Transfer Time: Wick and Pot

Sooner or later you have to move the babies into the real world, or at least as much of the real world as you're going to expose them to. In this case I decided to try to do wick systems as the primary hydroponics system and use some plain old potting soil pots for a control and back up system. The problem is that I had surgery on June 17th and I'm just not up to a lot of construction. So here is a sort of status update. I actually have three tubs and each cover has five holes in it. There are plastic cups in each hole with slots cut on two sides with a strip of material threaded through (actually a tee shirt cut into strips about 3/4" by 18" or so, one strip threaded through the cup with a little rockwool in the bottom. The plants were in mesh pots in other little plastic cups and now I just transfered the mesh pots with the developing tomato plant into the cups with the wicks.
Each tub holds about 8 to 10 gallons of nutrient and right now I have the nutrient conductivity factor at CF=19, which is just fine at this stage. I may ramp it up a little later. I'm not trying to oxygenate the tubs so we'll see what problems that poses. Also I'm counting on the roots following the wicks down into the tank. This should be pretty low maintenance as systems go with only an occasional ramp up of the water and addition of nutrient to bring it up to the conductivity factor I want.
The back up is three rather ordinary pots with one plant each. These are in a potting soil mix that came with a system I bought a couple of years ago, nothing very special. I'm running these for comparison and because Jessica says we must get tomatoes this year, so if I blow it with the wick systems at least this will fill the "must get tomatoes" imperative. I'll clue you in on how it's going in a while.

Getting on with getting on ...

These little tomato plants have been doing a yeoman job of growing and now are threatening to get everything intertwined, leaves, roots, everything. So it's time to do something. I have these little netpots and I put them in dixie cups and separated a bunch of the plants ... so far seventeen and I carefully marked each dixie cup with where it came from in the matrix so I can identify what kind of tomato plant it is.
Just to keep busy I made a gallon of blue and a gallon of white nutrient concentrate. I do that by measuring a pound of the blue mix and dissolving it in a gallon of water. Then I measured a pound of the white mix and dissolved that in a gallon of water. To make a working solution I take a gallon of water and add an ounce of each of the blue and white mix (I don't mix them together at the concentrate level because that would cause precipitation of some of the nutrients). My working solution is then at a CF of about 24-26 which is full strength for tomatoes, although you can run them hotter than that up to maybe 32. Some people like to do that.
The other thing I did was change the batteries in my old reliable conductivity meter. It's about ten or eleven years old and this is only the third set of batteries. It's an early model Dip Stick (TM) made in New Zealand and when I bought it, it was marketed by American Agriculture of Portland, Oregon. I love it. It is auto on/off, doesn't require calibration and is temperature compensated. It is an all around great conductivity meter.
I'm still not sure how I'm going to deploy these plants when they get a little bigger. I was wandering around Lowes today looking at their plastic stuff and I just have not seen any containers that I really like. I've seen some I could press into service with a little work, but I'm really lazy when it comes to making systems. When you have to drill too many holes it starts feeling too much like work. I got into hydroponics to avoid work. I'll let you know when I figure it out.

Germination Map

OK here's the cells that germinated marked in green. You can find the legend on May 21st. The surprising thing to me is how many of the 2005 seeds germinated and in general how well the Dona seeds did compared to the others. The Peppers were really disappointing, but then they were both either old seeds or harvested from commercial peppers and I don't know if I can expect those to germinate or not.

At Ten Days the babies are making progress

Well here we are ten days in and most of the tomatoes have started growing. The pepper seeds don't appear to have gotten the idea. Even the old tomato seeds have germinated which is encouraging.
The tin has been "watered" with 1/4 strength nutrient. Today I upped the added nutrient strength to 1/2 strength. The container is sitting on a shaded side deck inside a screened room so it hasn't been exposed to direct sunlight.
I still haven't really started putting the systems together. Just lazy I guess. I did do an inventory in the shed to see what I had. I have quite a few fairly shallow containers which I can lean up and use as the basic systems. Still planning to do passive systems. Should be fun.

Baby Tomatoes in Rockwool

Four days and counting and the little baby tomato plants start popping out of their seeds and stick up their baby cotyledon" leaves. These will be followed after a while by the true leaves. But it's always great to see the little ones pop out of their seeds and get started.
I've mixed up a gallon of normal strength nutrient but I typically cut it 4:1 with water when I'm first starting. I don't want to hit the little baby tomato plants with too much nutrient strength.

Finally Getting Around To It

Procrastination is the name of the game. I am only now finally getting around to seeding my tomato plants. Yeah, yeah, yeah ... I know I should have done it at the end of last month or maybe even earlier. Better late than never. Now I have to get going. Here's what I seeded in a matrix of 11 rows and 8 columns. We'll see what comes up.

My procedure is to take a sheet of small rockwook cubes. I use really small ones if I can, about 3/4 inch on a side and about 1 1/2 inches tall. They come in a sheet. I then saturate the sheet with them all together in fresh water and then put seeds into the individual cubes. At this point I don't use any nutrient but I put the rockwool sheet in an aluminum pan (one of those disposable kind of pans they sell to cook brownies in at the store) and flood the pan with some dilute nutrient so that some nutrition, but not at high levels, wicks up through the rockwool to the plants.
There are a couple of rows in there that are there just for curiosity. Row 1 has five French Dona seeds from 2005 to see if they will germinate. Maybe not, but you never know. Row 3 is a row of old pepper seeds that I think I harvested from some jalapenos I grew a couple of years ago. I just found them in the basement so I thought I'd take a chance. Then Row 4 is a row of seeds harvested some unknown time ago from green peppers bought at the store. Probably none of these will germinate, but then I'll know.
I'm thinking about doing a germination experiment just for the fun of it because I never throw out the seeds I don't use, so I have seeds going back a number of years, often of the same varieties. Science is fun!

Time to get going ...

Well I've been sitting around doing not much for a while now so far as hydroponics is concerned. But now that exams are finished, grades are in, and all the 2009 graduates march on Sunday at the college I teach at, I'm quickly running out of excuses not to get to work on my hydroponics system for the Summer.
I've mentioned that it's going to be a passive system, probably several passive systems so I can compare them to see how relatively effective they are. I'm planning to do maybe 1) a smart valve system, 2) a wick system, 3) some kind of float system and put pretty much the same plant varieties in each. That way I'll be able to compare the system effectiveness. I was also thinking about doing some nutrient experiments.
Some years ago when there was a pretty active hydroponics listserv on the web, there was a fellow in California I think who was always trying to grow hydroponically with a mixture of Miracle Grow and Epson Salts. I thought it might be fun to experiment with that as a nutrient system too, just for the fun of it. Generally though I've been really happy with TotalGro's Steiner mix. I think I talked about that in an earlier post.
The last day to expect frost here in the Shenandoah Valley is May 17th which just happens to be the day our new graduates walk. So I'm expecting to get really serious next week.