Saturday, December 6, 2014

My Vertical Gardens

Over the past few months I have been working away at making my vertical garden work.  I have made two of the smaller systems on the right in the photo but I had been seeing some problems keeping some plants alive.  One of the problems I was thinking was that I had been running these smaller systems on a constant flow.  I tried to get a bit of a lag in the bottom bowls by building bell siphons in the top bowls.  But I was thinking that still may not have been enough time to drain and that the roots were still staying too wet.  Another possible problem was that the bowls were just to shallow to have good root development.  

Next comes the bigger system.  I decided to work on both of these possible problems in the next version.  I made the these bowls from the the bottoms of five gallon buckets.  Each bowl is almost a square foot of planting area.  So this tower has almost three times the planting area of the smaller ones.  And the depth is about three times deeper than the previous bowls.  
I used a submersible pump instead of a air lift, mostly because I happened to have it on hand.  I set the pump on a timer to run for 15 minutes out of every 3 hours.  I haven't decided if that is optimal yet or not but it seems to be doing well so far.  I am figuring that there is a sweet spot around there some place that gives the roots a chance to breath and cycling the water long enough for biofilter action to take place to keep the system running and the fish happy.

Another change I made was to use Coco Coir as the main growing medium.  I used some of the hydroton and lava rocks I harvested from the smaller systems to add a filter bed at the bottom of each bowl and also to kick start the bio-environment along.   The one thing I like about the Coco is that it is easy to start seeds in.  Plants that I started in the hydroton always seemed a bit precarious until they actually got their roots established a bit.  The one thing I don't like about the Coco is that it stains the water at first.  I have done maybe four partial water changes but the water still has a orange tint to it.  Hopefully it will clear up in a few more weeks.


Already though I have been able to harvest some greens for sandwiches and I used some rosemary, sage and thyme to give the turkey some special touches :-)


This is where I am so far.  Anyone have any suggestions?

3 comments:

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