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.
Namaste, and Keep Farmin'
Nice, you definately have some good greenery going on. The reflective film makes it difficult to photograph doesn't it.
ReplyDeleteWhat are you using for light? Since you have so many plants, maybe a HPS is more what you need? Even better if you can open the window and vent the heat.
Duh just re-read your earlier posts, and you have an HPS haha. LED looks promising, but they are so expensive, and I have read that they burn out fast.
ReplyDeleteHaha greenery, I am loving it in my room with the white and concrete being all there is outside. Yea the film makes it near impossible to take good pictures of specific plants especially, and I have to take like 22019381243409832 pictures to get a single good one because my camera either thinks it is super bright or super dim, and makes the pictures awful. The HPS was definitely key, but even so the plants were getting lanky. I have added the lamp with CFLs, just 4 that are 15-25w each, and have been leaving it on 24h. And I have added a bunch more reflective film, covering most of the rest of the bottles, and blocking out the window because I was losing a lot of light onto the street. The grow light LEDs are really expensive, I have been researching building my own, using LEDs more attuned to the spectrum needed. Have you, I have heard they last much longer, because there is so much less heat stress than the HID lamps.
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