Hi,

My tomato plants are growing a lot… and now the roots are clogging the system. I tried to re-arrenge the pots but still the water doesn’t flow back to the reservoir and is starting to become a bit of a mess.

Would you recommend trimming the roots? If so, how should I do it?

Thanks,

This isn’t our first hydro build, by far, but it is our first one to be hung in a window! It’s in an east facing window in our living room & we love how it brings the same esthetic as a houseplant, but the benefits of FOOD!

This was about a week after we set it up. We started the beans & cucumbers from seed in a little greenhouse on top of the fridge. The top two pots are cucumbers and the bottom has 4 green beans.

We hung the pots with some hemp we had in our craft surplus & made the trellis out of the hemp & bamboo stakes. I’ve even made a bow and arrow out of the bamboo!

This is how the middle & bottom pot get watered. There is a piece of bamboo shoved up there to keep the tubing straight.

Here’s the reservoir, made from a cereal tupperware we got at Target & some ducting tape to make it lightproof. We took the little hinged pour spout off of the lid and ran the watering and drainage tubing through the opening. You can also see the timer there, right now we run the water pump for 15 mins every 2 hours from 6am to 6pm. As the plants get bigger we might have to adjust the schedule, but for now it works out.

We use a water pump we had around the house and it works great until the water level in the res gets down to about 25%. It’s a good reminder that it’s time for a refill without having the pump run dry.

Our first sight of beans!

Beans, beans….

….and more BEANS!!

Okay, enough beans. Here’s our first cucumber flower!

We’re getting a lot of male flowers, just waiting for that female! Well, that’s what we have so far. If you have any specific questions on what we used or how we use it leave a comment or send a message & we’d love to share!

Happy Growing!

-The Sanders

I am looking for any advice on how to remove ‘growplug’ soil from my plants roots once they have started to grow significantly. My plants have a heck of a hold on the soil and I gather the goal is to remove 100% of the soil. I’ve tried washing them and drying them and slowly brushing the soil off, but it is a minefield in that soil and I hear roots screaming any time I try to get even a bit aggressive with soil removal. Thoughts?

Also, what is the ‘sweet spot’ for soil removal? When I started transferring plants from my germination area to the planters I felt the stems were too fragile for me to be poking around, but once the stems seem partially stable; my root systems had really locked down on the soil.

Thanks for any thoughts

It has been awhile and I have been busy outside, but I did something interesting with my strawberries.  One of them put out a runner so I planted it.  I actually had runners last summer, but just cut them off at the time.  The original strawberries are getting old and I will replace one of them in the WF with this baby.  The three on the right have all been in the window farm for a year and a half.  The one on the left is the baby and the other three started off just like it and 1.5 years ago.   As you can see the crowns have really grown tall and have divided a number of times.

After deciding to plant it, my jalepenos and strawberries had to get cozy for a couple of weeks.  The runner was only about 18 inches long so they had to be really close.  I have a jalepeno growing in a three plant WF and the top two positions are empty so I planted it in a net pot in the middle position and waited for the roots to take hold.  I held it in place in the net pot with a paper clip.   So a few weeks later, we cut the cord on the new baby.

http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/07/23/jalapeno-spider-mites/

Baby Strawberry

http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/02/13/strawberries-11-monthes-still-flowering/

It’s only been 12 days since my last post, but things got a little more interesting this morning .  http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/07/11/jalepeno-at-6-months-and-vacation-survival/

Big storms went through here overnight and we were awoken by our water sensor in the basement at 3am telling us we were taking in some water.  Nothing major.  Normally, I wouldn’t mention this type stuff, but it is such a strange coincedence that later in the morning one of the tubes between the levels on my window farm plugged up and I had a mini flood in my window.   I hardly ever clean out the algea so shame on me.   So, in cleaning up that mess looking closely at the plant I noticed that I had spider mites. 

I was not completely surprized by this because last week I had noticed that my strawberry had mites.  I dealt with mites on the strawberries last year.  http://our.windowfarms.org/2010/08/01/strawberry-5-month-update-spidermites-other-bugs/  Last year I only sprayed the leaves off outside with a hose every few weeks and eventually they went away.  This year though I have purchased some neem oil and soap.  I gave the strawberries a good soaking last week.  Today, I sprayed off the japaneno with the hose and then gave it a spray with the neem oil.  So 11 days ago I had not noticed any thing and today they were all over it.

This is actually the first time I had the jalepeno out of the WF so I got a picture of the roots.  I have noticed that some plant roots like to travel out of the net pot and other don’t.  The jalapeno, strawberry and lettuce roots had been very content in staying put.  Both the peas and beans tended to roam.  http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/03/29/green-bean-roots/ 

So far I have been very happy with the jalapeno and it is producing well with at least one a week.  A couple fell off while hosing it down today.

Enjoy the pictures!

Spider Mites

Neem Oil & Soap

Jalepeno Roots

Jaleneno Harvest

 P.S.  I just made some jalapeno poppers out of these for lunch.  Yum!

Hello! So my windowfarm has been up and going for almost a month and is doing great! I’ve spotted my first tomato, the first couple of hot peppers, my beans are getting a bit wild, and the greens are growing.

Anyways…some of the roots from my tomato and bean plants are starting to poke out through the cap/water drip area and into the bottle below it! Not a lot, just a couple roots, but they are starting to get down into the clay pellets of the plant below it. Has this happened to anyone? What should I do about it? Cut the root that is going to the next bottle? Help!

I thought this was worth sharing.  I needed to rearrange the order of the plants in my WF.  http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/03/20/green-bean-harvest-at-8weeks/  The jalepano on top was getting real tall and was hitting the ceiling and growing out of the sun.  The green beans grew well and were covering up the bottle beneath it.  So I moved the green bean to the top since it had fallen over anyway.  The middle is now empty and is covered by the fallen beans.  The jalepano now has the bottom and has more room to grow up. 

This is a picture of the bean roots that had grown out of the net pot.  I pruned them off and the plant is just fine.  Don’t assume your roots will stay in the net pot.  They will try to go anywhere there is mousture.  As you can tell by the shape, they collected in the bottle nozzle and a few actually were traveling down the tube that drops the nutrients from one bottle to the next.

Green Bean Roots

Updated 5/5/2011

Just to clarify, the roots above that I cut off were only the root sticking out of the net pot.  The picture below is of the netpot 2 weeks after the root pruning.   You can tell by the shape of the roots that they were starting to fill in the nozzle of the bottle again.  In general the plant was still growing ok and was starting to flower some more.  However, it was getting way to big.  I have a jalenpano in the same WF and I wanted to give it a chance and the bean was shading it to much.  So the bean made it’s way into the compost pile.

In general, I am pretty happy with the beans.  In late march, I harvested and ate 25 good size beans over the course of a couple weeks.  It would have kept flowering and the harvest could have continued If I hadn’t move things around.  But oh well.  I have to say again that these were the best tasting beans I have ever had.  Even raw they were good and I can not say that about the ones I grow outside.  If I were to do them again, I would only put one or maybe two plants in the net pot.  four was too many.

Bean Roots 2 week Followup

Beans Before Going Into Compost Bin

Plants roots are suspended in clay pellets so that we can run a liquid nutrient solution over the roots without leaving them in a bunch of soggy rotting muck.

Roots bathed in liquid nutrients grow into compact hairy root networks, rather than long big roots you find in soil where plants are out searching for water below ground. The hairs  grab hold of droplets of the liquid nutrients and grow into the porous cavities of the clay pellets to find tasty little juice pockets waiting for them even when the pump is turned off.

Dandelion green roots growing around and into clay pellets

The clay pellets are a great match for drip irrigation because they hold just the right amount of this stuff around the plants’ roots. No killer sog because, like rocks or pebbles, they shed water. But way better than rocks because they hold just a little bit of moisture close by for the hairs to reeeeeach out and ahhhhha get a little sip when they need it.

Clay pellets provide no nutritional value for the plant; it all comes from the nutrient solution. However, they are not made of lava rock, which would react and change the chemical composition of the nutrient solution. They are “inert,” meaning they don’t react.

Clay pellets shed water like pebbles, but their porous interior pockets hold little droplets of liquid nutrients for plants' root hairs to find

I like them because they can be reused, so I don’t have to add to the landfill with every crop. You can clean them and dip them in boiling water between crops to sterilize them.

Nothing is ever sacred and in the spirit of R&D-I-Y, it would be great to find ways of replacing clay pellets with something that was not shipped all over the world from Germany.

However, if you are new to windowfarming, I don’t recommend that these be one of the first things you start experimenting with substituting out.  Wait until you get the hang of dealing with nutrient solution first– there are plenty of other variables to change out as you get to know the microclimate of your window.

This is why we include them in the kits for new windowfarmers.

-Britta

Reading up on ph levels.  Anything that falls between 5.5 and 6.5 seems to be the acceptable range. Is this true?

Images

See some initial research here