Hi everyone,

Here is an update on my second Windowfarm setup.  I planted basil, endive, sweet valentine lettuce, black cherry tomato, and jalapeno.  It has been 4 months since I planted seeds.

I’ve made one modification since the initial setup.  I was going to be out of town for several days, but my small reservoir cups needed to be refilled daily.  So, I setup a gallon jug as the reservoir and siphoned the nutrients into my t-joint.  In order to get the siphon started, I filled spit clean water into the line, then placed the filled line into the gallon reservoir, making sure that it was coiled and resting on the bottom.  Yeah, pretty crude, but it worked!  I didn’t need to refill for over a week.

Gallon reservoir and siphon.

The basil was great and made a delicious pesto.  I had two plants in the same cup, and it took about three months to grow enough, almost too much.  I did pinch off a few leaves here and there for the occasional dinner, and to help the plants grow larger.  They had flowered when I wasn’t looking, so after three months I knew they were done.

Two basil plants after 2 months.

I also planted two endive plants in one cup.  After about a month, I took one out, and the remaining endive grew much better on its own.

Endive, one per cup is better.

The sweet valentine lettuce also did well.   In the morning my window gets direct sunlight, but the lettuce did not like the heat.  Eventually, I placed the lettuce on the top of the column and let down the blinds to reduce the amount of sunlight.  I harvested 4 or 5 salads worth of greens, adding endive as needed.

Sweet valentine lettuce after 2 months. The bottom lettuce was harvested a week or two before this photo and is growing back.

The jalapeno grew well, but a lot of flowers bloomed while I was out of town.  I think they need to be pollinated, because I didn’t get many chiles out of them (those that I did pollinate grew chiles).  It is a nice and tall plant, almost 2 feet, but only three chiles so far.

Jalapeno.

By far the largest plant, and most difficult, is the black cherry tomato.  Right now, the tomato and the jalapeno share a column (basil was on top).  As it grew, I trimmed lower branches to put more energy into upper branches and flowers.  Most of the plant is at the top of my window, where the light is not as good.  I think tomato needs a trellis to grow into.  I probably could have just grown this one plant in my whole window.

Tomato, growing into the top of the window. The column on the left is empty.

The tomato leaves near the top are very dark and curly at the edges (you can see this at the top of my lettuce photo), but the lower leaves are a flat and a good color of green.  The flowers near these bad branches didn’t get far.  I don’t think it is water (water runs sunrise to sunset), but perhaps the low sunlight at the top?   I did get a few clusters of tomatoes from the flowers that survived.

Black cherry tomato.

Cheers,

Mike

EDIT: June 18, 2012,  Tomato roots.

As noted in the comments, I think the problem with the tomatoes is the root system.  It might not have been large enough for the plant.  I had to take the tomato plant out and I discovered the the green cup had been filled with roots, and that some of the roots appeared to be rotting.

The darker roots near the bottom appear to be rotting.

I think the solution is a larger net cup (with more clay pellets) for this kind of plant.  That will allow for a larger root network to grow around the pellets, rather than the dense root network that grew into the bottom of the green cup in my system.

- Mike

It is now the middle of winter and finally our first big snow of the year.  I love posting the pictures with the snow outside.   This jalapeno just turned 1 year old and I would say that it looks it.  I just gave  some of the older branches a good pruning to try and spur on some new growth.  It was hitting the ceiling (literally).  Compare it to the posts at 6 months in the summer.  http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/07/23/jalapeno-spider-mites/  The leaves now are much smaller.  I would think the temperature and less light are slowing it down.  It is in a southern window with no extra light.

The plant is in a bay window and the shades get closed at night and I bet it gets into the 50′s F at night.   I would guess that over the last 7 months or so I get about a pepper or two a week off of it on average.  The first picture has two hanging on it.   The older stems have stopped flowering and fruiting, but there is new growth and with the heavy pruning it is getting better.  The second picture is a closed up of the new growth.  You can see the original older stem and new spurs shot out not once but twice from the same node.  The youngest one coming out to the far left is only a few weeks old.  These newer spurs then start to flower.

The next plant I am trying are mini red sweet peppers.  My wife loves to eat them and buys them from the store – Trader Joe’s.  I figured that might work well in a window farm.  I dried out some of the seeds and planted them.  I have a couple of sprouts now with the first trues leaves coming in so we will see what happens.  I’ll post pictures of its progress later when it is farther along.

Jalapeno & Snow

Jalapeno Closeup

Update 2/11/2012

This picture is about a month after a good pruning and you can see that is has responded really well with new branches and fruit.

Jalepeno come back after pruning

It’s only been 12 days since my last post, but things got a little more interesting this morning .  http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/07/11/jalepeno-at-6-months-and-vacation-survival/

Big storms went through here overnight and we were awoken by our water sensor in the basement at 3am telling us we were taking in some water.  Nothing major.  Normally, I wouldn’t mention this type stuff, but it is such a strange coincedence that later in the morning one of the tubes between the levels on my window farm plugged up and I had a mini flood in my window.   I hardly ever clean out the algea so shame on me.   So, in cleaning up that mess looking closely at the plant I noticed that I had spider mites. 

I was not completely surprized by this because last week I had noticed that my strawberry had mites.  I dealt with mites on the strawberries last year.  http://our.windowfarms.org/2010/08/01/strawberry-5-month-update-spidermites-other-bugs/  Last year I only sprayed the leaves off outside with a hose every few weeks and eventually they went away.  This year though I have purchased some neem oil and soap.  I gave the strawberries a good soaking last week.  Today, I sprayed off the japaneno with the hose and then gave it a spray with the neem oil.  So 11 days ago I had not noticed any thing and today they were all over it.

This is actually the first time I had the jalepeno out of the WF so I got a picture of the roots.  I have noticed that some plant roots like to travel out of the net pot and other don’t.  The jalapeno, strawberry and lettuce roots had been very content in staying put.  Both the peas and beans tended to roam.  http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/03/29/green-bean-roots/ 

So far I have been very happy with the jalapeno and it is producing well with at least one a week.  A couple fell off while hosing it down today.

Enjoy the pictures!

Spider Mites

Neem Oil & Soap

Jalepeno Roots

Jaleneno Harvest

 P.S.  I just made some jalapeno poppers out of these for lunch.  Yum!

Not much happening since I have been concentrating on the outdoor garden, but I thought I would give everyone an update on the Jalepeno.  It’s 6 months old and producing a pepper every few weeks.    Back in June I was a little worried about it when we went on vacation for 2.5 weeks.  I filled the 2.5 gallon resevoir to the tippy top and set the timer to only run for 2 hours in the morning.   I use rockwool grow cubes that hold the moisure like a sponge.  When I got back it was still alive and still pumping.  The resevoir was down maybe 4 inches.  It is the only plant in the WF and peppers don’t use a lot of water it turned out well.

http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/05/05/jalepano-at-4-months-and-close-to-harvest/

Jalepeno Closeup

Here is the jalepano that I started from a seed 4 months again.  I planted it in the rockwool on January 16.  It took a few weeks to germinate and it did not get put into the WF until mid February as shown in the bottom picture.  It started in the top bottle as seen here http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/03/20/green-bean-harvest-at-8weeks/ , but I eventually moved it into the bottom as it grew taller and taller and taller. 

I won’t be putting anthing in the upper two spots as I am getting the outside garden ready and won’t get back to actively window farming until later in the summer or fall.

Jalepano Close To Harvest

Jalepano Close Up

Jalepano First Placed In Wf

This video was taken more recently on March 30th, 2010:

silox – 1st Week Progress and 2nd Vertical Plant Tower w/ New Plants – March 30th, 2010

This is an update after the 1st week of growing in the 1st vertical plant tower and after building/planting in the 2nd vertical tower of our hydroponic window farm.

We have learned a few things just in the 1st week of setting up, planting and running our hydroponic window farm that I would like to share with you.

*  Mentioned it in my last post, but I cannot stress enough, water quality is VERY IMPORTANT.  The first couple of days I used our city tap water to power the 1st vertical plant tower(before my first video/blog until 3/22/2010).  This was also before I purchased a simple PH testing kit.  The electronic ones are nice, but I stuck with the manual method using a small container and drops to gauge the PH for costs reasons, plus I don’t think I’ll have to use it that often due to the reservoir sizes and the water I use now.  I tested the PH of the city tap water I was using and it was over 7 which is not good. Aside from an unbalance PH, the city tap water also contains chlorine, flouride, other chemicals and various minerals.  Even though water can be naturally dechlorinated by letting it sit 24-48hrs in an uncovered bucket, you still have to worry about all of the other nasty stuff and the PH of the water.  Now, I could go through the trouble of filtering my water which I may do in some form or fashion in the future, but I find it easier and cheaper to purchase RO(Reverse Osmosis) water locally from 1 of the 2 sources less than a mile away which I did and I can happily say I’m now using it.  Right out of the gate, the PH was perfect and no impurities whatsoever.  An unbalanced PH can cause the plants to stop uptaking some or all nutrients in order to protect itself(from what I’ve read), same with all of the other chemicals inside the water.  We do have some indoor AC units that collect several gallons of condensation daily in collection containers when they are working hard all day to cool down the apartment, so we will probably look into using that water instead when the time comes to keep them on.  We are also considering purchasing an atmospheric water generator such as an Ecoloblue which also collects water from the atmosphere/humidity in the air, but also filters it afterwards which allows it to be used for drinking/cooking etc(7-8 gallons a day!) and the hydro reservoirs.

* Adequate lighting is also very important to keep the plants photosynthesizing which equals produce!  I think it’s probably safe to say that most window farms will probably not have 100% of the needed light to produce as quickly or as much as most people desire, but I could be wrong here.  That is certainly the situation in our setup and while we try to use the natural sunlight when it’s available for a few hours a day, we’ve supplemented to make up for the lack of desired light.  We added a 4ft 54W florescent bulb complete with reflector to our window farm and attached to the sliding glass door facing the vertical plant towers.  We reshaped the reflector to open up and allow for light to be casted almost 180 degrees towards the side of the plants which I believe really helps the light be as efficient as possible and keeping unwanted light from shining out of our window towards the neighbors.  You can tell the plants really are reaching to grow towards the light, so much that I’m going to need to move the vertical plant tower back just a hair to keep them from touching it, hehe.  I have the light on a timer for 12hr on/12hr off(6:30am to 6:30pm).

* Attaching the wooden dowels that support all of the plant containers on the vertical plant tower to the reservior for extra support sounded like a good idea at first, but presented some logistical maintenance problems later on.  We corrected this by mounting a aluminum L bracket (the kind designed to hold up a simple shelf) to the top of the window area so they wooden dowels can held straight up via a hook driven into the top of the dowel and inserted into a hole on the end of the L bracket.  All of the weight of the plants/dowel is resting on the floor via the bottom of the wooden dowel and the hook/L bracket assembly is to keep it from tipping over.  This allows for us to easily move or rotate the vertical plant tower and remove the reservior for water maintenance(water replacment and cleaning).  This will also allow me to move the vertical plant towers back some from the light as I mentioned above with a simple modification or two.

* We are using the caps that came with the bottles and recreated the holes in them to be smaller directly in the middle of the cap.  The plan does not call for these caps AFAIK.  Why did I use them?  To keep water from splashing out of the containers onto the floor.  Without the caps or using caps with large holes in them allows for water to flow unevenly which results in droplets that are thrown out the container and that adds up quickly over a few days.  I recut the caps to use a smaller hole(5mm) and this seems to work very well.

Recap of plants we have growing, locations and dates planted

Plants on 1st vertical tower(far left) from top to bottom – planted on 20100321:
1. Butterleaf Lettuce
2. Green Beans
3. Strawberries
4. Jalapenos

Plants on 2nd vertical tower(middle or right) from top to bottom – planted on 20100330:
1. Brussel Sprouts
2. Cauliflower
3. Broccoli
4. Eggplant

I thought it would be interesting to do a little math on the cost to run the light and pump.  With my current setup(1x 54W florescent light and 1x Petco 9904 pump), assuming a 30day month and $0.15/KWh power rate, it costs a mere approximate of $3.50 a month to run the light 12hrs a day and the pump non-stop.  Not bad!!

Our future plan is to put a 3 vertical plant tower in the same window on the far right.  In order to do so, we will need to purchase another 4ft 54W florescent light w/ reflector(lights can be daisy-chained together out of the box), another air pump and 4 more 1.5L Ozarka water bottles.  We pre-purchased all of the other materials with the expectations of creating at least 3 vertical plant towers total.

Will try to post an update in about a week’s time.  Happy window farming!

To avoid confusion, this video was taken on Sunday, March 21st, 2010 and was just now uploaded.

silox – Initial Setup and 1st Vertical Plant Tower – March 21st, 2010

The initial setup and after planting in the 1st vertical tower of our hydroponic window farm. Our hydroponic window farm is located in our apartment sliding glass door area somewhere in Texas We are very excited to see how our hydroponic window farm turns out and learn from our experiences. We want to use our knowledge we gain from this to setup a much a larger aquaponics setup(aquaculture + hydroponics) down the road when we move into a house.

This configuration is based from the 3-container, air lift instructions found on windowfarms.org.  We tried to get away with 5 containers, but that seemed to be too high for the water to make it(tried 1 and 2 air tubes).  We settled for 4 per tower(1 more than what the plan calls for).  We also tried getting away with just one air pump tube to power this vertical plant tower, but ended up using two like the plans call for.  I think you might be able to get away with using just one if you were to buy separate, better quality one-way air valves instead of using the ones that came with the Petco pump as each one certainly seems to provide different amounts of air resistance (tested by blowing through each one before installation).

What we are using:
- Petco 9904 Air Pump(4 air outlets and kit includes one-way air valves)
- 1 Gallon or more reservior(8L or about 2 gallons in my case)
- Various surgical type tubing, but most importantly reinforced tubing for bringing water from the reservior to the top to prevent kinking in the line
- Wooden dowel to attach 1.5L plastic water bottles to
- Sports ball air needles (1 for each air line coming from Petco air pump)
- 3″ net cups for plants
- Hydroton(or equivalent) expanded clay pellets for growing medium
- 4ft 54W flourescent light bulb w/ ballast and reflector(reshaped to redirect near 180 degrees on one side)
- Timer for light to keep it on 8-12hrs(depends on cycle of plants and natural light availability)
- Water(Qualtify makes ALL THE DIFFERENCE). Get Reverse Osmosis water if at all possible or something equivalent. Make sure PH is right(between 5.5 and 6.5) and it’s pure.
- Botanicare Pure Blend Pro Grow Nutrients(Organic) for all vegitation phases of growth
- Botanicare Pure Blend Pro Bloom(Organic) for fruiting of plants(haven’t used yet and may not be necessary, so we’ll see)

Plants on 1st vertical tower(far left) from top to bottom:
1. Butterleaf Lettuce
2. Green Beans
3. Strawberries
4. Jalapenos

We will try to post an update once a week for now until we at least harvest most of these vegetables to show trials and tribulations to get to that point(we are hopeful we will make it that far, lol)

Moveable hanging windowfarm we made for demos

These plants were all started from seed in February. The lettuce loved the cool early spring. Look at how bushy that blackseeded simpson got (mid left). There are also cucumber (the yellow flowers at top left), okra (maple-looking leaves mid right) , green beans (top right) kale (bottom right) and cherry tomatoes (bottom left), jalepenos, and Japanese Eggplant (bottom right big leaves) in this system. The cherry tomatoes,  jalepenos, and okra are just now ripe in early August. Beans keep coming- super tasty, crunchy, and sweet. The lettuce went to seed and started tasting better about after about 2 months of churning out georgeous new leaves constantly when we picked them.  Aphids and a weekend when I left the pump off (OOPS!) killed the eggplant. The cucumbers were a real mystery. Like Marilyn and James Dean, they died a young tragic death after a short, but full life. Read their sad story here. Someone else please try cucumbers!