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).

These guys are going like crazy in my farm. Sadly, my cat ate the other vine way, way back so it’s stumpy but recovering.