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

New Pictures:

I took some more pictures of my farm as it’s evolved. The reservoir, airlift and lighting are the biggest changes. I also included some detailed shots of materials I’ve used.

My reservoir is suspended from the steel wires that hold my bottles and stabilizes the whole thing. It's 2 centimeters above ground.

This shows my happy beans and thriving tomatoes. They really seem to like the led's I installed.

This is my version of the pulser pump. It works best of all the attempts I undertook.

These are the different sizes of tubing used in the pulser pump. The brand is Gardena

The check valve. I found this in an aquarium store

detail of the suspended reservoir

top of the farm, they sure love that bulb

as they grow too close to the bulbs, they burn their leaves even though there's hardly any heat emitted by the led's

Hi all

I have quite some experience with my farm so far which I’d like to share. As you can see from the picture, it grew. I now have 8 containers made from 2l fanta bottles with net pots in them. The reservoir is made from an Ikea container named Rationell. They make it from recyled plastic bottles. It has a lid that closes perfectly and blocks out any light. The airlift tubes are wrapped around a net pot and sunk into the reservoir by a stone i put into the net pot. I have strawberries, peppers, cherry tomatoes and beans growing, the 2 remaining containers will get more tomatoes and another sort of beans. After experimenting with wine bottles and using a mixture of techniques taken from @eloinen and @jamesnutter, I went back to plastic bottles, but keeping the 2mm steel cables for suspending the bottles. In my opinion, it looks beautiful and is incredibly sturdy. With the wine bottles, it all wasn’t holding together very well and I experienced quite some leakage. I had some ph problems with my old setup, but it all seems fine now.

Pump

I have my pump on a day timer. It runs for 15 minutes every 2 hours. It has a break between 1am and 7am. For the end and the start of the cycle, I let the pump run for 30 minutes.

Airlift

I have two individual t-joint airlifts installed. What I noticed is that they take a while before they start performing well when installed for the first time or after changing the water in the reservoir (i.e. they come out of the water). I guess this is due to air in wrong parts of the hoses. In the beginning, I always fiddled around with the installation because I thought something was wrong. However my finding is to just let it run for an hour or so and see if it sorts itself out.

Water exit on top

You may see on the pics that they’re not identical on the 2 columns. Actually this was unintended but proves as a good solution for my pepper. It doesn’t like to much water, and the short end shoots most of the water  on the bottles wall, making it flow down directly to the next bottle while only a few drops now and then actually get into the container.

Water and nutrients

I’m running my farm on some bought nutrients which seem to work fine. I change the water about every week to 10 days, checking the pH every now and then. It’s usually between 7.2 and 7.8. Once, I had it hitting 8, don’t know why and after a water change it never happened again.

Fortunately, we don’t have chlorine in tap water here in Switzerland, so no need to air it out first.

On my to-do list:

• Adding lighting. I ordered a 20W solar kit with a battery, charger, alternating-current converter and a bunch of red-and-blue LED growing bulbs which should arrive any day now. I want my garden to be independent from the power grid. It is quite an investment and I will have to grow a lot of veggies for a return on investment. But for me, it makes no sense having to buy a lot of electricity to grow plants.
• Starting a worm-tea manufacturing process.

Edit: I put a lot of info in the pic’s descriptions, but don’t know why it’s not displaying. Anyone know what went wrong?

Help.

At first I was building it my own way, which had its own gigantic problems. But then I switched to something that looks basically identical to how the kits and kit instructions work. (The current ones with the long instructions — V 3 modular if I’m not confused.) It managed to get a tiny bit of water going up the system, but mostly it’s just bubbling at the bottom. I checked and there’s no leak that I can find. The water is just coming out the air needle, going down the tube somehow, and bubbling out the little gap at the bottom where the air’s meant to go in. I made sure the whole thing was as straight up and down as I could get it. I originally had a straw around the tube holding it straight (with its own angled bottom to let water in), but the bubbles were pushing water up that instead, which was just insulting.

The “add media” option isn’t cooperating with my computer, so I just stuck these on imageshack. Hopefully that’s not a problem for anyone.

You are looking at:
-1 basketball inflation needle
-2 segments of standard aquarium tube — I have no idea where you get the rigid stuff
-1 joiner/adapter thingy that goes between mini and normal aquarium tubes
-1 useless blob of silicone caulk

Ideas what I’m doing wrong?

We built a starter window farm earlier this year, and now I’d like to build a bigger one to cover the entire window. (I actually have a really huge window.)

But I’m having trouble understanding the assembly instructions for plumbing, specifically at and after bottle cap assembly (methods A, B, and C).  At the end of the instructions for each method, it ends with putting the other end of the airline tube into the pump.

I must have missed something or am not understanding how this works, but if you have four or more columns, how do they share one pump? In the full assembly picture, it looks like each doesn’t plug into the pump but rather into something with a loop above it. I can’t seem to find mention of this in the instructions.

Can someone please enlighten me?

Here are my homemade cover boxes for my upper reservoirs. They block the light to help prevent algea build-up inside the reservoirs and they are better looking also.

First photo : View of one cover box insides from the rear. I removed the most part of the back of the cardboard boxes to slip them over the reservoirs. I also cut a large vertical slit into the front panel to let the tube escape through and to have a view of the water level in the reservoirs. I lined the inside with black paper to make the it darker.

Second photo : both cover boxes are in place over each reservoir. Beside the front slit, I glued a band of white paper and marked the water level in litres to help me monitoring the nutrient solution level. I covered the outside visible surface with photos cut from seed catalogs.

This is an easily available attachment for pop bottles here in Canada. They are available in garden centers for watering plants.  This means the the entire windowfarm can be made from pop bottles and still get excellent airlift.

Your water tube would go down in a J shape to the t- joint to prevent back flow into the reservoir.

If you cut the “showerhead” top off, you can use an upturned pop bottle as your reservoir for a windowfarm and  attach the water pipe to a t-joint  outside  the bottle  and at whatever submergence you choose.  I think this can make life easier for everyone.

Plant watering attachment for pop bottles

Photo 1 : I figured out a way to expand my windowfarm, building a last bottom row of four containers, sitting independently on the shelf right under the window. Now, I’ve got 22 containers in this window.  The tubing system in the upper part is still a mess remaining to be addressed, though. But the slow-drip irrigation in itself is working fine. My 8 litre reservoir usually lasts 6 to 10 days without needing to be refilled. It feeds 2 columns. My smaller 600mL bottles feed one column each. They last 24 to over 48 hours.

Each morning, I open the 8L reservoir flow valve to release one drop every two or three seconds. Then, the change of pressure in the big reservoir automatically slows the dripping flow to a stop after a few hours (I estimate two to four hours).  For my small bottles, though, I open the valves to maximum until every clay pot is dripping abondantly (one minute is enough), then I ajust the flow to 1 drop per 2 or 3 seconds and close the valves 30 to 45 minutes later.

After supper, I make the same operations. I always make sure all valves are shut before going to sleep. My plants don’t seem to suffer from this schedule, but they are still small and it’s winter. The true test will come with summer heat, I guess.

Twice, I experienced leaving all of them without irrigation for 24 hours, and I couln’t see any difference. The 50-50 mixture of clay pellets and rock wool seems to work very well to keep a good moisture level.

Photo 2 : These new containers needed to be irrigated too, so they are positionned right under each existing column, but they also need to drain into a big bottom reservoir, big enough to collect the upper reservoirs’ whole contents.

Photos 3 and 4 : These terracotta pots came with their insides covered in a glazed coating as well as the other pots. But their draining hole is located on the side of the pots. Just perfect for what I had in mind ! First, I cut four lenghts (2,5 in. long) out of a very rigid straw (the kind of stick they use to tie a balloon on). I put some plumber tape ( white and very thin, my husband says it’s teflon) several layers around its middle to make it thicker and I wedged it in place in a screwing motion, through the draining hole. Then, I put aquarium silicone sealant around the straw and the draining hole, inside and out. I experienced leaking problems, so I had to make touch-ups to seal them completely.  Finally I connected the straw to a lenght of 1/4″ blue silicone tubing (bought in the aquarium section in my neighborhood’s pet shop).

Photos 5 and 6 : I put the pots on their shelf and directed the tubing down into the plastic bucket sitting under the shelf. (I still need to find a neet way to secure these tubes so they won’t get out of the bucket inaverdently and spill water on the floor.)

Photo 7 : The story of a mistake. My first attempt at collecting water involved these big tubes. I put two of the small blue tubes inside this big one, trying to imitate the draining system on a washing machine. But the blue tubes ran horizontally before plunging vertically into the big transparent tube and the water level inside the terracotta pots would have to build up to about 2 inches high before gathering enough pressure to push its way through the blue tubes. It made a sudden flushing effect and when both containers were flushing at about the same time, the water would flow back up the transparent tube and spill on the floor. Only then did I figure out a most obvious and simple way to make things work. Now, the draining is almost instantaneous. Only a couple spoonfuls of water sit at the bottom of the pot before the water drains.

Photos 8, 9 and 10 : As a next step, I wanted to isolate my plants’ roots from the entrance of the draining tube. I didn’t want to take the chance of clogging it. So, I needed a container inside the pots, and I had to make sure it would not block the water’s evacuation. I used two different methods to make a “platform” in order to raise up the containers a little. First, I cut three slices off a cork and layed them down the bottom of one of the square clay pots. In the other, I cut the bottom part of a strawberry plastic crate and put it upside down in the square pot, making a side notch to give room to the tubing.

Both pots drain well, so if nothing nasty develops on the corks,  I’ll replace the plastic crate with cork.

Photo 11 to 14 : For the inside pots, I found these 2,5 in. “earth-friendly, biodegradable pots, made of compressed straw, rice husk and bamboo, taking one year to degrade after exposure to elements. ” 37 cents each at Walmart. I would rather find permanent pots, but I wanted to avoid plastic, so I’m buying myself some time with these ( I figure at least six months).  I used a square of geotextile material to line the inside of the pot. It will prevent the roots from reaching the draining tube, hopefully. I then filled the pot with 50% wool rock (including 2 cubes hosting each a sprout) and 50% clay pellets, and finally, I cut the excess geotextile.

Photos 15 and 16 : Four plants in place : one Buttercrunch lettuce and one parsley in the left container. I figure I have plenty of time to eat the lettuce before the parsley is fully grown. One question, though : will the remaining roots of the lettuce develop into a problem for the parsley or affect badly the water’s quality ?  In the second pot, same strategy : one lettuce and one nasturtium. I needed to train a mesh from under the pot above, because the distance is too big between both pots and the drops of water were splashing around. It was necessary to do the same elsewhere in my windowfarm because the developping foliage can divert the water outside the pot, sometimes.  I discovered that leaving some mesh to lie on the clay pellets distributes the moisture much more evenly on the pellets. But I’m not sure it’s necessary anyway. The only drawback is that with the meshing, the water makes no more dripping sound. Snif.

Photos 17 and 18 : An update on my peas and lettuce growth. The photo of the peas is overexposed, sorry.

I have set up the 4 bottles, and now I’m working on my airlift. I’m trying to do the T version instead of the air needles. But I’m having trouble getting the air to lift the water and not escape through what should be the water intake tube.

Any advice for this system? I’m going to go and cut a longer piece of tube and see if that makes a difference.

Thanks,

Melissa

-EDIT- (20 minutes later)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/58467192@N06/5378581924/

So the longer tube completely helped! There is no air escaping from the system at all. Now my poor tomato plant that was without water all night is getting some.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/58467192@N06/5377983157/

I purchased the white frame from ikea and it was around 20$. I plan on having 3 or 4 columns with a string of lights in between the columns. This frame will allow me to move the window farm around and close my blinds at night. I’m going to raise it up to window height once it’s all installed.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/58467192@N06/5378580404/

Here is a short video of my airlift in action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qER-HLCHcE

-EDIT- (Later that day…)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/58467192@N06/5378590143/

So my tomato is definately looking good! http://www.flickr.com/photos/58467192@N06/5379181542/in/photostream/
I have also transplanted a broccoli plant to the top of the column. http://www.flickr.com/photos/58467192@N06/5379182328/in/photostream/
My seedlings are starting to sprout! http://www.flickr.com/photos/58467192@N06/5378589329

I made another change to my system… I zip tied the coil of tube in the water so it is easier to remove and install. http://www.flickr.com/photos/58467192@N06/5379179122

Also, nutrients were added to the solution. I added part 1 and part 2 of the general nutrients, and I also added some “maximum plantroids” because it says:

“Plantroids Super-Vitamin Thrive Enhancer stimulates plant branching, increases photosynthesis and cell division. Plantroids also helps reduce stress as well as stimulates root growth”.

Just a warning about CFLs… I dropped one and it smashed into a million tiny shards. Took a while to make sure I got all the little pieces.

Can anyone give me advice on how to put pictures in my post, rather than just links? Thanks.

I thought the shower rod design http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/01/07/my-manhattan-windowfarm/ by Dave, @dhult was brilliant so I “borrowed” the idea for my next one.  I had an old shower rod laying around and it fits perfectly in my bay window.  My other two WFs use 2L pop bottles and so does this one.  The 4″ net pot fits in well into the 2L bottle.   My Home Depot had the ground clamp ($1.46), however it did not have that style pipe hanger and neither did the Menards store.  I had to improvise.  I used a 4″-5″ adjustable hose clamp ($1.49) in its place and drilled a hole in it to connect it to the ground clamp.

The other change that is different than my others is that I drilled a 1.5″ hole in the top of the bottles in stead of the 1″.  The 1″ allowed the bottles to be screwed together for some additional support, but the extra support is not needed here.  The 1.5″ hole allows the neck of the upper bottle to fit deeper into the lower bottle making the column a little more compact and easier to disassemble.

I still have to cover the bottles and resevoir to keep out the light, but I have to figure out what to plant next.  Overall, I like this design more than my last two since it has the advantage of easily taking the resevoir out.

Shower Curtain Rod WF Overall View

Shower Rod mouting w/Pipe Clamp

2L Bottlw w/4" Net Pot

1/18/2011 Update – Here is a video of the pump in action.    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKjkFIcBLj4   This is the same “Tee” style pump I have been using on all my WFs.   There’s a good picture of it in this post.  http://our.windowfarms.org/2010/12/04/strawberries-9-months-new-wf-first-snow-of-the-year/  The water does go up and around the rod pretty well and its fun to watch.  The total lift is only 42 inches.  Later on when it is full of algae it will be less interesting and I’ll probably straighten it out then.

For version 3.0 system.

I am having difficulties with the end cap to the bottom bottle (reservoir).

I have a .6″ check valve but getting the parts for method B and C is near impossible.  The Industrial Specialties company with the plastic threaded bulkhead only ships supplies if  the  if you spend $25 and I don’t need that many bulkheads so I am not going to order from them.  Some parts for method B and C both cannot be found at Home Depot so I am kinda stuck.  Method A is the easiest route but states that it is only for a .8″ check valve.  Does anyone know why I cannot use Method A for a .6″ check valve?  What are the difficulties?  Thanks.