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

Here’s an update on how my buttercrunch lettuce is doing.  I bought a small light for cloudy winter days and I have dialed in the watering schedule.  I have a timer for the light that turns it on at 7:00 a.m. and off at 9:00 p.m.   I also have a timer for the air pump that turns on for 30 minutes every two hours during the day, and for 15 minutes every 4 hours at night.  The lettuce seems to be doing very well.

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?