Yesterday my daughter and I built a 3 column hydroponic vertical window garden using a 20 gallon fish tank as the water reservoir. In the middle of the fish tank, I squeezed a length Of 3″ PVC tubing. I bore 3, 1&5/8″ holes into the tubing. I used this as the base for my three 6′ columns of 1.25″ PVC tubing. I used a submersible pump. connected it to 1/4″ tubing and used it to get the water up six feet. I then used Ts to try and bring the water to each column. 

It looks alright, but it has a few problems: The problems I am having: 1.The caps at the base of each plastic bottle do not drain well enough, so many of the planters become water logged. 2. I have not yet had success getting the water to all 3 columns simultaneously. 3. In addition I probably shocked an number of my plants. I’m going to play around with it, and see what I can do to improve things.

In an effort to build a pump-free system, we put together a wicking system that can fit in a window. Yay no electricity! (At least until I add lights). We’re new to hydroponic gardening (pretty new to growing anything anywhere actually), so we’re making it up as we go, but this is what we’ve got…

Basically it is a couple of PVC pipes sealed at the ends, with a bunch of holes in them for the plants. You can kind of see on the top one that we cut a hole in the end and put in clear plastic so we can see the water level. There is a drain in each pipe which you can see is attached to piping making it easier to drain when its time to switch out the water. It will also make it easier to convert to some kind of flow system if this bombs. There is about an inch of standing water in the pipes. So far, only the top pipe has nutrients as those are already sprouted.

The materials cost about $70 without doing any shopping around (not including the stuff from the hydroponics store…nutrients and the grow medium). I’m pretty sure that’s cheaper than most everything else I’ve seen on here. Right now it will hold 17 plants. The top has 11 spots for things like herbs and greens and the bottom holds 6 for things that need more room, like peas. Adding up to 22 more should be easy…just waiting to see if it will work before I spring for the investment! We made sure to space them so that the holes line up with the one above, so if we need to go with a drip system later it will be an easy fix.

The seeds are sitting in yogurt cups with this stuff we got at the hydroponic store. No idea what it is. The guy who worked there said it would work and shouldn’t decompose and throw off my water. We found these silly Trix yogurts are actually a really great size and don’t have a glued on label, so I’m eating neon colored yogurt now. I put nylon rope into the material, cut a hole in the bottom of the cup, and the rope hangs into the water. The wicking works beautifully. The top of the spongy material stuff is always damp. Two weeks in and there’s some growth.

Arugula is shown. It took off after about a week even in my chilly sunroom (it rarely tops 60 degrees, low to mid 50′s are more normal.) I’m also seeing signs of life in the sugar snap peas I put in about 8 days ago, but pretty much just huge roots. They haven’t popped above the surface yet. Other things seem like they will need to wait for warmer weather (i.e. the basil, and the tomato).

SO, my question to you experienced folks is this: what to do about lights?? I want to stay very inexpensive because I don’t even know if this wicking business is going to work. Despite my south facing window, I know I need something because it IS January, and I DO live in Minnesota (our days are sunny and getting longer every day, but its still only about 9 hours of daylight). My boyfriend thinks we can do a string of LED Christmas lights and tuck them into a smaller PVC pipe cut in half and lined with foil. Thoughts? Ideas?

Did I miss something else that is going to make me fall on my face here?

First post! We (me, roommate, and boyfriend)  just started our “research and design phase” of this little project. Perhaps foolishly, we’re kind of running off track of the community. We want to use piping (PVC for lack of a better idea) to hold the water and plants. I see this isn’t a totally new idea to the community, BUT what we want to do is integrate wicks. We’re hoping that by using some standing water which the plants can use optionally, we can do away with a pump altogether and simply water it twice a day when we feed the dog and cat. If that worked it would be AWESOME to not use any energy at all (though this is MN, I suppose we’ll need lights in winter).

Here’s what we are thinking (eventually this would be 4 levels):

SO, here’s a few things we considered or haven’t decided yet:

1) Hopefully this will allow the plants to access the water settling in the area below the pot without growing crazy root systems. We can trim roots to avoid them growing into the water too much and blocking water. Haven’t decided if the bottom of the pots should be submerged at the highest water level.

2) We’re thinking that at each watering it will actually get watered twice. Once to flush the system and give em a good drink, and once to refill again (if needed) and leave enough standing water to get it through to next time.

3) We anticipate it will get a bit gunky on the corners. Since these are independent sections, that should make it easier to clean.

4) We have absolutely no idea how high we should leave the water. Suggestions?

5) For the wick, we’re thinking nylon rope.

6) PVC pipe seems to be the way to go, BUT I know there are some pretty substantial environmental concerns. Any other suggestions appreciated.

7) End caps. I understand the PVC caps of the size we need are expensive. Any other ideas to seal off the ends???

What exactly are we sacrificing by not having a semi-constant stream? Are we going to suffer for lack of aeration?

Any other questions/comments/suggestions would be welcome! We’re new at this and have no idea what in the world we’re doing!

I’m about to build my first WF. While I generally love the idea of growing food at home, the free design of WF 3.0 is a bit of an eyesore as such. I wanted to come up with something that’ll still be a full grown window farm, but is still approved by the wife.

Update: Second Draft

Thanks for the input everyone. I came up with a simpler less work intensive solution: flower pots. I went to a hardware store to look at PVC pipes, and stumbled upon some plastic orchid flower pots. They seemed right size and only cost 1,99 a piece, so I got two for testing. The pots have a dent in the bottom, kinda like wine bottles. See the drawing. This type of construction prevents the container from draining out completely. Not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

I also decided to try string instead of metal wire, since I couldn’t find proper parts for attaching the wire to the pots. Here’s a picture with initial string based suspension:

Drawing:

First Draft

Here’s my first draft on an improved design. I didn’t bother drawing the irrigation system in detail since it’s not really important in this context. The main idea is that we’ll encase the water bottle, suspension system and the irrigation system in painted PVC pipe. Any other pipe should do as well. My first draft doesn’t depict how exactly the pipe and bottle are attached to the suspension system. I haven’t really made up my mind on how I should implement it. Anyway, the PVC pipe should be sort of fixed into the suspension wire system, while the bottle and the plant are easy to remove. It’s not really feasible to remove the pipe, since the wires and the irrigation hose run through the pipe.

Comments and improvement ideas welcome

See the next post for construction details and pics.

I just came across this site after watching the presentation on TED.  From what I’ve seen, this place and the ideas here are fantastic.

I wanted to share a system I build and have been using successfully.  Having seen the systems on this site, mine looks huge and clunky!

I live in Las Vegas, Nevada, which as most know, is very hot and dry throughout 9 months of the year.  I have a small yard, but no usable soil for growing a garden.  I don’t know much about gardening, but its something I’ve wanted to try.  My goal is to have a year round system that I can use to produce herbs, lettuce and other greens.

My system is a free standing, recirculating pump based system.  It has a reservoir full of nutrient solution that gets pumped up to a system of PVC pipes.  The water flows through the top pipe and then down to then lower pipe, and so on, until draining back into the reservoir.

Each pipe contains four grow sites, spaced about a foot apart.  Each grow site has a net pot filled with clay pellets.

My Hydroponic System

Before planting, I had started some beans, lettuce, tomatos, green onions and peas inside in a growth medium that I could easily transfer to the netpots.  You can see these small starts already planted in the photo above.  Below is a photo taken several weeks later.   I had since put a “green closet” (small green house) around the structure to help control temperature and filter out some of the intense sun.  The green house is made out of PVC pipe, made rigid with wood bracing and covered in 7 mil painters plastic.  In the photo below, you can see that the tomato plants are taking off, peas are doing ok and the onions and lettuce are still slow to get going.

Progress!

All of my starts did not take off.  My beans did not survive at all, and all but one lettuce plant died.  I attribute this to planting too soon, before the starts had developed good roots.

Here’s a shot of the root system for one of the tomato plants:

Tomato Plant Roots

These roots actually started to become an issue.  They started to grow so much that they would block the pipes and cause water to back up in the system.  A little bit of a “hair cut” fixed that (for a little while…)

It's a jungle in there!

The above photo was taken just a week ago.  The tomato plants by far had grown the most.  So much, that I had to remove a few plants do to their roots blocking up the pipes, and to allow for the other plants to get more light.  I have since added string support for the plants to cling on to.

We’ve been using the green onions and lettuce to make salads for 6 (two adults and 4 kids) several nights now. Below is photo of one of those plants, which we’ve been cutting leaves off of for a while.  They just keep growing back…

Lettuce

Below is shot that shows how dense the roots get on the tomato plants.  This is a pot I removed to thin out the garden.

Dense roots!

All in all its been a good experiment, and I can’t wait to build my next system, refining my ideas.  Hopefully the information on this site and its users can help me out.

Pete

Hey everyone, I just built my first V2 airlift system and I thought I’d share some pictures and tips for those of you who are thinking about building one yourself.  I made a pdf and hosted it on mediafire via the link below:

http://www.mediafire.com/?z0f3vlr93db7iku

This is a close-up of the PVC and top of the frame.  I had the water collect into this pipe and then trickle down the 2 columns

Okay, here’s a hint at what my little vertical patch will look like.  If I get all the glueing right…

A slightly different approach, one that will need only one straight piece of tubing from the pump to the top (bottom left to top left), and has a built-in reservoir.

The upper floors (3) are 63mm PVC-U, the reservoir is 90mm.

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.

The main factors to consider when deciding what to use as containers:

They should be made out of material that is lightweight, waterproof, easy to suspend, easy to cut holes in.

The containers need to be designed to position water flow so the roots of the plant are always exposed to the water/nutrient solution. This does not mean that there always needs to be water dripping or flowing around the roots – some growing mediums can retain the water for some time.

If you’re using net cups in your system, the container will need to fit them. There are various sized net cups. Concievably you could skip the net cups and grow your plant directly in something rockwool. Remember, however, that the roots need room to breathe, and so the container should have space around the growing medium so the roots.

The containers should be opaque or have an opaque cover on them so the plant roots are not exposed to light. The water bottle on the left is not yet covered. We’re working on designing paper covers. We’re considering fabric as well, but it may let in too much light.

The suspension system you use will depend on the containers. We used heavy-duty fishing wire for our prototype but a rigid suspension system might work better, especially when the plants get heavy. Perhaps steel rods, aluminum pipes or wood.

• The fishing line is hung from hooks drilled into the top of the window sill. Ian suggested using a chin up bar to suspend everything from at the top of the window instead of drilling into the wood. Gabriel points out that a cheaper alternative to a chin-up bar might be some threaded pipe from the hardware store. They sell metal pipe cut to length and threaded on the ends, which screws into plates that are screwed onto the window frame. So some holes in window frame, but only in two places vs. a series as with hooks. Very strong.

Aesthetics: Clearly this window farm will become a pretty major feature in the room, and you’ll want something you’ll love to look at. The containers could be modernist white plastic, bottles covered with wood veneer or paper with handmade drawn patterns, ….

We used water bottles as containers, with net cups inside holding the clay pellets and plants. The water bottles (Poland Spring or Deer Park 1.5 liter “eco-shape” bottles) are inverted, with holes cut out of them using a box cutter, so the net cup can be slid inside, where it rests in that indented part of the bottle.

Many hydroponics systems use PVC pipe in round or square shapes. In a window farm, you could suspend these pipes at angles and have the water consistently pumped through and trickling from one level to the next. The photo at the right shows a setup with what looks like 4″ PVC. There’s an instructable on how to make it here.

Square PVC pipes are also possible. These types of systems, with long pipes, are called NFT (Nutrient Film Technique). The water flows through the pipes constantly (if you’re using clay pellets or another medium that doesn’t retain much water), or periodically if you’re using something like rockwool for your plants.

Check out instructables for other people’s DIY hydroponics designs. Not many are vertical, but they may give you ideas for materials.

I love this sculpture by Ken Rinaldo. Transparent glass in a window farm would mean too much algae growth, but blown glass like this with elegant root covers inside the glass itself could be gorgeous.