Author: Micah A Kolsevich

Last update before harvest…
Unfortunately, the prospects of potatoes are growing ever dimmer. The roots are looking really thick though, except for the left middle one that is dying. Maybe we will have a surprise spud grow over the weekend, but at this point we are resigned to the fact that we will probably not have any potatoes by next Monday. Ryan is planning on taking it home over the summer, though, so we are hopeful that he might at least get some and it won’t be a complete flop.

On the plus side, the greenery is still looking good. We are definitely proud of how our plants grew, even if they didn’t grow fast enough to give us any actual potatoes.
This Monday is harvest day, and will be our final update of the year. Thanks for checking us out, and I hope you enjoyed our aeroponic potato adventures!

Final week!!
Unfortunately, still no potatoes. At this point, that means we probably won’t get any by harvest day unless something miraculous happens. From the top, though, things are still looking good. We had to tie another plant that was peeking out the left side to the supports, as it was falling over a bit. Also, we forgot to mention in the last post, the from left leg of the support broke off. We were unable to remove it to glue it back together so we just ended up having to tape it. It’s so close to the end anyway though so it won’t have to hold for much longer.

On another note, most of the plants are doing pretty well. The front left and back right are doing surprisingly well catching up to the others despite starting their growth much later. The left middle one, however, is not doing to great. As you can see, the leaves are starting to wilt on the edges, which is a sign that it is not healthy. This is probably due to the other plants blocking its light, but they are so big at this point that there’s not much we can really do to help this one.

One more week left before harvest day! We are still hopeful that we will we able to harvest some potatoes, though the chances of this appear to be getting smaller and smaller. We will see soon enough…

Time is running out…
Not much has changed since the last update. The plants themselves are still growing fine, but no actual potatoes have started to form yet. We are still hopeful that we will get some, though we are starting to worry that they might not come in time for the harvest day on May 4th, less than two weeks away. For now, all we can do is keep refilling water, adding nutrients, trimming roots, and hoping for the best.

Finally growing straight!
The supports have been working great so far! We can finally stop worrying about our plants falling over and breaking under their own weight, which is really nice. One problem with it, some of the plants (you can see on the right) are growing a bit too tall. They are almost reaching the light, which is already as high as it can go. We’re almost done for the year, though, so we don’t think its really work trying to move the whole bucket down to save a couple leaves.

The roots are continuing to grow longer and thicker. We are continuing to have to trim them back from the water pool. Unfortunately, there are no potatoes so far, though we don’t think this is because of our root trimming as they typically grow only 4-6 inches below the ground. We are still hopeful that we will get some potatoes before the end of the semester, though time is running a bit short… I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

BIG UPDATES!!
Today we finally constructed the supports we have been talking about making. As you can see, they help the plants stay upright very well and make things look a lot nicer and more contained. Now it looks like a real garden!

The back middle plant was growing a bit too far back to fit inside the support, so we ended up tying it. Hopefully this will be enough to keep it from falling over in the future.

And finally, the last plant has sprouted!! It shot up between the last update and now, so much so that I had to check our previous photos to make sure we just hadn’t missed it. That makes a full 8/8 plants that are growing, which is really exciting for us! We aren’t too optimistic about its chances of survival, though, as it is very far behind and surrounded by much larger plants that are blocking its light. Whether it survives or not though, it is still a great marker of success for us!

We have a bit of a problem…
So we definitely waited a bit too long to make a structure to support our plants, as they have all started completely falling over under their own weight. With this, we started planning out how what type of structure we will make. As you can see on the right, the current plan is to make a wooden table-without-a-top structure that will be able to prop up the plants from a higher point than their base. Hopefully this will be complete by the end of the weeks.

On another note, here are some pictures of us adding water and nutrients just to show you how we do it!

Lots of roots!!
We realized today that we have been forgetting to take pictures of the roots to show their growth progression. They’ve grown a lot! Maybe even a little too much even… they’ve reached the pool at the bottom of the bucket. This is a bit problematic as the whole point of aeroponics is to control the amount of water and nutrients reaching the plant to an optimized amount. If the plants start sourcing water and nutrients from the bottom, it is possible for them to absorb too much, which could be bad for them. Because of this, we have started trimming the roots so that they no longer reach the water by themselves.

In addition to this, we were actually able to remove some of the dowel rods supporting the plants because the large plants started being able to support themselves by leaning on the other plants, which we think is pretty cool. We still plan to add a more permanent fixture, as we imagine that it won’t stay this way forever, but we did not have enough time to work on that today.

We have another sprout!!
The back left plant is finally showing signs that its starting to grow! As you can see, the eyes that were peaking out are starting to grow leaves. This will put our count to 7 of the 8 growing, which is frankly a much better return than we expected when we began.

On another note, the front right plant is showing signs of continued growth since its emergence from under the lid. This is a good sign for its health and future growth.

Unfortunately, we still have not gotten around to fixing the leaning plant problem. We are hoping to get around to that next week, but the dowel rods seem to be working well enough for the time being. That’s all until then!

It’s the leaning tower of plant mass…
Not much of an update today, but of course the same time that our new plant sprouts is when our other plants decide to start leaning over to block its light. We didn’t have much time to work on this today so we made a temporary fix with some dowel rods to push them back. We are hoping to be able to implement a more permanent fix sometime in the near future, but this will have to do until then.

Other than that, as you can see in the pictures we finally got around to adding blockers around the plants to prevent the water from spraying out the top. We used coffee cup lids that we cut the centers out of because they were pretty much the perfect size.

Well that was unexpected…
While refilling the water today, we made quite the unusual discovery: one of the plants we thought hadn’t sprouted yet actually has – it’s just been growing under the lid of the container! We really don’t know how it’s survived down there without light, but somehow it appears to be alive and healthy. We helped it back to the surface by shoving it through a different hole (it was too big to go back through the same one)Hopefully it will continue to grow, in the right direction this time!

That brings our count of growing plants up to 6 out of 8! That’s three quarters! The remainder of our plants continue to be doing  well, and a second one has flowered.

With this, we have also decided to leave the last two “behind” and switch to the other type of nutrients to promote more plant growth. We are still hopeful that they will eventually sprout, as they both have some roots growing, but we would rather focus on the success of the more promising ones than make sure all of them sprout.