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!