This is from Jackson’s blog at Superforest.

I found my way into the vertical garden/hydroponics section of youtube, and there I feasted like a wild wildebeast.
I gorged on gallons per minute tables, pvc piping comparisons, and silicone sealant. I learned about pump volume ratios and outflow units and bleeder valves and plastic tubing.

And in the end I thought: I could design a system for growing food and flowers just like these but much, much simpler.

And so I went to the drawing board and tried out some ideas…

And here we are now.

My idea, which I happily share with you all, is to use a six-gallon bucket, a few lengths of pvc, an air pump, a short section of tubing, some zip ties, and one-gallon milk containers to create a personal, scalable, hydroponic (soil-free) drip-irrigation food machine.

I call it: The Jackpot.

An air lift is a wonderful and simple device. It’s just a length of pipe, open at both ends. You feed an air line into the bottom of the pipe and submerge it under water. The air bubbles within the pipe form an upward current and water is carried up to the top of the pipe. Simple, cheap, effective. Here’s a viddy to help explain.

The problem with a single air lift is they can only lift water a short height. Conceivably, combining multiple air lifts within a larger pipe would allow one to lift any amount of water to any height required, provided you had sufficient air flow. This idea probably originated in ancient Persia, I’m not making any claims to it.

So, a hanging garden set up, where water is pumped to the top and there trickles down through multiple growing containers before eventually feeding back into the main reservoir, all built around a central multiple air lift is the problem that’s been bugging me for the past few weeks.

P.S. I awoke from a fever dream and drew this schematic! Cool, no?

The pump – purchased from MoPar – an autoparts store, for about $20.00. This is a standard windshield pump. Others can be found online for next to nothing. The supply voltage is supposed to be 12V – This is the same as a car’s standard voltage.

What HAS to be known is that at 12V, this pump’s duty cycle, that is ratio of running time to off time is about 5 seconds every minute…… or so. In other words, if you run it too long, it will overheat and fry. Anyway, it moves SO much water at 12V that it’s aubsurd to operate at this voltage anyway. We tried 12V, and 7.5 V from a wall-wart style adapter

Connecting the pump to a small 12V lead acid battery. The black wire on the pump is the negative (-) pole, and the white wire corrensponds to the positive pole. On the battery, this is red. Note, that this isn’t always the case, so try to check documentation if you’re not sure. Thankfuly, the consequence for connecting the pump backwards is a reversal of the rotation direction, and poor performance (and NOT a reversal of flow so don’t even think about it!)

We used polyethylene tubing. The pump has 1/4” barb fittings. PE tubing is food safe, meets real FDA specs, and is very easy to work with. Example, McMaster part No. 50375K43 is available for 0.11 per foot, or 7 cents over 100 feet. To soften the tubing to allow easy installation, we briefly heated the tubing with a common cigarette lighter until the tubing took on a very slightly more clear appearance. Don’t apply too much heat! Once the tube cools, no clamping is needed and the installation can be considered permanent.

In order to use these pumps, you need to place them BELOW the water line of your main reservoir. Use as short a piece of hose as possible on the intake. Even better than running the tube over the edge of the container would be to install a fitting in the bottom of the reservoir to allow a direct connection.

If you use the siphon method like we did (tube over the top of the bucket) you need to prime the pump by (yep) SUCKING on the hose to draw some water in to the pump. No you don’t have to get the liquid in your mouth, just in to the pump….. anyway it’s just bat guano.

WALL WART power transformer. Can be found at All Electronics for less than $10 – sometimes less than $5. You want DC, and at least 1 amp – 2A, (2000 mA) is even better.

Decreased flow AND noise from running on 7.5 volts. There was still plenty of pressure. We had no problem getting it to pump water to the top of our Food Chain.

Everybody be warned that the Ecoplus pumps are a bit of a hit or miss. It seems like sometimes you just get shipped a lemon.

We have been having a lot of trouble with the EcoPlus pumps and have had to return them 3 times. Agh! Seems like there are some manufacturer issues. Maria Ailova, the program director has almost given up on them.

The window we are using for our windowfarm is 6′ 10″ tall and the plan is to mount the pump right flush with the bottom of the window and have the tubing go up into the top reservoir about 6″ above the top for a total head (pumping height) of 7’4.”

The first pump we bought was the Ecoplus 1056, which is rated for 9.2.’ But it did not pump high enough and the attachment for 1/2″ tubing was broken. We replaced the attachment and it still did not work.  Even the next pump down, the Ecoplus 633 is rated for a max head of 7.4.’

We returned the 1056 and ordered the 1267, which just barely reached the top. However, it leaked! The back of the pump housing put out a rapid drip as soon as we turned the pump on.

We returned that one and told them the problem. The next one they send did the same thing!

We finally got one that worked and did not leak. Just plan that there is a possibility you will have to return your pump so definitely wait to get seedlings until after you are sure your system is working.

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!

Here is a link to the water pumps I am using. They are $20 and have a head of over 7′. I did a test over the weekend and was able to get descent flow at a height of 7′ or so

Cheap Water Pump