Seeds

Something about getting seeds in the mail in the middle of Winter when it is freezing cold makes Spring seem all that much closer. I now have about eight or nine tomato varieties to pick from and that becomes sort of the basis for targeting the system design.

Seeds are a wonder anyway. I always enjoy getting them started a little early. A few years ago I started growing my seedlings indoors under a GH lamp starting around late April to put out after the chance of frost had ended. Here in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, that's around May 16th. In the meantime I'm daydreaming about what the coming system will be like.

Hydroponics as a Spiritual Experience

I got started working on hydroponics because I didn't like digging and weeding. Besides that I'm a techie and we like to make measurements, build things, and just figure out how things work. It's a lot of fun. Hydroponics was a natural. So when I started fooling around with it now about thirteen years ago it was a never stopping kick, each different system, each different plant or instrument was a different adventure.

Now I think all work is fundamentally spiritual. We are creative beings and we imitate our creator as Tolkien pointed out with our ability to subcreate. We can't create from nothing as God can, but we can create marvelous things by manipulating the elements of God's creation that He has made available to us.

But there's another dimension beyond our own subcreation and that is the reflection on close inspection of God's own creation. St. Paul says in Romans 1:20 "For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; ..."

As one tends one's hydroponics system the wonder of plant growth is a constant revelation. I encountered a picture on the internet of dew drops on leaves of grass and I've added a picture of just one drop of dew here. The wonder is everywhere and it fills up one's spirit.

Passing of a Giant

Yesterday I got a painful email telling me that The Growing Edge had published its last issue. It was to be no more. I am very disheartened to see such a high quality magazine in an industry that I love pass from the scene. I have written a lot of articles for The Growing Edge, some about the wonderful people I've met through hydroponics but most about my Summer adventures as I experimented with hydroponics system configurations and grew a lot of tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers, as well as basil, lettuce and miscellaneous larks like a bit of corn, some egg plants and some squash. With enough attention you can grow anything in hydroponics.

The Growing Edge will be missed because it was the best magazine in the industry. It was a great run and I love the folks who made it possible down through the years I was associated with them. Good luck all!

Notes

I've always liked keeping notes. There is something about making little drawings or lists of things or just trying to capture one's thoughts in a quick brief caption or blurb that gives me a sense of proportion. I am engaging the universe in the incredible dance of existence if only in a small way.

Wintertime when it's too cold to grow things since I don't have a greenhouse and even a greenhouse would have to be heated to grow much, then is just the time to kick back and think about the systems to come or how things might have gone differently in the past.

I particularly like quadrille tablets since I can lay out designs precisely on the grids and they also make it easy to organize data into columns. The picture is of tracking tomatoes in season but I keep a notebook all year around. I've graduated from the little spring scale seen here to one of those nice electronic scales which instantly give you a precise digital figure up to five pounds which easily handles all my tomatoes. I did have a 2 pound one once, but it was cheating a little by growing together with another tomato.

I'm actually all set for the Spring and Summer of 2009 with seeds, nutrient, some basic components for the Year of the Passive Systems, like float valves and smart valves. But I still have some design and further conceptualization to do. I'm thinking about some wick systems, maybe some float systems, using the smart valves you basically have a sort of float and drain system. Right now the idea is to have a big nutrient tank on the side deck running down to feed nutrient to the systems on the ground level below the deck. That way the system will auto-feed and I'll only have to top off the tank now and then. But if I create a lot of systems I'll also have to have bigger tanks so there is a size compromise to consider. Just like my eyes are often bigger than my stomach when I'm contemplating food, my appetite for hydroponics systems often exceeds my common sense and need for hundreds of pounds of tomatoes. I do have six seed varieties picked out for the system and one really needs to have at least maybe four of each kind so that puts about 24 plant sites as the minimum. Scaling that with my NFT systems of the past would make it equivalent of a four tube system, and maybe that will turn out to be a six tub system. You can see that that creates other questions. Each tub will require a feed so the nutrient tank will have to split the feeds so we need ... well you get the idea.

Design is a bifurcating process, one thought leading to another, one requirement for one part of the system demanding something from another part. It's a logical chain and fun to think about. That's when you get out the notebook and start sketching. Sketching and reading and sipping hot chocolate on a cold Winter day is just the ticket.

A Video from Growing Edge

Loafing around the house on Christmas day, presents opened, just relaxing I thought I'd do a little web-surfing through YouTube and came across this little hydroponics video. YouTube has a whole lot of interesting hydroponics videos and when I get the chance I'm going to look through a bunch of them and feature some that are worthwhile.

Functional Assemblies

Functional Assemblies is a fancy name for "parts" — the parts of the system. Any design requires something like an inventory of parts and a review of how they function. So let's start doing a little thinking about that.

The basic elements of a hydroponics system are:
1) A nutrient reservoir or tank (I usually use plastic 30 gallon trash cans but anything watertight that doesn't leach anything into the nutrient would be fine), 2) some sort of delivery system to make the nutrient available to the plants, 3) plant growing sites, 4) support for the plants as required, and 5) a monitoring system for making sure the system works and continues working properly.

We've addressed the nutrient problem by buying a bunch of Total Gro 8-5-16. We've only thought a little about the delivery system. Right now I think a tank on the side deck with gravity feed to the passive plant sites will maintain the nutrient delivery. The tank will have a flexible hose with splitters to deliver individual feeds to different plant sites. To facilitate that design I've picked up a couple of Jim Fah's Smartvalves and for the sites that are not smart valved I'm planning to limit the nutrient with float valves. That only leaves the support system to worry about.

Tomatoes need a support system because they are heavy. Right now I'm thinking that using thin-wall conduit supports similar to those I've used on the NFT systems will fill the bill. We'll see when you go into more detailed design mode. I'm going to need at least twelve plants sites since I have six tomato varieties and I want to plant at least two of each. But if plans go as they usually do I may expand that. I don't want to have to pay too much attention to the system so that either will limit the number of plant sites or expand the size of the nutrient tank.

Design Evolution

Designing a system is a matter of sorting out the parts you're going to need and finding suitable candidates. I always like to walk through hardware stores and home supply stores that stock all kind of gardening and other plastic containers and things that can be turned to hydroponics use.

He's a little float valve I found which I think might come in useful for my passive systems this Summer. I found this little value on ebay
so I bought a couple at $7 each. They are cute little devils, only about four inches and the seem well suited to controlling the nutrient depth in the subordinate growing tubs I envision for one of the variants of the passive systems. I looked at some other float valves too but they were bigger and made for animal feed troughs.