My home aeroponics project continues to grow. The basil is really taking off, the rest of it… hopefully it’ll get there?
Setup #2, the one with the water pump and tubing, is way over watered. Everything is soggy, even cutting back the hours from before. I think it really wants more like 5 minutes every hour, not 10 hours a day. I could set up a relay with an Ardunio… but then there are all sorts of power supply and housing issues I don’t really feel like dealing with. So instead I think I’ll just get separate AC timer for the pump. Overall setup #2 is more expensive, more fiddly, and generally not doing well. Its only advantage over setup #1 is that it is substantially quieter.
The most impressive thing about setup #1 is the root systems. They’re crazy:
Notice the one short pod, a lettuce pod I swapped over to see if it would be happier in this setup. At this point I don’t think there’s any real need for the long pods at all. With the pump running all day you don’t really need the wicking action they provide, and at this point all the big plants have roots touching the water anyway (they don’t seem to mind).
You’ve gone very quiet on this project… I wasn’t commenting but I was reading with great interest, so if you have any updates that’d be cool.
Hope nothing bad’s happened!
Heya!
Nope, nothing bad, just been busy. And now that the garden is established… I guess it’s not as exciting to blog about? The plants are bigger now, but things look more or less the same. I do want to try some experiments with pond foggers instead of spray misters, so I may blog about that shortly.
So, we’ve been finding the same watering issues too. The journal papers suggest 7 seconds of mist every 10 minutes…that works out to 42 seconds an hour. Our results are a bit staggering on the production side…we get sprouts in 24 hours of wetting the seeds–we do that separate from the root chamber and then transplant them in so that they don’t fail and waste a pod. The journals indicate that you can have edible harvest-able lettuce in like 3 weeks from germ-date. That’s just nuts. Like Bish, we are avid readers but not so avid commenters. We would like to here about progress, ideas, and any experiments you choose to run. Appreciate your posts! Thanks.
Demented
Thanks for this project, its really interesting,
i would like to know if it is still alive
greetings from bonn/germany
A