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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