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

Hi everybody,

I’ve just about finished construction on a 2-column windowfarm, and I am just waiting for my seedlings to get big enough to put them in.  I’ll post some pictures when it’s up and running.  Anyway, I have some comments and reflections on the “official” instructions and parts list.

So, I followed the instructions pretty closely except for on two points: first, my windowfarm is suspended from a free-standing frame on casters (which doesn’t really affect anything), and I used a t-joint for the airlift system.  The t-joint (a.k.a. t-valve) design is really simple and easy to install and use, whereas I found the method(s) outlined in the instructions to be really complicated and, frankly, intimidating.  The fact that the size of the check valve included with the air pump determines some of the other parts is pretty inconvenient.  Anyway, I hope the instructions are changed soon to include this more user-friendly design.

Speaking of the t-joint design, there are some issues that I ran into with parts.  Mainly, I bought a t-joint off the Petco shelf with all three openings the same small diameter.  It’s made for three of the standard 1/4″ OD tubes that come with the air pump.  The problem is that this makes a bottleneck for the flow of water.  At least I think it’s a problem.  Brian White say’s that the airlift tube should have an ID of 1/4″ for optimal performance, and he seems to have done his research.  I ran the 1/4″ OD aquarium tubing from the reservoir bottle to the t-joint, and from the t-joint up to the bottom of the 3/8” OD 1/4” ID rigid tubing from the parts list (McMaster.com #9245K17).  It works, but maybe it would be better if I had bought a wider t-joint and used wider tubing.

Speaking of things that could work better, there’s the Petco pump (#9902).  It’s not adjustable, as far as I can tell.  I guess I can add a little adjustable valve in the airline, but if I throttle it that way I’ll be wasting energy.  I think an adjustable pump should be recommended.

Then there’s the tubing.   Two kinds of tubing on the parts list reference McMaster part numbers, but the 3/8” ID flexible vinyl tubing for some reason does not.  Now, McMaster has a ridiculously extensive selection of tubing, so we should be able to find one that works.  I used #5103K36 (Chemical-resistant Clear Tygon Tubing, 3/8″ Id, 1/2″ Od, 1/16″ Wall Thk).  It was okay for joining the two long pieces of rigid tubing, but it was not flexible enough for the top, to curve down into the top bottle.  Technically speaking, the “bend radius” is too big.  Maybe #5231K185 (Clear PVC Tubing Chemical, 3/8″ ID, 1/2″ OD, 1/16″ Wall Thickness) would be better.

Chains.  I think the ball/bead chain is a good way to go, and McMaster was a convenient way to order it.  Weirdly, though, the part number on the parts list (#3606T16) turns out to be stainless steel chain, whereas in the instructions photos it looks like they’re using plastic.  It’s not important, but what’s up with that?  I also ordered the specified couplings (#3606T41).  They are listed in the McMaster catalog as being the same size as the chain, but for some reason the chain does not fit through the center hole.  I had to widen the hole.  I’m not sure what to suggest here.

I think that’s everything.  I don’t mean to complain; I think the design is great and I really appreciate having access to it, but I want to help make it better and easier for windowfarmers who come after me.  I hope this post is the right way to give this feedback.  Sorry it’s so long and boring!

 

Sincerely,

Bill

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 came here just in the right time to see cool mods like the t-valve technique (thanks @gaiatechnician), and the way of splitting airlift (credits goes to @kenokazaki) allowing two columns to be watered using only one reservoir and airlift. Read the rest of this entry →

Update: Do NOT use aluminum for the piping as I have. Apparently aluminum will release toxins in the water which will build up in your body. There are also reports of plants dying due to aluminum exposure. I’ll be replacing the aluminum pipes with plastic as soon as possible.

The construction part is finally complete! It turned out as good as I hoped, and much better than I expected!

Here are the earlier posts related to the same project: 1st , 2nd (the title said it was complete already, but it wasn’t pretty enough

Here are the first shots. I only have some tiny little shoots in there, but you’ll need to use your imagination on what it’ll look like in the spring. The rockwool needs to be cleaned up a bit and properly covered with pebbles.

    

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. (25 e at Bauhaus)
• 1 Inner pot. The inner pot is 22 cm tall, so below it lies my actual reservoir. The volume is somewhere around 5-10 liters. (15e at Bauhaus)
• 2 meters of aluminum plastic pipe, 6 mm diameter. One meter for drip pipes and another for the air lift.
• 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)
• 4 gaskets for sealing the drip pipes. The ones I got seem to do the job pretty well: 17mm outer diameter, 5mm inner diameter, 4mm thick. (around 2 euros for a 4-pack)
• 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” air hose. It’s possible to stretch this over the aluminum pipe using small pliers. (2 euros / meter at a local aquarium store)
• Needle for the airlift (3e at Bauhaus)

Update:

Here’s an additional picture to better explain how this reservoir works. A company called Elho makes these pots. The outer pot is perfect for the reservoir, and the inner pot is good for a bunch of plants.

d.3 stands for D’Artagnon’s third system . . . in case people went looking for an “official” set of d.3 plans on the site.

Anyhoo . . .

Looking through the site and through the plans I felt I wanted another option for my containers other than plastic and another growth medium other than those provided. So, taking the basic theory I struck out with my shoelaces untied and the wind in my face.

First the bottles; I used 12 oz soda bottles for a mini herb garden. I found a cool method of slicing the bottoms of the bottles off that was clean and painless. I will post the extended directions in another post. So, bottoms off, edges smoothed then I added my medium.

 

Rockwool doesn’t breakdown and they are a onetime use product. Once the roots have taken over, then what? Where does that go? The pebbles and expanded clay can be reused often, but that seems a lot of maintenance and they come with plastic baskets. A while ago I saw a news segment about a man who went in to the doctor because he thought he might have lung cancer and through some tests found he had inhaled a pea, which started to sprout in his lung.

Creepy, but it gave me a great idea; luffah as a growth medium.

 

The early version of my system proved that the luffah stayed moist and allowed oxygen to flow through the root system. Best of all, it breaks down slowly. Not too fast so it supports the root system but it can be thrown into my compost and returned in an earth friendly way. Also, luffah easier to manage if soaked briefly in water.

 

The reservoir bottle is a salvaged wine bottle sealed with aquarium grade silicon in the neck. I inserted the pump needle directly into the silicon air tube and that tube sits next to a purge valve for easy drainage. I found a simpler check valve at PetSmart and inserted it further down the line for easier access.

The bottles are strung together using a bracelet knot. Well, really it’s a bunch of square knots tied over the bottles. Tension keeps things stable.

In the earlier version of the system having the airlift tube on the outside proved messy, so I had the tube running up inside the bottles. After having to do some maintenance and fret over root invasion I returned it to the outside. The white tube is 1/4 inch  (outside dimension) pex tube and the smaller is a 1/4 inch (outside dimension) ac tube.

 

A side note on the airlift system: If the water level is too low in your reservoir then the air won’t lift enough water. I kept the level about 1.5 inches from the top edge and I chose a long bottle for this specific purpose. Right now it’s a single column system so I only need a single pump.

Next is to transplant my sprouts and actually get food for the system. That’s going to be an exciting learning curve. Eventually I want to see if I can get a piece of bamboo for my airlift tube and be free from the plastic. Here’s hoping.

Let me know what you think and feel free to ask questions. Happy tinkering!

 

d’

My Skylight T-valve windowfarm.
Those version 3.0 designs are way too complicated. I wanted to make something as simple as I possibly could using minimal materials. This is what I have come up with:

---

February 26th, 2013 Update
Moved, Settled in, Got windowfarm back up, new plants started, images and new stuff will come soon, as I finalize my new design…

---

APRIL 5th, 2012 Update
Ghost chiles are fruiting!, and Jalapenos ready for stuffing and wrapping in bacon

---

MARCH 8th, 2012 Update !

---

COSTS TOOLS & WHATNOT one|two|three|four

---

• The Jana water bottles seem to be perfect, it is a Croatian brand of spring water. I like the water, they are 1.99 a bottle, but you can find used arrowhead 1.5L bottles fairly easily.
  ($0-10[$40, for 4 columns]) Bottles can cost anywhere from free to $10/tower.
• ($0) Suspended with a hook and shoestrings, you can use anything, this doesn’t need to cost anything, spend here only if you feel like trying something fancy.
• ($10) Airline tubing is 10cents a foot. I bought a $10 Roll of it, plenty to spare.
• ($3.50) T valves are a 50 cents each x7
• ($2.00) flow valves are a 50 cents each x4
• ($10-20) the pump was pretty darn cheap, repurposed from fish tank… 3watt, super cheap, and costs about 20-80 cents a year to run on the timing i have.
• ($8.00) 3″ net pots were 50cents each x16
• ($30.00) 2x Timers were $15 each, 24 hours of 15min intervals for water.

TOTAL FOR SETUP: $113.50 for 4 towers
Additional costs(& ongoing expenses); nutrition, lights, paint if you don’t have it, electricity is about 25-75cents a year for the air pump, lights are costlier.

---

Seeds I’ve Started (for windowfarms or my garden outside):
http://store.myorganicseeds.com/ <— Hot Peppers !
http://seedrack.com <–Cool and interesting plants

---

Oregon Sugar Pod Peas – Pisum sativum
Green Onions

PEPPERS – Capsicum
SUPER HOTS 300,000 to 2million Schoville Heat Units
Trinidad Moruga Scorpion – Capsicum chinense
Sunrise Scorpion – Capsicum chinense
7 Pot, Barrackapore variety – Capsicum chinense
Habanero – Capsicum chinense
Bhut Jolokia – interspecific hybrid (mostly C. chinense with some C. frutescens genes)

Low – Medium Heats (6,000 – 100,000 SHU)
Marbles – Capsicum annuum
Black Pearl – Capsicum annuum
Jalapeno – Capsicum annuum

TOMATOES – Solanum lycopersicum
Roma
Brandywine
Yellow Pears
Green Zebra
Black Krim
Speckled Roman

Purple Tomatillos

Butternut Squash

GREENS
Rouge d’Hiver Lettuce –
Arugula –
Dwarf Blue Curled Kale – Brassica oleracea

HERBS
Purple Basil – Ocimum basilicum
Cilantro – Coriandrum sativum
Sage – Salvia officinalis
Oregano – Origanum vulgare
Thyme – Thymus vulgaris
Chamomile -Matricaria recutita
Chives
Catnip
Lemon Balm

I posted earlier about designing a prettier window farm. I’m now building a clean and simple single column farm, and I figured it might be about time to post something about my progress. The pots, suspension and drip pipes are mostly in place. The reservoir and the airlift are still in the works. I haven’t made up my mind yet about what kind of reservoir to use.

Part list:

• 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)
• 2 meters of aluminum pipe, 6 mm diameter. One meter for drip pipes and another for the air lift. (4 euros/meter at Bauhaus)
• 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)
• 4 gaskets for sealing the drip pipes. The ones I got seem to do the job pretty well: 17mm outer diameter, 5mm inner diameter, 4mm thick. (around 2 euros for a 4-pack)
• M3 Nuts, washers and screws (or bolts) for attaching the pots to the aluminum strip. (Less than 1e total)

Parts not installed yet:

• 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” air hose. It’s possible to stretch this over the aluminum pipe using pliers and some soap as lubricant. (2 euros / meter at a local aquarium store)

Still missing the reservoir and the airlift needle(s).

    

This is not the final assembly and you might notice that some of the drip pipes and pots are not straight. I’ll fix that before doing the actual planting. Originally I’d thought I’d have to glue the drip pipes to the pots, but with the gaskets in place and the hole being tight enough, I’m not sure if glue is necessary. It won’t matter anyway if the drip pipes are wet on the outside.

I was wondering though, should the downward water flow be somehow restrained so that the water drips down slowly? Now when I pour water in the top pot, most of the water has come down in less than a minute. How does it work in WF 3.0?

The wife said it looks alright. I might even get a permission to build a second column Stay tuned. The next step is building the airlift.

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.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

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?