Sorry to be bombarding you with these pictures, if you’re uninterested.

So, I’m just a few days away from the science fair, and I’m already disappointed in how rigourous I was not.  If I do this for next year, I’ve got some ideas of how to really science this up.

That having been said, I’ve got the

This pea blossom is in one of the 2 "just fish water" columns.

This pea blossom is in the "CO2" column.

first blossoms from my pea plants!

The first pic, you can’t really see the blossom, but it’s in there.  It’s the whitish ‘leaf’ right just up and left from centre.

The CO2 column has only been getting CO2 for the last 4 or 5 days, so there shouldn’t be loads of difference yet, even if I’m getting a meaningful amount in there.

How am I putting CO2 into this column of plants, you ask?

Read on…

If you have an aquarium that’s heavily planted with real plants, you have a nice, natural support to your filtration.  Unfortunately, the heavier the plant load, the more you run up against a limit on the plants’ growth – the amount of available CO2 in the water.  Since the concentration of CO2 will be roughly equivalent to that in the atmosphere, since the fish are not as great producer of CO2 as land animals, CO2 supplementation helps encourage plant growth.  Now you can spend LOADS of cash on a CO2 canister with all the bells and whistles ($00s of dollars) or you can have some soda pop, and DIY a CO2 generator.

2 cups of brown sugar, spooned oh-so-slowly into a pop bottle

drill a hole 1/16" smaller than the outer diameter of the airline. Cut the airline at an angle to make threading easier. Once you've got it in, hot glue a seal on both sides of the cap.

1 tsp of quick yeast (you can go as high as 1 tbsp, some say) and 1 litre of water. Don't slop the yeast on the sides of the bottle, it won't do much good there.

One nice thing about doing this instead for hydroponics instead of for an aquarium is that for the latter you need a fancy diffuser (there are, of course, DIY options).

So I just have the other end of the CO2 airline going into the top of the bag that’s around one of my plant columns.  Simple.

So, my experiment was ‘is fish water as  good as commercial hydroponics fertilizer’.  There are a few caveats to my investigation.  #1 is that I’m not stocking at true Aquaponics densities.  They fill their tanks to the gills (heh.  Get it?  To the gills.  It’s about fish) and so have a much higher nitrogen level than I have.   They would also spread this over many more plants than I am.  There’s a lot of variables, is what I’m saying.  At any rate, here’s a few examples of the growth.

taken March 23rd

taken April 3rd

Not a bad amount of growth for… what, 12 days?

That’s it for tonight. Thanks for your interest, and have a good night. Good luck with your veggies.

Hi !

Eight weeks ago, I presented you what I now call my sailboat windowfarm. Seven weeks ago I was presenting you my clay pot windowfarm.

Then, I explained in detail my pH imbalance adventure, telling you that I lost several plants in the process. Now, I’d like to show you the survivors. Here they are. First photo : My sailboat windowfarm suffered a much smaller scale pH imbalance. Its growth was interrupted and one of the pole beans lost two leaves to it, that’s all. On the first storey : 2 pole beans, second storey : 2 nasturtiums, third storey : 2 cherry tomatoes.

Second photo : a close-up of the biggest leaves on the pole beans.

Third photo : my clay pot windowfarm is still half empty and the spinach and thyme will get out soon. The two center columns are connected to their own reservoir. They are designated home for all flowering plants and may receive a special blooming nutrients formula. The two outer columns are designated for leaf crops only.

Following photos : watercress started from cuttings, surviving lettuce, blooming peas and baby cucumber.

During the first 12 hours or so on this diet, I made a stupid mistake in adjusting the flow of dripping on my two central columns and my whole new 3,5 L reservoir emptied itself in a few hours, drenching the poor plants with my horse remedy. Poor things. When I came back from work that evening, some of the leaves on my peas displayed white spots. I concluded that my solution was burning my plants, so I rapidly cut the solution in two by adding fresh dechlorinated water to it in each of my reservoirs.

So now, we’re talking about 1 : 10 solution of urea. Three days later, my peas seem to be OK and I could swear that my plants are starting to get bigger again. It’s a little soon to be so enthousiastic, though. But I’ll tell you if I was dellusional !

Meanwhile, I still have to adjust my pH daily to try to keep it down around 6. And I don’t know, but it seems to me that needing a daily pH adjustment isn’t the norm for windowfarmers. Next post, I’ll try to add photos.

Here are my two lettuce plants at 15 weeks.  I have been getting about one salad a week to eat.  In the bowl are about 10 good sized leaves that I just picked and chopped up and the plants don’t look like I touched them! 

Lettuce For Lunch

The peas on the other hand I am not so sure about.  They are producing a 2 to 3 pods a week which is good, but some leaves are pale and are dying off here and there.   There is new growth and it’s still flowering.  I’m not sure if it is the fungus gnats (which I still have) or maybe a nutrient problem.  Either way, the lettuce does not seem troubled at all.

Pea & Lettuce WF

Pea Harvest

The gnats seem to be under control but are not gone.  The sticky paper is doing a good job of catching the adult flys.  The guys at the hydroponic store talked me into trying some insecticidal soap to kill the larvea, but not sure how effective it has been.  The next time I am at the store, I’ll get the neem oil and give that a try.

Besides my fungus gnat problem (http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/01/04/borer-type-bugs-in-my-peas/),  my second WF is doing well.  We have been picking lettuce leaves off around the edges to eat.  The lettuce has two plants in it now.  At first I sprouted about 5 and have thinned it down to two.  I never like thinning plants out.  I know if this was in dirt outside I would have thinned to just the one.  I just wonder since there should be less competition for the nutrients, how many plants can you get away with in each net pot?

The first pea is almost ready to be picked and more are on the way.  The pea is on the bottom and has three plants in it.  I have added dowls through the bottles to form a trellis.  Since it was on the bottom, the root have traveled down into the resevoir and it has turned itself into a deep water culture.   Since I had an extra port on the air pump, I added an aeration stone into the resevoir to give it some more oxygen.

A good question here is which plants naturally have short roots and which prefer longer roots.  I wonder what would have happened if the lettuce and pea were reversed…

WF at 70days

Peas Flowering

Bibb Lettuce

Here are some more pictures of sprouting the seeds.  I sprouted them directly in the rockwool in a makeshift terrarium and then moved them into the WF when they were big enough.

Sprouting Peas in Rockwool

Sprouting Lettuce in a Terrarium

Lettuce first placed in WF

I have been browsing many a seed catalogue, and I am sure that I’m going to buy a bajillion different kinds of seeds. Just to grow one plant of each variety… so…

Let’s swap seeds!!!

Is anyone else interested?

I’ll be posting some information on my second WF hopefully by this weekend, but I wanted to throw this out to see what you think.  I have peas on the bottom level and lettuce on the next level up.  The peas are about 60 days old now and doing well, and these small bugs just showed up!  They look like some type of borer. They have a white/clear body and a black head.  Any ideas what they are and how they might get here?  On the seeds? In my rock wool supply? In my rain water?

Am I the only one with bug problems?  At least my spider mites are gone now…

Bugs In My Peas

 A big THANKS to @samenrahmen for knowing what these little buggers were.  Knowing what you are dealing with is half the battle and it all makes sense now.

To document this a bit more, I am adding a few more pictures to this post and changing the title.   Here is an example of the adult that has been buzing around that I just smashed.  I am surprised that my camera took a decent picture of it as it is only about 1 mm long.

Fungus Gnat Adult

 This now explains the dying leaves on the plant.   The lower leaves are drying out and dying and this symptom is slowly working its way up the vine.  I assume this can be caused by them  feeding on my roots.  Hopefully, I have caught this in time as the upper part of the plant is flowering nicely and peas are starting to grow.

Gnat Fly Leaf Damage

 In reading up on these gnats, I see that they like really wet conditions so I am going to cut way back on the watering cycles.  I had been thinking it was a bit too wet.  I had gotten a new air pump when I started this second WF and have not gotten a good feel for how much water the peas and lettuce like.

Adult Gnat Flies on Fly Paper

I bought some fly paper type stuff from HomeDepot.  It is the darker part of the image above.  It is a long piece of sticky plastic and came all rolled up in a tube.  It is incredibly sticky and does not want to straighten out.  To make it easier to work with I cut it into smaller strips and put it on some yellow construction paper.   It naturally wanted to curl up so I made in into a cylindar and put the tie on it.   I quickly learned to use rubber gloves.  In a matter of 24 hours, there were 12 flies stuck on it. 

I am giving them less water and I have also taken out as much of the rockwool as possible to give them a smaller home.  The majority of the roots on this one are actually in the resevoir below.  It had turned itself into a deep water culture.  I have also tried some hydrogen peroxide since that is what I had already in the house.  

As a side note, everything I have been doing has been with rockwool.  When I first started and went to the hydroponics store, they were out of the small bags of the clay pellets and I did not want to buy the big “life time” supply bag.  So this is what the recommended instead.  The one advantage has been that I can “accidentally” unplug the pump for a day and the plants don’t die.

Monster Peas in your WF ? I had my doubts about growing them, too, but then I found him:

So – after numerous attempts to take a proper picture of it – may I introduce to you His Youthful Blurriness, T. Thumb.

Those of you in Canada and the US may already know it; round here it’s harder to get one’s hands on it.

This is quite an old variety, and the good thing about it is its low and compact growth, which should make it ideal for a Windowfarm.

So, if anyone’s worried that the peas might take over the allotment …

Hello all,

After a fixing a bad ph situation and burning the tips off our strawberries, everything is growing well.  Our peas are starting their climb with the structure wires making  good support.  So happy with our little window farm!

You can grow anything but root vegetables.

Here is a list of plants we have grown in windowfarms using supplemental lighting from CFL bulbs:

Fruiting Plants
Okra, cherry tomatoes, scallop squash, small cucumbers, beans, strawberries, peppers, peas, japanese eggplant.

Leafy Greens
Arugula, bok choy, brocolli rabe, kale, chard, radicchio, watercress, chives, various microgreens, and many varieties of lettuce.

Herbs
Rosemary, cilantro, basil, thyme, oregano, parsley, mint, and sage.

Edible Flowers
Nasturtium, violets, and marigolds.

We have had varying degrees of success with each depending on the particular microclimate of the window, the amount of natural sunlight available, the drip rate, the type of nutrients, our ability to fight pests, the source of the seeds, and the particular variety of each species.

You can actually grow some pretty big, productive plants even though the containers are small because plants growing in hydroponic systems grow differently from dirt plants. Instead of growing large long roots that have to grow far from the plant to find new water and nutrients in the soil, plants grow more compact rootballs that grow a lot of root hairs for more surface area to absorb more of the water and nutrients you are sending directly to the roots.

Check out how big and healthy some of the plants in this early system were.

Many more varieties of plants are certainly possible but we need your help testing what works because we can only grow so much ourselves. We need you to try out different plants and techniques and share your knowledge about what works. The goal is to get the most nutrients and the most variety for the carbon footprint of the systems.

As we refine the website, we will create ways that you can track and share your results. In the meantime, please focus on getting your system ready and working well and in the meantime, just please be sure to make posts and tag them well. We strongly encourage new users to start with the simple 3-plant airlift system (there are some chronic problems with the reservoir system so we are moving away from it).