Has anyone experimented with diffused light – like the light you achieve with certain greenhouse kits that use plastic panels?

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?

I am currently setting up my first windowfarm, and only have North facing windows.  Does anyone have suggestions of plants that have done well in low light conditions?  OR, is it necessary for me to add lamps?

Thanks!  I’m really excited to get started!

Unfortunately, I have absolutely no experience in electrical work, which the instructions in the 3.0 MAMA incorrectly assumes for those hanging lights. Granted, I had no experience with airpumps and plumbing, but those were very well explained. I just wish the electrical components also were explained so well (video  tutorial or careful diagrams). Furthermore, I could not find anything called a “pin socket” at Lowes.

So If you are like me and completely hopeless with electrical wiring, Here is an alternative.

1. Depending on how many plants you have, select that many extension cords, lights and sockets with plug-ins.

2. Plug the sockets into the ends of each extension cord and space them vertically as you please.

3. Tie off the slack of each extension cord and tie the cords together at intervals with lock ties (or string if you don’t have any lock ties on hand)

4. Guide the cords with hooks to keep them out of the way of the farm. (Because my farm is leaning against my fridge, I have the lights climbing up the fridge and then go through some rings on top of the fridge, which I keep in place with magnetic tape.)

5. Plug in all the extension cords into a circuit breaker. I actually only had three lights and I found a special outdoor plug that had three outlets, so I used that instead.

It is probably not the most efficient set up, but until I come up with something else, this will work splendidly!

So I have been mulling on how to get my grow lights to work. I definitely need some hanging growlights because I just don’t have the window space in my small condo (well I do, but that window NEVER gets any sun). I have stared at the directions for the pin sockets on the 3.0 Beta instructions, but I am still lost. I couldn’t even find anything on youtube to give me more information. So could someone give me the lighting for dummies instructions on how to make those cool hanging lights in the 3.0 MAMA instructions.

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 →

http://cgrantmccool.com

Using the following website with a quick, easy DIY solderless LED fixture as a guide, I set-up and made my own lights!  http://www.dabblings.net/subpage2.html

I’m no expert with electricity, but I understand enough and had enough research skills to pull off a modified version of the DIY set-up given in the site.  My LEDs were TopBright LEDs

I have since reworked this set-up to add a Red bulb to each fixture.  This was a bit tricky because the Red LEDs I was using required a separate circuit from the White/Blues which had the same electrical draws.  While each fixture’s Blue and White circuits are all self-contained in their own project enclosure, the red bulbs are also in series with each other from enclosure to enclosure.

Hi everyone!

I’m new to this group but I have been growing plants indoors for a couple of years myself. I live in a house though, so that makes it much easier for me to use soil instead of nutrients.

What I’ve discovered is that the water temperature plays a big role in the speed at which your plant grows. The water should be a little hotter than warm (but not burning!). The warmer the container stays, the better for the plant. To do this, I use black pots in order to attract the sun. I occasionally turn the pots around as well to get al the roots warmed up.

Another thing plants LOVE is humidity, so if it’s possible to have a small humidifier in the room it would get your crops ready in no time!

I hope that helps with  your indoor planting process!

I’ve been working on my Window Farm for a little while now, and everything is coming together nicely. But I’ve been worried about how I would put together the lighting system.  Fortunately, while roaming the lighting section of Home Depot, I found these nifty sockets, and the whole project became a lot easier.

after splitting the extension cord, just the plastic bit that holds the wires together (this was an indoor extension cord, without the ground wire) you just place it in the  bottom of the socket like so:

the socket has these pointy contact things that break through the plastic covering the wire, so you don’t have to actually touch wire at all.

so you just screw the bottom of the socket back on, and you’re done.  just measure where you want the lights to be on the cord, and screw the sockets on.

What I thought was the scariest part of the whole project turned out to be the easiest, and super cheap.

nifty sockets: about 2 bucks each

20 feet of indoor extension cord: about 3 bucks

6 CFL lights Britta suggested in the how-to: about $15 total

oh, and the timer was about $5.

I hope this helps anyone else who was worried about how to put together the lighting system. =)

This is a simple DIY way to make a reflector for a compact florescent (CFL) bulb.

There are many situations where you are lighting a plant and half the light coming from the bulb is going out your window, on the floor, or into you living room. A lot of this wasted light can be redirected back at the plant with a simple reflector.  With CFL’s the best light comes out the side of the coil, therefore a standard shop light reflector is not very affective. Fortunately it is possible to make a  effective CF reflector in under 10 min.

You will need:

1- 16oz beer can (12oz work, but not as well for bulbs over 15 watts)

1- CF bulb, I used a 26watt one

1- Clamp light (this will work for other fixtures too)

tools:

needle-nose pliers

tin snips or scissors you don’t care about

pocket knife

Step 1-

Take apart clamp light. With out a bulb in it (and not plugged in!!!!) twist the reflector off. It is threaded into the plastic, and it should come off in 3 to 5 revolutions. Next loosen the wing-nut until everything falls apart. You should now have something like in this pic:

Step 2-

Cut up your can. I started by poking a hole with a pocket knife, then attacked it with scissors. First I cut a strait line the length of the can starting and ending just before the metal starts to curve in. Next I cut off the top of the can. On the bottom of the can I cut a slit almost half way around on each side, leaving about 1/2in. on the opposite side as the slit.

It should now look something like this:

Step 3-

Cut a hole in the bottom of the can that the light fixture will fit into.  I did this by poking a hole with a knife and then pulling back the metal with pliers.  Notice in the picture that the hole is not centered, instead it is located closer to the side which was cut. This will give more room for the bulb.

It is also important that the hole is not much larger than the plastic fixture. When opening the hole, the extra metal should not be removed, as it is necessary for the next step.

Step 4-

Put the clamp light back together, with the new reflector.

Slip the new reflector over the plastic fixture, and bend the excess metal so that is touches the plasic. Then reconnect the bracket that connects the clamp to the fixture so that it compresses on these flaps of metal. This is what will hold the reflector to the fixture.

If you are not using a clamp light this connection could be made with a hose clamp, or my favorite thing; annealed steel  wire.

Step 5-

Fold the cut edges of the reflector.

Be careful with this step, it is sharp! Gloves may be a good idea, though it’s not as bad as most sheet metal, as aluminum is rather soft.

I bent a little under 1/2 in. of the edge over. This makes the reflector much stiffer, allowing you to bend it to the form you want.

At this point the reflector could be painted white, or better yet coated with silver Mylar. This can easily be attached with spray adhesive. Just cut the Mylar to size, spray, and stick it (read the directions on you spray adhesive)

Step 6-

Test it, and tweak it.

Bend the reflector so that it shines the way that is most useful for you.

For larger bulbs, like this 68watt CFL, a coffee can can be used.