DWC Strawberry

A few weeks back, in the wake of a very early snowstorm I decided I better not wait much longer before starting my hydroponic strawberries from the overabundance of runners that were sent out this season.  So I dug up five and set up my table top DWC system in a prime southern facing window.  I also set up an old HPS lamp that we had laying around to supplement the light to a full 12 hours of direct light. Now a couple of weeks later they are doing amazing, and one of them is even beginning to flower!

What I am pointing at is one of the remaining original leaves from growth outside. All of the original leaves were discolored and partially necrotic, likely a soil deficiency that we will have to fix next year.  These pictures don't really do justice to how healthy the other leaves are looking.

Something else that is doing surprisingly well is my pineapple plant!  I mentioned this very briefly in a previous post or two, but the story is I dropped the top of a store bought pineapple into my tomato system over the summer, and when I dismantled it this had fully established roots! So with my conclusion that my orange tree experiment was over (it never grew past a couple leaves), I dropped it in that bucket, and there it remains.  I just did a full water change after noticing a lighter green color in the new growth (which there is surprisingly a lot of since being out in full light).  Significant of a nutrient deficiency, which in this case was likely a result of old water throwing off the chemistry and causing nutrient lock-up. Unfortunately this picture isn't great, but the roots are awesome, and hang well to the bottom of the bucket, ~1 ft.

Summer Successes

So I have been super awful at keeping up with my endeavors online since things went awry in the spring, but I have continued endeavoring! And over the course of the summer my family and I have had a few successes despite some crazy weather for MA (We had perpetual rain for some weeks, tornadoes, hail, hurricanes, early frosts, and snow in october!).

The three tomato plants that I started in the spring are probably what did the best of anything. At their peak I was harvesting a large bowl full of heirloom tomatoes daily! They were super delicious. Up until earlier this year I never ate tomatoes, even on anything, and I would eat the yellow pears right off the vine daily. The yellow pears were the most prolific of the three by far, my speculation is that it was because of the placement of the plants in the system; the yellow pear was in the center, directly over the primary of the two airstones I had in the system, and the most area to grow due to the shape of the basin which the water was in. Aside from the fogger, which was removed mid-season, the system contained no plastics whatsoever. It is hard to see in the pictures, but I built a support cage out of chicken mesh, and used an old shovel handle to hold the plants up.

These first two pictures are from just before, and just after moving from inside to outside.

They took a bit of a beating, especially the yellow pear (center/ tallest). Taken in late May.

These are from a couple days, and about a month later

After some overzealous branching up  top in late July, my tying up gave way and the whole bush started to fall over, so I put a 12 foot 2"x4" in the ground next to it and began tying it up.  It reached about eight or nine feet before we got hit by a hurricane, and some sort of a mold/mildew/fungus took out all of the tomatoes in the area.

Also in this system, I rooted my new pineapple plant!

Next to the tomatoes, the other hydroponic things did pretty well. A DWC system which I had set up for my mom in the spring, which had three basil plants and a pepper produced a number of peppers and good deal of basil, though the pepper overshadowed a little. This system survived hell, the pepper plant, and even the whole system were blown over multiple times, causing branches to break off. There was also a twelve site fog culture planted with two peppers and eight or so basil plants of assorted varieties. It was not the best fogger system set-up, a lot of sediment built up on the fogger which clogged it. But none the less it was very bountiful, we made multiple pesto dishes throughout the summer simply through picking little bits off, and then when we really harvested, we made dozens of 4-8oz jars of pesto with it.

All of these pictures are from very early in the season, by the end everything was much larger.

Before move outside.

After move outside.

Though I shelved my indoor systems for the summer, I did set up one simple, experimental ‘garden’. I built a table out of scrap wood we had laying around and cut two holes in it the size of a five gallon bucket. Then I built something of a light box around it, and lined it with reflective film on all sides. I planted five basil plants in each bucket, placed one new airstone in each bucket, fed by the same pump. If I had light on, it was equidistant from each bucket. The one difference between the two buckets was that in-line to the airstone of one bucket I placed an algaculture relay system. In theory, via passing the air through an active algaculture, the oxygen content will rise in the air relative to the external atmosphere, thereby diffusing a higher oxygen content into the DWC nutrient solution. In practice, I took a clear mason jar, drilled two holes in the lid, ran a line-in which was to be submerged in nutrient water (to the bottom of the jar), then ran a line-out which was mounted just enough into the jar to be sealed, this was all sealed air tight with hot glue (silicon caulk in the future), the jar was filled with nutrient water leaving a small gap, I inoculated the solution with algae from a fish tank, and the lid was tightened on. The plants in each bucket grew equitably while the jar was establishing. It took a while to get established, but eventually the jar was a vibrant green and all surfaces were thick with algae. I then cut all plants back to the base-most node placing them on the same level literally and figuratively. Effect, after leaving them to grow freely all summer, the plants in the inline-algaculture-bucket were substantially taller, approx. 140% taller (~ 4-6 in.). I don’t consider this at all definitive, and I will likely try the experiment again, multiple times, before I am positive it is beneficial. The idea being that as with all life, plants use oxygen, especially at night, especially in the roots, so increasing the atmospheric oxygen in the root zone would potentially increase growth in some capacity. Whatever the end result, these plants produced wonderfully. Unfortunately it was too close quarters to get any good photos.

This is all of the basil we grew, inside/outside, soil/hydroponics from the night we made pesto.

Top is from soil plants.

Bottom left is outdoor DWC.

Bottom right is from my experimental DWC.

Now for the soil. It was super wet this year, and as I previously said we had some intense weather. But we have an extensive garden and some things did quite well. Potatoes, we grew nine different heirloom varieties, and we actually bought another fridge to store them all. The soil tomatoes (as well as the hydroponics, though earlier) were attacked by a mold, mildew, or fungus in the area and took a hit for it. Beans did okay though we had some pole beans labelled bush and vice versa, so we didn’t have the proper set-up for maximum yield. We planted strawberries, and they spread like wildfire, and produced some fruit. Onions did well, beets not so much. And as always we had plenty of lettuce, kale, chard.

This is the primary part of our soil garden, before much had sprouted.  In the center are onions, chard, lettuce, beets, spinach.  To the right of the central tree was all potatoes, ~25'x25'.  To the left of the tree out to the rope was all corn, but it didn't do fantastically.  And in the back left were our soil tomatoes. Kale and broccoli scattered everywhere.

The next picture is from what is now our berry patch off on the northern side-lot of our yard. Four blueberries, and a lot of strawberries (even more now!) this has all been covered in mesh.  Just out of frame to the left were our beans and some cucumbers.  An the picture to the right is of one of our cold-frames which we use to start plants outdoors before it is warm enough, and now to keep our lettuce alive past frosts and even snow this year.

I will likely be posting again soon, with the summer gone, and winter quickly approaching, I will be bringing much more life back indoors.  I have a few hydroponic things that I worked on, but never planted anything in due to timing which I will post some designs and pictures of.  And my WindowFarm(s) will be running and planted again in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned, follow to be notified of any updates, and keep farmin'! Namaste.

Free the Food, Free the People

A couple of months ago, me and my roommate at the time were sitting on our deck, talking about the developing food movement, and all of the niches involved in that.  After covering a variety of foci, we came to a basic conclusion that food has been commodified, and turned into a detached, unknown, dreadfully separate thing from ourselves, which we have to trust the various industries provide for us. Well, maybe not so simple of a conclusion.  After a period of mutual understanding and contemplation following, the silence was broken with, "free the food, free the people."  We really latched onto that phrase.
Something similar to this idea is illustrated in Dan Brown's My Ishmael, where he shows the effects of 'locking up the food' within the bounds of a centralized control system, in our case that is our oil driven economics.  Over the years this has developed into generally centralized agricultural, and other food production modes which are highly inefficient in an ecological sense.  The vast majority of produce is grown in grand clusters, completely separate from the urban, and suburban environments.  Though if you are reading this blog, I suspect you are well aware of many of these issues.  The production of food in this manner is superfluously wasteful, and creates vastly inferior foods in every manner.  None-the-less, for the sake of ease people have accepted the growing partition between themselves and their food.  Dan Brown's novel generally argues for one point, and that is neo-tribalism.  In a sense that is also what I am striving to illustrate, though I am solely concerned with our food production in this case.  The general aims being localized food production, de-commodification of foodstuffs, supporting public health through reacquainting people with what their food is and where it comes from, and hopefully a growing participation in this process.
The system which is continuing to dominate food production across the globe is broken, the waste and ecological cost is quickly building, and will soon far outweigh the benefits of centralization, if they haven't already.  So a new paradigm need be established.  We are fortunate that this has begun organically and is well on its way to success.  There are such a wonderful variety of approaches, thoughts, ideas, concepts which are all playing roles in this growing movement.  And this is where I am directing this blog.  WindowFarms were a wonderful place to start, and I encourage anyone who is new to hydroponics to begin there, easy to construct and modify.  Super sleek and utilitarian at the same time.  Completely recycled.  And you get to see all of the inner-workings in action.  But there is also so much more out there which I wish to highlight, and considered when looking forward with food production.  We need to strive for a decentralization of agriculture, purely local, nearly-no-transportation-required local, sort of agricultural modality.
I will continue to utilize WindowFarms, and WF inspired vertical drip gardens, I certainly have plenty of bottles! And I will continue to work on plastic-free options.  But there is a growing continuum of sustainable methodologies, and possibilities which I will talk about as well.  As I already have dabbled with, alternative methods in hydroponics such as DWC and FC.  I also aim to learn much more about permaculture, and creating relatively self-sustaining hydroponic/aquaponic gardening systems.  Along with different systems, I plan to use more CO2 and O2 enrichment methods.  I am currently reading a book called Edible Forest Gardens by David Jacke in preparation for a conversion I aim to work on for the next couple of years at a wooded plot I have free-reign over; so far the book is a good read simply for the conceptual understanding of the intricacies of natural forest ecosystems, but is also a practical guide.  I found that HERE, at Fuck yea Permaculture, generally great information there.  I plan to try mushroom growing possibly with portobellos or another commonly farmed variety.  There are some other things rattling around that may or may not go anywhere, but these are some of the ongoing, or soon to come up things.
With all of this said, I hope to take my food into my own hands, and I hope others attempting the same may be able to learn from my trials along the way.

I don't really have any pictures pertaining to any of this, but I like pictures, so here is one of my tomato and pepper harvest of the day, these are all hydroponic, organic nutrients.  The tomatoes are three heirloom varieties, yellow pear, green zebra, and black krim.  Toms were grown in a DWC constructed using no plastic (more on that soon).  I didn't like tomatoes until a couple of months ago, and even I love to eat the yellow pears off the vine.

Hello Again

The more I have progressed in my projects and writing on this blog, the more I realize I am straying quite far from the Windowfarms motif that started me on my path a year ago.  And because of that, leading into the second year of horticultural escapades I will be expanding the focus of this blog to not only Windowfarms and iterative systems, but also all things relating to the decentralization of agriculture, and generally better, less toxic modes of obtaining diverse foods.  I have done some of this in the past, with the inclusion of DWC and Fog Culture, but I hope to go more in depth with some of the benefits and differences between different types of systems.  I will also be taking a step back t the basics, and look at organic soil gardening practices from the garden my father and I have been establishing for almost a decade now.  And on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from Windowfarms I have been stumbling across a lot of interesting information surrounding agroforestry and smaller scale permaculture systems which I hope to borrow principles from in building the systems which will carry me through next winter.  I will of course go into more details as I write.  So a title change may be due in the near future.

With all of that said, I'm back with some exciting updates, and pictures!  I have recently been moving out of my apartment and back home for the summer, and consequently had to decommission near everything that I had running in the apartment.  These first four pictures are some of the neat things I got out of the last month or so.  First is the stalk and root system of a Mango tree that was growing very well until my spider mite pandemic killed everything.  None-the-less I thought that it was really cool to see it out of the hydroton like this.  The second picture was my best attempt at taking a picture of my two roma tomato plants after I pulled them out of the tower.  It is amazing how that much plant mass was supported by a root ball the size of half a wine bottle!  They were probably 3-4' tall and produced 3 tomatoes altogether on all artificial light, just CFLs the last two weeks.  And the last two pictures are of the largest tomato, one on the vine, one after it had fallen off and ripened some.

By far my most successful crop thus far, especially in my apartment, has been my basil.  I never really took pictures of it, but I made many a pesto dish from the leaves picked fresh from the plant.  This coupled with the recent news that something seems to be attacking Basil crops in the area, I am happy I have planted so much in my new systems at home!
Here is my 12-site fog culture system, relocated in our sun room.  I started this with some extra seedlings from our gardens a couple of weeks ago.  Three (3) sites sweet basil, one (1) italian genovese, one (1) purple petra (SOOOOO GOOOODDD, this is like my favorite smell ever, seriously.), and one (1) mix pack (contains green, purple, and speckled).  Each site has 2-4 plants in it, and I have clipped the tops to help them branch out twice in this picture.  The three plants behind the basil are yellow bell peppers, they were a little light choked under tomato plants that I had started in the back three sites (and have since transplanted).  And you can't see it in the picture, but in the back right corner is a pineapple top which I have finally gotten to root! Now I am just trying to decide a more stable final resting place for it.

 In this next picture you can see my heirloom tomatoes (and my orange tree!).  I don't remember which is which, but I think the tall one in the middle (5' tall!) is a yellow pear cherry tomato, based on the number of flowers it has in each cluster, and the other two are a green zebra tomato, and a black krim tomato.  These are only three (3) weeks since transplant into hydroponics, their companions that remained in the soil pots are only 6-8" tall.  They are all flowering, and grow like mad despite us having rain for the last ten days.  This system will be moving outside once the rain stops for more than a couple of hours, I expect to have trees.

 And this last picture is a blowback to February's DWC updates post.  This is three months of growth in a particularly dreary spring, I would say it is pretty impressive, the benefits of DWC and FC never cease to amaze me.  You can't see under the leaves here, but there are loads of flowers.

And down here in the bottom left corner you can see the remnants of my avocado tree.  It sprouted, then seemed to die, then when I was moving I noticed it had a new 4" shoot, which I then broke off accidentally in transit.  And now, I am just leaving it just to see if it will come back a third time, there seems to be a lot of the seed pod left some who knows? I have seen some pretty miraculous things in my short time utilizing these systems.

So expect new things soon, I am near complete on a few different projects, and have some outside events to report on.  And as always, please, please, please feel free to ask questions, make comments, draw connections to outside sources, make constructive critique/ trouble shooting ideas, I love hearing what others think and have to say!

On Hiatus

An infestation of some sort of mite or gnat started a couple of weeks ago, which I tracked on Folia in my journals.  Long story short, my 2-Tri-Towers are decommissioned, and only two plants survived, a jalapeño and a cucumber, which have been transplanted into my newly refurbished portable tower and poised to be mounted out on my deck in full view of the sun.  As for the decommissioned towers, I removed them, and reorganized the remaining space and re-opened the window to the street (since I am not so worried about yield anymore).  In general, I think it was a little too crowded for my aims, or in the least not lain out properly.  Due to my preoccupations the past months, I have been tearing out plants almost daily, and have nothing to replace them with since I never started a second round of seeds.
I do have a few relatively healthy plants left that I hope will produce something: basil, cantaloupe, squash, some other beans.  So at this point I am seeing myself falling quite short of any hope for self-sufficiency this time around.

p.s. Sorry I have no pictures this time, my camera is refusing to upload.

Nook Developments

I have been quite preoccupied with other things the past couple of weeks, though in my spare time I have continued plugging away at small projects refining the garden nook.  No great developments occurred, but there are a few relatively small refinements worth noting.

I suppose I can start at the top, literally and figuratively.  I recently added a great deal of reflective film within my garden nook, effectively halving the volume of the nook, and significantly reducing the area of light absorbing surfaces proximal to the lamp.  My primary reasoning behind this was that all of my plants were stretching, which can signify too little light.  I covered many of the bottles at the same height as the light with film first.  I unfortunately felt it necessary to block out the window, a substantial amount of light was pouring onto the sidewalk.  Consequently, people walking by no longer can see in.  And I finished the reflective film additions with lowering the 'ceiling' of the nook a little.  The effect that all of this extra film had (aside from utilizing more light) was that it made it very hot and humid, particularly at the top.  Unfortunately the lettuce in particular was getting droopy because of this.  So I thought it would be a good idea to put in some ventilation.  I was able to finagle a small fan on top of the tower, that sucks air from outside the nook in, and vents it out the bottom.

In this first picture, you can see how close the ceiling is to the top of the tower.  As well as the fan, which isn't as blocked as it looks from this angle.  And look at those lanky lettuces!

I also added more lighting within the nook.  The first addition was this 'medusa' lamp with five heads.  I have four ~20w CFLs in it, positioned as close as possible to the plants.

 I have also been doing a lot of reading into lighting, and have learned a great deal about LEDs.  My one continuing issue with them however is that manufacturers still seem to think the overhead fixture is an ideal lamp placement, and consequently replicate the design of fluorescent, or HID fixtures when designing LED fixtures.  I think you could get substantially more benefit from spreading the diodes around the hydroponic installment.  And since I don't really have time right now to construct my own ideal LED system, I thought that some LED light ropes may or may not have a benefit, and would be far more malleable in placement.  In the nearish future, I hope to get my hands on a spectroscope to measure the wavelength and intensity of the rope light, as well as absorption of light by various leaves, to really gauge how beneficial (or not) it is.

It is plugged into the fifth lamp socket, and is strung across the top of the Penta.

And then hangs down in front of the tri towers, where I am hoping to attempt to train my new bean plants which are in the proximal planter sites to grow up the LED rope.  

And this is the same scene where you can see foliage.

One huge development spurred out of me and my roommates frustration with how finicky the Penta system has been.  At six feet, I think it was just at the cusp of functional for the air lift.  Because of this, the slightest changes in the vertical tube, water level, or air pressure would stop it from pumping, and one of the columns rarely pumped at all.  From the beginning I had thought trimming the height would be more ideal, but never did for some reason or another.  Though a couple near droughts changed my opinion on that.  The issue in doing this is that we could not lower the tower, because the construction would require removal of all of the bottles, which are now carrying plants that have been trained up the ropes.  I had acquired a milk crate recently for another purpose, but my roommate made the astute observation that it was about the exact height we needed to remove from the Penta, and that it would support the weight of the reservoir.  So in a fury of work, we removed the reservoir and lift tube, cut 10 3/4" off the bottom of the tube, changed out the nutrient solution, and reassembled the system on top of a milk crate.  And for the past two days, all five columns have been sufficiently moist, top to bottom.  This has the added benefit of moving the FC plants closer to the light source.  I plan to add some reflective film to cover the reservoir and milk crate in the near future.

And lastly I have a couple of different angles of shots from the floor looking up at the towers which I think captures all of the plants.  Unfortunately (from a photo standpoint anyway) everything is getting so dense and overlapping it is hard to get decent pictures head-on.

And a piece of bad news, my portable tower has found the disadvantages of glass construction.  I stupidly put it on top of a milk crate, and it being unstable to begin with, fell over at some point, killing the plants I had growing, and spilling glass, water, and hydroton everywhere.  I fortunately have more bottles and will just be replacing the two broken ones.

DWC Updates

You may remember my orange tree.  My, look how she has grown!

Ever since picking up my three inch hole saw, I have been a little out of control making new systems.  While this is certainly not the first, I think it is a nice little system.  I made this for my mother, who has been getting really into hydroponics since I recruited my parents to watch over my first vertical systems in the fall.  We all loved the pesto made from the hydroponic basil, so she planted some basil plants, and they were getting to the point where they needed an upgrade.  So this is what I threw together.  Standard five gallon bucket.  Four three-inch holes for net pots cut into the lid (three have basil, one has a pepper).  One 1 1/2" hole for filling, and checking the water level.  A two outlet aquarium pump feeding two bar air stones hangs on the handle.  The airline tube is attached to check valves which are rigidly mounted by airline attaching on the opposing side of the lid.  I have also weighed down the air stones with a couple of steel nuts.

 In terms of Windowfarms, this system could easily be outfitted as a reservoir for a vertical system by just drilling a hole in the top for a lift tube, and assembling a pump mechanism, such as the Low water level Pulser Pump.  With moving water, you could get away with a single air stone, using the second outlet for the lift tube.

Nook Updates

   I don't have anything ridiculously exciting to talk about, but the plants are growing quite well.  They are a little stretched out, but nothing too bad.  It is hard to see in the pictures, but the front-most bean is trained into a loop due to its expansive height (about a foot between the three main nodes!).  I am adding some more reflective film in order to cut down on light loss.  I may unfortunately have to block out the remaining open window space (A LOT of light spills out onto the street).  But I am going to lower the 'ceiling' and cover most of the bottles' surface area first, and will decide then.  

   One thing I do want to mention, DO NOT USE CHEESECLOTH in place of net pots, at least not only two layers.  I have been finding more and more of my most saturated columns' bottles with hydroton falling out of the neck.  Most jammed up quickly, so I just refilled them and left as is, but it still makes me uneasy.  I hope that the root systems will hold the media together after a point.  The first this happened to, I replanted in place of the eggplant in the fog culture, and they have bounced right back, in fact they are already much larger than the plants that remained in the bottles.  

   A note on fog culture, allow plants to get their first true leaves before transplanting them in.  As seedlings, they are so low to the 'ground' that they get well over-watered from excess fog spilling up.  I had two eggplant plants in the pot, they never grew, and they looked wrinkled and almost like they had mildew (they didn't but they had that sort of gross half-dead look to them).  Even after transplant, one of them died, and the other lost all of its seedling leaves, but luckily sprouted its first true leaf at the same time, and survived.  

View from the window direction, top tiers.

 Tier two, you can see me adding reflective film, to further

reduce light loss.

Tier three and four, and the remainder of the Tri-Towers.

TriTs are mostly unplanted, waiting for more sprouts.

That bamboo pole is the pole for my Trionfo Violetto pole bean, 

which has climbed it a little faster than I had hoped...

Shot from the 'door'.

Unfortunately blocked is the squash plant (to the left in the fog culture, at bottom), 

it has three splayed-fingered hand-sized leaves, and is very vigorous.

I may update this post with some more specific pics over the weekend, but for now,
Namaste, and Keep Farmin'

Some More Sites

Here are a few sites, blogs, articles that I have found interesting and or useful along the way:

The Garden Pool - A video of this sent to me by the friend who turned me on to Windowfarms last year... if only I had a pool...
Garden Pool Blog - A lot of great videos and instructions all over this site, check it out!
BionicMelissa's Windowfarm Blog - She just started this blog, but she is off to a great start! Show her some love.
CO2 Enrichment Methods - Something I plan to get into when I have a more closed off space. Very in depth and to the point.
A NASA article on Hydroponics - Interesting...
Hotwired's Lighting Experiments and Design - He has been doing his own research into the spectrometry of different growing lamps, in order to make the most ideal lamp, great information if you are thinking about lighting.

I will continue to add to this as I find new sites, but these are a few I have returned to a bunch.

Penta-Tower in Full Swing

  So the school I am doing my student teaching at had a snow-day yesterday, but my biological clock being lined up with that schedule... I was able to get a lot done, including transplanting everything that was ready/ that I wanted into my newly functioning Penta-Tower!  I finally got it to work a couple of days ago, and had left it pumping since, to make sure it wasn't a fluke, and after three days it seemed consistent enough to plant in.  I filled 23 out of the 25 spots in the tower, because the two plants I had remaining are ones that I will likely need a little more space than the two remaining open planting sites.  I have taken a picture of each tier, though it may be difficult to see the plants, it is impossible to get around the sides and back of the tower.  So here are the pictures, I will list plants in each tier in clockwise starting with the back center plant (sorry they are crooked):

 Pea, [empty], Lettuce, Lettuce, Lettuce

Pea, Broccoli Rapini, Purple Basil, Basil, Basil

[empty], Broccoli, Edamame, Pencil Pod Bean, Pencil Pod Bean

Red Pepper, Eggplant, Red Pepper, Eggplant, Yellow Pepper

Armenian Burpless Cucumber, Roma Tomato, Bean Tavera, 

Lettuce, Edamame

And this is my portable tower, now a little more reliable and in full swing.

Lettuce

Straight Eight Cucumber

Basil

For more regular plantings updates, please visit myFolia.  

Namaste, and Keep Farmin'.

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Fog Culture

The first type of hydroponics that I was ever really introduced to was the AeroGarden.  I never had one, but someone mentioned it to me somewhere along the lines, and that was the first time I started looking into hydroponics.  I didn't want to spend the money on an AeroGarden though, and couldn't think of a way to self-engineer one easily, and so shelved it altogether.  Time passed, I was turned onto Windowfarms, look back for the rest of that story, and now in my reading, and regained interest and aeroponics are again in the forefront of my mind for methods.  Though I have since learned A LOT more about things, and know that the spray nozzles used clog up very quickly, and are relatively expensive, and kind of a pain to set up.  So I started thinking about a similar but different way of doing the 'grow in air' method.  Eventually, I stumbled on a video that used a decorative pond nebulizer to create a nutrient fog.  Then a couple weeks ago when I was ordering books for the semester, I got side-tracked looking at these nebulizers, and finding them relatively inexpensive, I ordered one.  The only problems with it are: the thing used to float it at the right depth is plastic and styrofoam (but I am dealing because it is at least a plastic that shouldn't break down easily), and it has a bunch of blue LED lights on it (blue is the most useful color of the spectrum for plant and ALGAE growth, and roots are used to the dark).
So I had this thing, but the two problems kept me from using it, trying to wait until I came up with solutions to the problems.  Then my portable tower, which I had recently transplanted a cucumber and lettuce into, stopped pumping unexpectedly in the night.  So in the five minutes I had the next morning, I dropped the plants into the fogger, extremely wilted, on the edge of oblivion.  When I got home from school, hours later, the plants seemed like they had even grown a little bit!  So I said screw it for the time being, and decided to plant in my new Fog Culture set-up.  It has been running for a day now with four plants from my seedlings in it, and they look great.
So here are some pictures:

I used a paper bag to catch the copper debris, 

and a saw blade to push against.  This was a pain,

copper doesn't like saws because of it's malleability.

Traced a net pot with dry erase marker for the guide.

3" hole saw = much easier and faster than a hand saw.

 Clockwise from back center: eggplant (3), cantaloupe (2),

butternut squash (1), watermelon (3), and we had a mango 

last night, so I am trying to germinate the pit in #5.

The ominous glow from the side of the basin, oOoOoOOo

Thick, thick fog, hard to do justice with it open, and via photo.

You can see how bright that sucker is though!

So that is that, a new water culturing technique to think about and play with.  The plants seem to love it, I just added nutrients today, hopefully they will love it even more now!

The Penta-Tower is also now functioning in full swing.  I moved the Tri-Towers from my parents' house here, so they are ready to plant, or refurbish at any point.  With those came the pump that I had been using, which is a rather heavy duty fishtank pump, with a five outlet splitter with nice metal valves.  I was able to easily use that to pump the water as best as I have yet seen in the new tower, and it pumps down to 4 gallons (~1/2 capacity).  I also have the portable tower, and the diffuser running on the same pump.  Once I reintroduce the Tri-Towers, I hope to run them on that pump as well.  And I have begun transplanting into the Penta, I have the whole bottom tier full, but ran out of cheesecloth (instead of netpots), and figure I will wait until it is full of life to put up pictures.