Here, I am going to highlight the nitty-gritty parts of the operation.

This is where it all starts.

For the resevoir exit, I drilled a hole in a rubbermaid and secured a small piece of tubing into it with some waterproof caulk. This small piece of tubing is then connected to the rest of the line by that funny white connecter doo-dad. Having a removable connection point makes cleaning very easy.

I find that I don’t necessarily need a check valve since the T-joint is significantly lower than the pump. I used to have one check valve for each line, but I found that the check valve restricted the one line quite a bit, so I removed it. After doing that, I found that the check valve line was much quieter. It seems that without the valve, I experience the gurgling noise. Hmmm

 

T-joint

A very simple setup here.  The resevoir is about a foot above the T-joint. This creates more than enough pressure, even when the water level is quite low. After the T, the flexible tubing continues for about a foot and then connects to the rigid tubing. To make this connection, all I had to do was shove the flexible tubing into the rigid tubing. No leaks! Easy.

Here’s the top of the farm.  I used zip ties to secure the rigid tubing to the chain. To get the coiled up, rigid tubing to straighten out, I boiled some water and syphoned it through the tubing. This allowed me to bend it and straighten it with ease.
I used to have some serious gurgling sounds. I found that by lowering the T-joint, I was able to get rid of them. No need for a silencer. The key is to make sure your tubing has lots of water running up it at one time.
One thing I really like about using these chains is that I can adjust the height of my pots at any time without disturbing the others.

Here is the bottom of one of the pots. You can see the net cups full of clay balls through the holes on the bottom. I thought I would have to plug up some of these holes so that water wouldnt be dripping everywhere, but (luckily) I was wrong!  By hanging the pots on a slant (see gallery), the water only drips out of one of the holes! This is another nice feature of the chain. I can change the angle or direction of slope for any pot at any time. So, what did I do about the bottom pot?…

For the last pot in the line, I poked a hole in a plastic bag, taped a piece of rigid tubing to it, and shoved a piece of flexible tubing in it. The tube connects straight back to the top of the resevoir. The net cup sits in the plastic bag. This is a simple solution that works like a charm. You can also see that the pot is hung at an angle.

This is where it all starts.

T-joint

The bottom of a middle pot

Pot-to-resevoir

Air Pump

Nutrient solution

Peter piper…

pot-to-chain connection point

resevoir connection point

Sideof the resevoir

Top of resevoir

Seedling Tray

Swiss Chard seedlings

Timer

A lovely tomato plant!

This is the whole setup

 

Hello, I’ve attempted my first window farm this week as a prototype for class. It’s been a bit difficult to find proper supplies in Hong Kong due to language barriers. Challenges and questions I’ve come across while exercising my poor engineering skills. I will be using black socks to cover the bottom of the bottles.

1. My seedlings have already been attacked twice with aphids and fungus gnats in it’s growing plugs. I had to start a fresh batch. If the seedlings are already so sensitive to the  moisture and humidity, how soon will my window farm be attacked by these pest? Anyone have experience with handling this in a humid country?

2. My tubing is too stiff to direct it away from the seedling. I’ve seen some systems using a toothpick or wooden chopstick, but my result was a moldy chopstick. I ended up using a fishing wire just to hold it down and a tape to keep the tube in place. I obviously need to find a better alternative. 

3. Reservoir problem. Due to the limited space in HK, I don’t have the luxury to have a big bottle for reservoir so I attempted to use a ketchup bottle on the bottom. I found the tip was a good way to plug the tubing in (I still need to reinforce it with plumbers tape, but haven’t found it yet).

4. Cutting through plastic was the biggest challenge.  I am not a very handy person, but I attempted to use the drill to make some holes on the bottom of the bottles but the bottom is thicker than the rest of the bottle, so I am not able to cut through it. In the end, I made a big circle but the bottles don’t fit perfectly. Any suggestions? I thought about using sticks to reinforce it.

5.I wanted to try out using water beads instead of clay pellets. Anyone have any success in it?

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.

I am doing a couple of vertical pallet planters and changed the airlift to suit the planters. In this case, the next planter will have 2 wooden legs in plastic buckets. The water will drip down the legs and back into the buckets. I usually use the t joint method outside the bucket but I also appreciate that not everyone has room for a u tube that is one ft lower than your T joint. I tried a few different methods and this one works.
This way uses all the depth of the bucket and you might get a little bubbling when it restarts for a few seconds but usually not. Note that once again, I got a few days where the tubes acted funny before they behaved themselves. Pretty sure it is whatever sheen or grease is on new tubes. I think all new tubes need to just sit low with nutrient running through them for about a day before you put them up in position. There is almost zero drainback in new tubes and that is what is causing the problem. Newbies are going to be very confused by this.
My pallet planter project is at instructables A very interesting aspect of this (for me) is that the air pump is 120 ft away from the planter. (It still works and pumps the air through 1/4 inch tubing all the way to the greenhouse). Brian

Here is my modification to the bottle caps @karenwslp made. After several leaks, and a need to just pull the tubing free during reservoir cleaning, I came up with an improvement to the bottle caps. Oh and these caps are from Poland Spring sports watter bottles. Just in case you can’t read the steps:
Step1) remove the blue cap.
Step2) Remove the plastic “Y” piece.
Step3) Insert 1/4 inch coupler onto top part of cap (hexagon shape in cap)
Step4) Insert size “00″ flat washer inside cap. *note use pliers to push it in
*use a little bit of aquarium silicone on the coupler before inserting it into the bottle cap to add extra sealant!

I have now built and planted tomatoes in my windowfarm with a 200 l reservoir. I hope this will be able to keep the plants happy for long warm periods unattended.

My farm consists of 8 hanging pots that are supplied with water from a t-joint airlift and three large boxes that get water through some pieces of yarn. The reservoir can hold more than 200 l of water and I have added some liquid nutrient in the water.

I am growing tomatoes in the hanging pots and in the boxes I have an ash, rosemary, maple, rowan and white clover.

So far, the plants seem to be fine. Some of the leaves on the tomato plants have some white patches. I might need to adjust the amount of nutrients in the water, but that is just a guess.

My plants are doing reasonably well, considering I haven’t really had any time to mainain them. Until this weekend, refilling the reservoirs is about the extent of the care my little windowfarm was getting. I’m up to three columns now – two done using plastic cups and greek yogurt containers, and one using Deer Park bottles and net cups. So far, I’m finding my version to be a little easier to maintain and slightly more attractive. Very slightly. There are a few more photos of individual plants over on my blog.

My upside-down Deer Park bottles were leaking a bit, and looked a bit worse for the wear, so I put together new reservoirs using soda bottles (which are thicker plastic), and added a nice coupling on the top for me to attach the water return lines. Previously I’d just shoved the water return lines through a hole I stabbed in the bottom of the inverted water bottle.

A few other people were having trouble preventing the air from bubbling back into the reservoir, so I made a diagram of my set-up and included a few numbers for reference. The full write-up can be seen on my primary blog, but the cliffs notes version is that I’ve got a 1 liter bottle, suspended about 6″ above the t-joint, connected by a 5 foot long piece of clear 1/4″ tubing which is coiled at the bottom of the container it all sits in.

I do still get air bubbling back when the pump first turns on, but it corrects itself in about a minute.

Hey Fellow-windowfarmers!

I’d like to share some pictures of the design and progress of our first ever windowfarm where we are growing peas, mini tomatoes and cayenne peppers So far, so good! More updates will follow as our plants grow.

As you will see, the basic set-up of the windowfarm includes; an airlift system using a pump, a nice green hose, a t-joint, two valves, a plastic white cereal container as a reservoir (3.5 litres capacity), 3 plastic white plant pots, two chains by which to suspend the pots from the curtain rail, plastic white tubing to allow the water & nutrients to drain down through each pot and some bbq skewers placed horizontally to keep the white tubing stable and to give the plants something to grab onto! Please feel to add your comments, feedbacks and tips!

Photos

Very special thanks goes to my boyfriend Dmitry for his engineering, design and building contributions. It is our windowfarm and I couldnt have done it without him .

Hi,

I’m building the MAMA farm,

but I have some problems with the reservoir bottles.

I can’t figure this step out:

Next, attach the metal inflation needle to the threaded tapered end of the presta stem. Using pliers, tighten as tight as possible.

I collected a lot of presta stems, but I have no idea on how to attach the air needle.

Can someone help me?

Thanks

Update, March 3rd: Added some pictures and descriptions.

When I got this floor standing flower pot reservoir, I started off with a needle airlift. The needle turned out to be really unreliable and the result was also noisier than a T-airlift. Fortunately I found a “tap” that can be attached to any reservoir with a non-curved surface. It’s a tap made by AutoPot. I just drilled a hole in the side of the reservoir and attached the tap to the side of it. Careful when drilling. You’ll need a special tool or a huge drill bit to make a hole this big (25mm). The tap can take a 16mm hose if you stretch the hose a little, so I needed an adapter to 6mm. Fortunately, a local chili equipment store had an adapter for 16mm to 6mm hose with an additional filter in it.

My initial column had just a tiny reservoir. It was way too small and a bit ugly as well. Another setback was that I originally used aluminum pipes in the plumbing, and found out that aluminum (not healthy) might end up in the plants. Thanks for pointing that out, readers. What I’ve learned from this is that if you’re planning to make your own window farm and don’t want to use recycled bottles, prepare to spend the price of a factory made windowfarm. Of course, you might end up with something better that way

Here’s the final part list for those who aren’t familiar with my previous posts.

Part list

(total cost ~100 euros)

• 4 Plastic orchid pots. These are made of Polypropylene, which is (afaik) safe to use with food. The pots also have an inward dent in the bottom, so they will never drain completely. I don’t know whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. Be careful when drilling plastic. I managed to break one pot by using too much pressure. (2 euros/pot at Bauhaus)
• 1 Large floor flower pot. This is the same brand as the orchid pots so the color matches perfectly. The water volume is 10 liters, and the reservoir is in the bottom of this outer pot. (25 e at Bauhaus)
• 1 Inner pot. The inner pot is 22 cm tall, so below it lies my actual reservoir. (15e at Bauhaus)
• 1 meters of plastic pipe for the dripping, 8 mm diameter.
• Two meters of aluminum strip. Mine is about 12mm wide and 2mm thick. I wouldn’t go any thinner than 2mm, since the rigidity of the column would likely suffer. (4 euros/meter at Bauhaus)
• M3 Nuts, washers and screws (or bolts) for attaching the pots to the aluminum strip. (Less than 1e total)
• Sera Air 275R Plus air pump with adjustable air flow and two outlets. Came with two non-return valves. (28 euros at a local aquarium store)
• 6mm “colorless” hose for the air. (2 euros / meter at a local aquarium store)
• 6mm black hose for the water. Colorless hose gathers algae. (2 euros / meter at a local chili store)
• A Y-joint for the 6mm hose. Came with the pump.
• A check valve. Came with the pump.
• A tap from AutoPot.
• A 6mm adapter for the tap

Plants

So far I’ve planted some cherry tomato, 2 kinds of chilies, coriander, parsley, basil and strawberry. The tomato is growing like crazy. Tomato was germinated three weeks ago and the plants are already 15cm tall. Then I threw in another basil plant I got from a grocery store.

Nutrients & pH

I was recommended nutrients called Flora Mato and Flora Micro by GHE. I don’t know much about nutrients, so I just got both and I’m adding both every time I add water. I’m aiming at an EC number of 1.60mS/cm.

The tap water around here is pretty alkaline with a pH of around 8. I got some pH down powder and a pH tester. Before I add water I first add nutrients and then make sure the pH gets down to about 6. Only after that I pour it in the reservoir.

Photos