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.