Educate Me: Hydroponics

I've been messing around with gardening a bit this year.  Hydroponics is very interesting to me.  Anyone here do it?

I'm curious which system you would recommend most for a beginner.  Which system is the most energy efficient?  Which has the lowest start-up cost?  Which is the easiest to maintain?  

Any other tips or information you'd like to share would be great.

How hydroponic do you want to go?

Do you want roots living in water, coco or rockwool medium or something dirt like? Pumps or self feeding or hand/nature watering? Indoor or outdoor? Liquid or powder nutrients, or teas and foliar feeding? 

How much work do you want to put in? How often? Seasonally, weekly, daily?

You're more or less asking what car, in this case. So what are your goals?

Cheap and easy way to play along would be sub irrigated planters. This is essentially a bucket in a bucket system.

You have a lower container that gets filled with water, a wick that goes through the top into your actual growing medium, and you're done. Use a good medium, like proper compost or a commercial soil blend, and you don't even need to add nutrients.

It can be stacked 5 gallon buckets, bigger containers, they even sell cheap systems at big box stores that work fairly well without modification. 

RevRico said:

How hydroponic do you want to go?

Do you want roots living in water, coco or rockwool medium or something dirt like? Pumps or self feeding or hand/nature watering? Indoor or outdoor? Liquid or powder nutrients, or teas and foliar feeding? 

How much work do you want to put in? How often? Seasonally, weekly, daily?

You're more or less asking what car, in this case. So what are your goals?

 

How hydroponic?  I don't know.  Indoors.

I want it to be as low maintenance as possible.  Something I can check on once in a while, but also leave for a week without much worry.

Don't care if the nutrients are liquid/powder/etc.  Ideally down the line I would feed it with compost (tea?), but I would need to figure out how to make that first.

I don't want significant daily work.  Seasonal I would expect some, however part of the  draw of indoor systems is I can grow year round as opposed to a short season in the summer/fall.

I've been looking into dutch-bucket method and it seems fairly straightforward.  The hardest part is just getting a good seal on the bucket it would seem.  I was hoping to re-use some protein mix containers I have (maybe 2 gallon or so) just just to try it out, but I am concerned the wall thickness is too small to get a good seal.  Could even manually water/feed for the first little bit to check it out.

My ideal setup would produce tomatoes, a few types of peppers, lettuce*, herbs, and maybe some other stuff. 

* I understand you can just harvest leaves off lettuce and it will continue to grow vs. chopping the whole head off.  This type of thing I like because whenever I buy a head of it, I use a bit then the rest goes bad before I can use it.

Lettuce, I would just use 5 gallon buckets with net pots and an air bubbler. Or even just a countertop aero garden thing. 

Sub irrigated planters are going to be what you want if you only have limited time to work on things.

17 gallon totes from Lowes depot for reservoir on the bottom, 4 inch corrugated French drain pipe, cap on the bottom full of holes, filled with soilless mix, sunshine or promix, and use fabric grow pots, so you can cut holes in the bottom to connect the wick easily, they'll also help with evaporation. The big big trick with these setups is to soak the medium as your filling the wick so it comprises completely and hump it up inside of the pot. In the pot, use your preferred soil, I like fox farms ocean forest for most things but it's expensive. Only water from the top when you first put the plants in, you need to water heavy enough to fill and get a good wicking action going, but not heavy enough to pour water down through the wick. Use a watering can, and aim for half as much water as the pot size, 5 gallon pot 2 gallons of water. Cut another hole in the lid of the reservoir container to fill it with water, fill it up until you have a 1-2" gap between water and lid, that air gap is extremely important for wicking. 

As long as you don't let the reservoir run dry, you'll only need to add water every few weeks, if you're using good soil. NOT MOISTURE CONTROL SOIL.

You can get 2 5 gallon pots on top of a 17 gallon tote, and fit 3, maybe 4 totes inside of a 4x4 space. 

Lighting will be a big factor indoors. Florescent light will only do so much and LEDS are ridiculous expensive, but good old fashioned metal halides are cheap used and provide the proper spectrum for the majority of vegetables. Look for high bay lights or commercial spot lights on Craigslist. 

You could get fancy, with a master reservoir plumbed to an irrigation system loop that feeds all your plants sitting on the ground, but then you need to buy nutrients, ph water, setup timers, and pray nothing leaks, which it will, typically at the worst possible time. 

Edit: These were dirt cheap in the fall, like $30-50. They'll water for a couple days, and are pretty idiot proof as well.

Interesting.  Just watched some videos on Sub Irrigated Planters.  Pretty simple.  Seems like once established (and used the nutrients in the soil) some of them are very similar to a Dutch Bucket setup but with a much larger reservoir built in.  Of course the video I saw mentioned nothing about a wick but otherwise matched your description. 

The leaking of other systems does concern me, but it seems like it can be overcome with the proper use of fittings.  Lots of people cheap out with grommets and whatnot.  I suppose that's one benefit of the NFT stuff - its all PVC with no bulkheads so its pretty unlikely to leak, no?

If I did get crazy with pumps and timers and whatnot (this sounds fun and appeals to my engineering sensibilities), I'd have to figure out some sort of conductive breaker switch and a drip pan to kill the system the moment a leak is detected.

Whenever we grow lettuce we pick as needed and it will go all season or until we get sick of salads and let it go to seed.  

In reply to ProDarwin :

In my experience, leaks occur at the barbed fitting between the line going to the plant and the main lines coming off the pump, then at the sprayer end where the Jets will eventually clog. But that's common in most all irrigation systems. Where there are more leak problems are flood and drain systems, where the plants sit in a container full of inert medium and water and nutrients are filled and drained several times a day. 

Nutrient film is another animal all together, not something I have any experience with. 

What I've been looking into lately is building my own fertilizer. Compost, obviously, but also salt based like you would buy at the store. You can buy all the individual elements relatively inexpensively, then mix ratios to your heart's content, finding the perfect setup for your habaneros vs jalepenos, your beef steak tomatoes vs the black cherry chocolate. 

It's a lot of experimentation and spreadsheet work mixing from scratch, some people find it calming, some find it nerve wracking, but if you want to fine tune your specific garden it could be worth looking into.

Hmm, good reasons to stay away from the complex systems (for now at least)

Yeah, if there was a good published ratio that's safe for everything, I'd be interested in making my own.  I'm a bigger fan of KISS in this case, I don't need to optimized, just don't want stuff to die.  Ideally I could use compost tea for a bunch of my nutrients, but I have no idea how to validate that would work.  I think coming up with a good workflow for compost from kitchen -> tea making -> water & toss solids in outside bin would be more difficult than the actual hydroponics setup by far.

I did just realize that my old yogurt containers fit perfectly in the top of my old protein jugs.  So I might cut them into "netpots" try a simple Kratky setup just for the hell of it.  I can always aerate later if necessary.  I like that aeration is pretty leak proof.  Well, not leak proof, but the consequences of a leak are almost non-existent.

I've been messing around with a few different hydroponics for a while, now.

First was one of the kits you can buy- Aerogarden- which is just a flooded system that uses bubbles to put air in the water.  Works quite well, and for indoor use, it's the one I will use in the off season.  Not their specifc one, but one I made myself.  Pretty easy to do- netpot, water, airpump and lights.  And the lights on a timer.

Next was the under water one in soil- which I found as the rain gutter grow system.  There's a lot of people doing this, and it's pretty neat to do.  I was forced to grow in containers due to invasive tree roots runing my gardens.  Instead of using house water, though, I have mine fed by rain barrels.  Once you get it all sealed up, and then maintain the floats every year, it barely uses water.  And requires no maintenence what so ever (as long as you make sure there's water in the troughs every once in a while).  Last year, I added another level of laziness to it- by going no-dig in it.  Many of the other planters take the system apart, and "refresh" the soil every year.  But then I've read about no-dig concepts, and decided to try it for the containers.  Now I add a few inches of compost to the top, and that's it.  Leave it for the winter, start over in the spring.   So far, so good,  

That being said, I want more growing space, so this fall, I'm going to convert one series of containers to a full corregated steel raised bed fed from beneath it.  I'm a little nervous about stuff getting into the gutters, but if I can put some forced water to flush it, it should work.

The other thing I wanted to try is a specific outside hydroponic system.  Wanting to eventually make it solar powered, I wanted to use the one that ran the least.  At the start, I tried using aeroponics- using the NASA example of high pressure, small drops.  Quickly went away from that as it was not robust- too many failure points.  Next tried spraying the roots- same thing.  Then went to a hydroponic tower- where the water is just pumped up to a plate of holes on top of the tower, it drips down onto the plants, and that works really effectively.

But... (there are always but's, arent there...) last year I had a pump failure, which I didn't notice for a few days, and that killed everything.  So that changed my idea to a different system I'm still building.  This year, though, I'm still working with the tower and found a few more things- it's now powered purely by solar and the original pattern was 1 min pumping, 4 min off.  

That, as it turned out, was more than my tiny solar set up could handle over night.  Way too much on time for the sun.  What was super interesting was that the plants didn't get water for a few hours, but didn't suffer at all.  Now I'm watering it 1 min pumping, 19 min off.  And everything grows great.

And that all leads me to the system I'm planning, but have not pulled the trigger on- a combo of a flooded system plus the kracktay system.  Troughs with net cups holding rock wool.  Just the very bottom of the rock wool will touch water.  So as long as the plants have a root in the water, they will be ok, and if there's a failure, it will take days for the water to evaporate instead of the plants dying in a day.  

Almost all of the flooded systems I've seen on line are like 50% on/off kind of cycle.  Seeing what happens with the tower I have now, I'm going with- on- however much time it takes to replace all of the water in the system- off- however much time it takes so that the total on time is 2-3 hours total- I'm thinking once an hour or two will be it.  That way, my little 25W solar panel, plus batteries, will be able to run the system without stress.

In terms of fertilizer- I used to stress out about it, then I didn't.  I'm sure one can get more by keeping the system perfectly balanced, but I'm ok with the lesser for less work.  And I generally just feed it with worm waste.  IMHO, compost tea will work just fine - just that I use all of my compost in the spring....

So in terms of what to plant- greens are obvious.  If you want tomatoes in the hydro system, they take up a LOT of space, so I'd suggest finding some container specific breeds, so that they don't grow so large.

It's pretty fun to experiment.  For pump controls, I've learned how to run an arduino, so that I can easily change the watering cycle.  And I've let mistakes add more experiments to what I'm doing.

Another note on nutrients. When I got started growing hydroponically, I was just using General Hydroponics 3 part liquid nutrients. Used them for years for everything from tomatoes to pot to trees. 

I was finally convinced through reading that liquid nutrients that were running me $35+/ gallon were mostly water anyway. Which is expensive and frustrating when you need to buy 3 different parts to make up a basic feeding.

So I started hunting, and came upon JR Peters. They're actually a local ish company to me, but they have a wide array of powder nutrients. Look like miracle grow, but grow better, you don't taste them in the finished products unlike miracle grow, and pretty much dirt cheap. A $10 jar makes almost 1000 gallons of water.

Running their 10-10-10, aka jacks classic, at half strength, so 1 tablespoon per 5 gallons, kept everything very happy. I noticed within the first month I was getting less salt build up in my reservoir and pump lines, then at harvest found far less salt build up in the rootballs than when running liquid. 

It's now my go to recommendation for people, but they don't sell it in chain stores. You can get it on Amazon though. 

I do like to crush up and add Epsom salts to the Jack's classic one feeding per month. I haven't found the "perfect" amount, but I haven't hurt any plants adding or changing the amount either. 

Fox Farms does make organic powder nutrients, which I'm experimenting with in my sub irrigated planters. By digging a trough in the top of the pot and burying about a cup around the plant, I've found it works wonders once the nutrients in the soil have all been absorbed but the plants are still going strong. 

You'll find arguments all over the internet about organic versus synthetic nutrients, like everything else basically. In my experiences, organic nutrients even in powder form work better because the plants will take what they need instead of taking what they're given with synthetics. It really helps to lower the risk of nutrient burn or over feeding.

In reply to RevRico :

WRT totally organic- IMHO if you want to go that direction, attempt the supercheap lazy way- compost tea, worm leachate.  Other than getting containers to brew or grow worms in, both can be free (I get my worms from the back yard).  

That's why I like the no-dig gardening- I use my own free compost, and I don't have to keep digging things up.  The fact that it turns out to be organic is just a bonus.

Alfa, your rain gutter system sounds interesting, do you have pics?  Just curious what fittings & whatnot you use to get the water into the SIPs, and how you filter out crap. 

I was thinking of doing a rain barrel & whatnot for my normal garden but it really does add up to a pain in the ass.  SIP solves a lot of that by being way more efficient & self regulating.

Some really old pics of it on page 4 here- https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/off-topic-discussion/i-got-spring-fever-and-the-only-cure-is-gardening/99704/page4/

It does not look like that anymore, as I had to make sure it's above the soil, and it's now held together with 2x4's.  And it's in a more organized locations.  But the idea is the same- 3" pipe with 3" net cups in them.  I also now use 5 gallon buckets instead of the 3 gallon ones in the pictures (mostly at least).  

For a filter, I use good garden fabric material.  Not woven, but kind of random- it's the most robust material I've found.  But that goes outside of the net cup though the bottom of the bucket.  The peralite-compost-peat mixture works great- wicks up more than enough water.

Like I mentioned earlier, I'm going to change one to a corregated metal raised bed with the net cups going through the metal into the PVC pipes.   There are some good examples of auto watering raised beds- and this is just a slightly different version of that.

I'm having a little trouble following where your rain barrel is in relation to your 3" PVC pipes that are on the ground.  If its higher than them, do you have some sort of check valve to keep the water at the right level?

Re: filter, I was thinking you were filtering the rain water, before the barrel, but it looks like you do so right at the plant?

The bottom of the barrels are about 18" off the ground, which is more than enough head pressure to run the simple float valves. Other than trying to keep debris out of the water, there are no filters. Just the cloth to keep the soil in the buckets. 

This is the kind of simple float valve that I use https://www.amazon.com/Kerick-Valve-MA052-Float-Adjustable/dp/B0077RAP1I/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=float+valve&qid=1595793527&sprefix=float+v&sr=8-3

Made 2 of these guys this afternoon.  This will be Kratky method and easy to upgrade to DWC/add a bubbler if I get the urge.  Right now they are just sitting on the front porch where they will get sun but not rain.  I need to set up a light for them in the basement.  Will a standard LED bulb provide enough light for 2 plants (vs. being outside)?  I had one over some seedlings and they were outperforming the outside ones earlier this year, but I'm not sure if that was the cause.

The plant in the above post is the middle plant in this pic.  I haven't touched these other than the initial fill.  Kinda cool.

These things work out well.  I want to try the sub irrigated planters next because I can leave them outside in direct sunlight because rain has no negative impact on them, whereas it would fill/overflow these.  I could put a hole in these to limit that, but it would still flush out the nutrients.

In reply to ProDarwin :

You could also put an end cap over the fill tube to limit stray water.

A 3500k LED should be a fine indoor supplement.

RevRico said:

In reply to ProDarwin :

You could also put an end cap over the fill tube to limit stray water.

Yeah, I probably will, but rainwater would still fill it right through the rocks in the center.  Really the only reason for the PVC fill tubes is more of a level gauge and easier fill location.

So <24 hours later, my middle plant looks like death.  Any ideas?  Water level is about 1/2 full.  What do I looke for?

I'm late to the thread. 
 

I was going to say that depending on the budget this could be the easy button if you wanted to jump in with both feet:

Tower

In reply to No Time :

Those are pretty easy to DIY, actually.  A 5 gal bucket and some 4" PVC and you have got it started.

So I replaced the water + nutrients in my plant and it returned to normal.  I guess I need to get a PH tester.  Also got some fertilizer to do the mphgardener mix.

In related news, my poblano pepper plant is getting eaten by a bug of some sort.  I don't know what kind, I never see any on there - I think they are feeding at night.  I'm making some hot pepper spray from some jalapenos now to test out on it.

I decided to see how the plants do out in full sun and see if rain is really a problem.  I fit the cap of the container around the plant and I feel like it will keep 99% of water out, but I will investigate after a good rain.