06/5379181542/in/photostream/
I have also transplanted a broccoli plant to the top of the column. http://www.flickr.com/photos/58467192@N06/5379182328/in/photostream/
My seedlings are starting to sprout! http://www.flickr.com/photos/58467192@N06/5378589329

I made another change to my system… I zip tied the coil of tube in the water so it is easier to remove and install. http://www.flickr.com/photos/58467192@N06/5379179122

Also, nutrients were added to the solution. I added part 1 and part 2 of the general nutrients, and I also added some “maximum plantroids” because it says:

“Plantroids Super-Vitamin Thrive Enhancer stimulates plant branching, increases photosynthesis and cell division. Plantroids also helps reduce stress as well as stimulates root growth”.

Just a warning about CFLs… I dropped one and it smashed into a million tiny shards. Took a while to make sure I got all the little pieces.

Can anyone give me advice on how to put pictures in my post, rather than just links? Thanks.

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.

The moment I started really hating on those water pumps.

In the windowfarms community, no design is final. Rather, we are constantly evolving the designs to better performance standards. They evolve because WE LOVE FAILURE.

You can think you have a brilliant design but, like the Titanic, most designs are subject to failure at some point and it’s only when you see how your design performs throughout several seasons and under unfavorable conditions that you learn its true merits and shortcomings. We are fascinated with merits and shortcomings. Distinguishing between them is the core of what we do.

In our community, value comes- not from having the idea that works- but from BEING A GOOD TESTER.

@ajinil is one of my favorite pioneering testers, who is trying growing strawberries year-round in a snow-laden environment with no supplemental lighting by simply supplying flowering nutrients. So far, he has kept the plants flowering for 9 months!

Innovation can be painful. Death brings moments of revelation for windowfarmers doing R&D-I-Y. Ok. So I was only fake crying in the image above, but I was super bummed about losing my okra plants. After letting off a little steam, we were really able to take inventory of issues from this die-off. Ultimately, this was the last version 1 system we built after determining that nutrients just plain like to clog both water pumps and drip emitters as particulate matter builds up over time and clogs pathways. Failure also motivates progress. This is when the airlift technique started to seem a lot more attractive and worth pursuing. Ian, Ania, and I got to work on tweeking the airlift to work for windowfarms just a few days after this came down.

The MOST interesting moments are the ones right before your plants die (=FAIL= YAY!). What was that edge condition you managed to rock for a while? What can we learn from it?

Dry roots the result of clogged reservoir drippers in a V1 system

A mature plant’s root conditions are the best way to assess the workability of your windowfarm design.

I have a dissection table set up next to my windowfarms and as soon as I kill a plant (and trust me, I kill a LOT of plants with all of the frankenstein systems we have in the core team’s shop, where we test out the community’s ideas), I take it out, look at the root situation in the net cup and see what killed it. Were the roots massive and healthy right before they died? Did they dry out? Did I have spider mites? Are there any signs of rot? Were the factors that killed it particular to this plant or to the system? Would other people have this problem as well?

So maybe you want your windowfarm to thrive– totally valid. That’s why we give you two columns in the kits. One you can have be a control column, where you give your plants ideal conditions and allow them to thrive. Consider dedicating your other column to research. Take on an experimental conditions, fail, and report back!

-Britta

So after some thinking, some scavenging, and a little tinkering, I have completed a portable WindowFarm I had previously mentioned on my blog (http://anuttahwindowfarm.blogspot.com/2010/12/some-thoughts.html).  I have simplified the design quite a bit, and the proportions have changed some.  It stands a little taller than I had planned, at around four feet.  And the base is substantially smaller, currently at about four inches (I may add a small wooden base to make it a little sturdier).  For more details on development you can check out my external blog: http://anuttahwindowfarm.blogspot.com/2010/12/my-portable-windowfarm.html

I had these large copper pipes left over from a previous project, they already had holes drilled in the elbow at the top, which I used for the suspension of the rope, as well as the top bottle.  The base has a screw fitting that attaches to a mounting bracket.  The airlift system is the same as my previous designs, for the sake of being an exemplar for presentations, I didn’t want to change the major component parts too much.  I used bottles that I had never used, or removed from other farms, and found that a half-length beer bottle, two full-length beer bottles, and a wine bottle reservoir fit nicely in the space I had.  And I thought up a far more convenient method of suspension than I have previously used.  This was likely inspired in part by Jenna Spevak’s plastic free farm suspension system (http://our.windowfarms.org/2010/05/05/plastic-free-window-farm/), though I use two sets of S hooks per bottle, so that each bottle could be easily removed, for planting, reservoir change, etc.  Along the same convenience principle, as well as to clean up the design, I ran the lift tube through the support tube.
This is how it all came out in the end:

The whole system, in functional set-up.

The entry of the lift tube through the support tube.

hello, my name is Tom and I am a student studying 3D Design. One of my recent projects was looking at hydroponic gardens. Initially my project was focused on people who live in houseboats due to the lack of space and faculties available to them, however as the project developed it became apparent that my solution would be transferable to other environments such as apartments and people with limited space.

I thought I would create a post to get a bit of feedback with people who use hydroponics and probably have a lot more expertise then me!

My final solution was to create a very simple passive system using a cotton wick, which pulls up the nutrient solution from the bottom bottle to the top. Above is some computer renders of my final system, I hope after reading how it all works it will make sense!

The bottom bottle contains the nutrients solution, and the top contains the growing medium (I imagine it to be coconut fibre), with a wick which joins the two together through my joining system.

The main part of the project is the joining system between the bottles, which allowed you to use different size bottles depending on what you had. It works by using a latex skin which you can pull over the bottle top, similar to how you stretch the end of a balloon over a bottle. It also holds the string for hanging the garden, and because it is a very simple system you can have as many bottles as you wanted (or could fit) on the string.

This linking product makes it a lot easier to begin a hydroponic garden, therefore making it more accessible. I imagine that you would be able to buy the linking system with the nutrients and instructions how to grow with hydroponics, as well as releasing open source instructions on how to create a similar system for free so you could adapt to your needs/ expertise.

I would love it if you could give some feedback to this project, any advice to make it better or directions you think it could go in. It was only a four week project, so is definitely not a finished polished product and could be radically improved.

Thanks for reading and get posting

Tom

The basic construction for my first windowfarm is complete since  long. I made an effort to build an airlift. However I encountered some problems which brought me to the point where I decided to boycott the entire airlift concept. It just requires too much specific parts and is a hassle to setup and on top of that it is noisy. Instead I decided to go with a different kind of water-distribution system. The only real issue was finding a pump thats small and has enough pressure to push a water-column to about 4m (12-13ft) while remaining cheap.

I found the solution when I skimmed though my usual computer store, liquid-cooled computer systems! The pumps have excellent specs for this type of projects and the majority of them are submersible as well as being low voltage/wattage which means they can be used in constructing mobile DC-powered systems . The construction is identical to aquarium pumps with impellers so the buildup in nutrient salts shouldn’t pose a problem.

Prices however seems a bit steep since the cheaper brands land at >$45. Which is about the same as the air pumps I’ve found i might add. I plan on circumvent this issue by ordering in bulk from China which should leave me ahttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWPLr0Selh8t about >$20/unit. Only issue being I would have to order about 500 units but I’m putting my hopes to free samples.

Also in the progress of building another ebb&flow like system with top drippers. But thats another thing, however it will use the same type of pump.

We just got our first windowfarm going, but it was not without a bit of experimentation, and in particular, getting the airlift working. We started by downloading the MAMA v3.0 design, and was eagerly looking forward to our windows going green. However, living in Malaysia we quickly realized that pretty much none of the listed components were available.

We went to the hardware and aquarium shops to find out what WAS available. To make a long story short, we did over 30 design variations and experiments over the course of two weeks, learning LOTS in the meantime, and below is what we currently have. As always, it’s work in progress, but at least it shows some variations that can be tried out.

The major realization I had after failing miserably in the beginning is that the core design principle in a windowfarm is basically “use an airlift to feed a series of water bottles nutrition and water”. Everything else is optional and variable (which it what makes this so much fun!). Here are the major variations we made, to the suspension and airlift. Here is the big picture of what it looks like right now:

There’s a tiny airpump to the left, and we found out that we HAD to keep it on the “low” setting. Too much air will disrupt the flow of water. There’s four bottles right now, and they are not screwed together. Instead the top of each bottle is cut out, and each bottle leads to the other. At the bottom we have a reasonably high and narrow bucket for the water and nutrition. As others have found out having a high pillar of water is key to getting the airlift to work, and this way it’s easy to refill as well. The end goal is to use this single airlift and bucket for the whole window. We’ll see how that works out.

Suspension

We couldn’t find any of the suspension components from the original design, but got real lucky in one hardware shop (Ace Hardware in Kuala Lumpur) where we found a one-foot pot hanger. Our window also has a a metal grille (in Malaysia pretty much everyone has grilles for the windows due to breakin risks, perceived or actual), where three metal bars account for one foot. One bottle also turns out to be approximately one foot. So, put this together and you get what is shown in the picture. One end of the hanger is attached to the grille, and the other is put through a small hole in the cap. We also have a triangle cut out for the water to run out, so it doesn’t go through the hole for the hanger. Now we can easily put it and take out bottles. We also experimented with skipping the net cup for the plant, but I think in the end we have settled for having it in. Then we don’t need to duct tape the whole bottle, so it just looks nicer.

We then have four of these bottles in each line. All in all we should be able to put in a maximum of 36 bottles like this in this single window, and each is easy to put in or take out due to this suspension system.

T-airlift system

The second major problem we had was with the airlift. We couldn’t quite find the components shown in the MAMA version, and there was just too many places where it could leak. A bottle also has too low of a water column to consistently get the airlift technique to work. After LOTS of experimentation with various designs (including using straws for tubing, which was awesome but leaky), and looking at how others have done it, we settled for a dead simple version: the T-airlift.

In the middle of it all is a T-joint. On the left we have air coming in from our airpump. On the right we have water coming in from a 3-foot soft tube. At the top there is soft tubing going up to the plants. We have taped the soft tube to the wall, which makes it straight enough. Because the tube for the water intake has a natural coiling effect, and is quite long, that is what keeps it down in the bucket, so we don’t need to tape it down or anything like that. We could make it even longer to increase that effect. I think that having a reasonably long one also helps in not getting the air to exit that way. Sometimes the air will push evenly upwards and into the water tube, but as soon as the pressure is released by the first water dropping into the bottle line, the air seems to prefer going up rather than out the water intake tube.

This system does not require the one-way valves, or needles, or somesuch, and allows for a high water column and easy adding of water. There’s no air leaking going on since the T-joint handles that quite well. It’s not as pretty as other versions, but this is in our basement (with window to outside, since we have a terrace house), so that’s ok.

So that’s it! Now we want to add more lines, maybe reusing the same airlift, and also maybe experiment with using a solar panel to drive the pump for the ultimate post-apocalyptic-nothing-works DIY experience.

I was having trouble with my tiered bottle system so since I had some extra table space I revamped my design a bit.  I got rid of the bottles and just used two medium sized plastic pots with perforated bottoms.  I filled the pots with hydroton and buried my net pots to prevent the roots from seeing sunlight.  I used flexible vinyl tubing and a “tee” to break up the flow to two tubes.  The water flows past the plant’s roots, through the hydroton and out the bottom of the pots into a drip pan that was originally a seed starting tray.  The tray has drainage channels and the slope of my table forces the water to pool up in the lower left hand corner.  The tray hangs about two inches off the side of the table, and I drilled a hole in one of the drainage channels where the water pools to allow recirculation back to the reservoir.  Because of the vertical drip distance to the reservoir, I was getting a splash effect and making a mess, so I stuck a piece of vinyl tube into the hole I drilled and the water runs down the tube and drips off about 1 inch above the reservoir’s water surface (this worked surprisingly well).  My only issue now seems to be the fact that the left hand pot gets a little bit less water than the right pot.  I think its because of the tee (the water wants to flow straight rather than turn 90 degrees).  Anyone have any suggestions for that?  I was thinking about running another tube and using one air needle for each lift tube, but I would like to expand this in the future and that idea doesn’t allow for expansion.  I am going to try rotating the tee tonight so that the water is forced to turn 90 for both pots.  I think that might give me a more even distribution of flow.

Here we are at the first snow the year and my strawberry Window Farm is still going.  The three strawberries in my original WF on the left are 9 months old.  To the right is a new window farm.  The resevoir on this is a recycled cat litter jug and holds about 2 gallons.  The peas on the bottom are 32 days old and the bib lettuce in the middle are 26 days old.  Nothing is on the top yet.

First Snow of 2010

 It’s interesting that during the summer, the gallon resevoir on the strawberries needed to be topped off ever few days.  In the course of a week I would use about an extra gallon of water to top it off.  Now with the change of season and less light, during the week only a pint is needed to keep it topped off.  I have no supplemental lighting yet.

With the new WF I went and bought a Petco 9904 air pump that has the 4 outlets so I can supply air to both units.  In the second WF I am using a variation on my original Tee air pump design.  The difference in this one is the 5″ of hose that is coming out of the bottom.  It is hard to see, but this short extension also has smaller hose shoved in it.  You can see the plumbers tape in the hose that is holding it in place.  With this restriction, I seem to get better nutrient flow up the hose and less air bubbling back through the bottom.   The Petco pump has a variable output and I get plenty of flow with it set to its minimum.

Variation on Tee Air Pump

Happy window farming!