Hi Folks,

Ryan here, new in Window Farmer town.

This community caught my eye because I am a beginner urban gardener and also a consumer of a large amount of these type of containers:

http://www.fnnfoods.com/images/sg_NutriSoy.jpg

It is my intention to attempt to build a window garden to keep them out of landfill as the place where I’m living at the moment doesn’t have a recycling program for them.  I suggest that they might be an improved container for the Window Farmer system as they would not require seperate root covering. The downside is they are not as pretty and minimalist looking as clear water bottles!

Hope everyone is having success with their projects, and I look forward to sharing knowledge with you all.

RyanNutri Soy containers

This was our first attempt at a system using sewer pipes as reservoirs. With this particular prototype, we got to a more workable reservoir with the sewer pipes, we found we could use the top reservoir to suspend the bottles (then realized this makes cleaning difficult), and realized that lawn irrigation drip emmitter buttons do not work well. 

We had been having two issues with my tupperware reservoir system: 

1) The brass fittings that connected the tupperware container to the tubes were very difficult to attach to the soft plastic of the tupperware container. When the plastic would bend, we developed little leaks. 

2) We had been controlling the drip rate by progressively tightening clamps onto the tubes that fed each column, but we did not really have a fine enough degree of control. 

We made the switch to these PVC pipes, which are often used in traditional home-built  hydroponics systems. While there are plenty of things we don’t like about PVC, it is a cheap and easily accessible material with plenty of ready-made plumbing fittings, so it spares the beginner some headaches. 

We installed drip emmitter buttons (black and yellow pieces on the underside of the top reservoir, as seen above ) but found that they clogged frequently, not being designed to deal with the particulate matter in liquid nutrients. We have since replaced the drip emmitters with two-way aquarium air control valves, which you can pick up at your local pet shop. They are not perfect either. You do need to watch your system and occasionally clear the valves when one of your columns stops dripping. 

Luckily, the plants bounce back pretty quickly after you start the nutrient flowing again. 

Finally, we realized that after about a month and a half, there was a lot of gunk clogging up the top reservoir and that we needed to clean it way more often– like every two weeks. It became apparent that suspending the columns from the top reservoir was not a good idea because then you have to take apart the whole system to clean the top tube. You will see that in the current how-to, we recommend hanging the columns separately.

In this system, we merely hung the CFL lights by their cords flat against the window and plants grew out toward them.

Moveable hanging windowfarm we made for demos

This demo model was all about portability. It has much in common with a standard reservoir setup, but we needed to be able to move it out into the main space so we could show people how a windowfarm works while also being able to put it back in the window most of the time so it could get light (and grow HUGE!!) .

This model came before the move to sewer pipe reservoirs. We used the same suspended tupperware reservoir technique we used in the first prototype that we built in my apartment’s kitchen window.

You can’t see it in this picture but the “plumbing” is detachable and can be moved separately from the plants. We suspend a tupperware reservoir above this windowfarm and use a bucket on the right at the bottom to recapture the liquid and house the pump. We drilled holes through the side of the tupperware container up top  and attached individual tubes to the reservoir (tricky plumbing!). The individual tubes dangle down into the top of each column. The “recapture” tube you see at the bottom attached to the bottom dowel drained into a 5 gallon bucket that also housed the pump (on the right, not shown). The pump in the bucket is attached by a long tube to the reservoir up top, closing the loop. 

We made it portable by creating a removable frame for the bottle columns. We hung one dowel rod from another dowel rod with tension cable, creating a loose hanging frame. Then we hung each strand of bottles from a dowel rod at the top using the fishing wire technique. There are holes in the recapture tube, into which we insert the tube at the bottom of each column. We tied the recapture tube to the bottom dowel with zip ties.

 It was so exciting to just pick the whole thing up and move it down the hallway! It’s light enough for one person to carry even with these big plants.

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!