Month: November 2010

It’s the week before harvest, and it seems that everything is going just fine. We still have great plant growth, everything working well, and I noticed that although I’ve been checking the pH in every single tube and the reservoir weekly, it’s been perfect–what a nice surprise that I didn’t have to deal with adjusting it. We topped off the reservoir for the thanksgiving break, but it really didn’t need it. The systems been going for more than a month and hasn’t even used up two gallons of water. Definitely seeing what they mean by saying NFT systems are water efficient.

Our plants are continuing to grow just fine. The first plant is growing tremendously, and the other two are growing just fine, although not as fast as we’d like. We noticed buildup of waste in the tubes. This is because of our drainage system which is raised. Now that we see this, we realize that we probably should have drilled properly sized holes instead of raising the outlet pipe, since the waste has no way of draining into the reservoir where it can be collected on the filter attached to the pump.

We’ve noticed a small leak in our system where the pump hose goes into pvc tubes. Its only a slight drip though, and it drips right back into the reservoir, so we decided to ignore it for now, since we’d have to shut down and drain the system to fix it, and our plants are still growing just fine.

What a surprise! In just two days, we’ve seen tremendous growth in all three tubes!

Again, no need to top off the system with water, it seems like everything is working perfectly

Over the weekend both of the seeds we planted in the two growing tubes began to grow! They’re both extremely young, but hopefully they’ll grow fairly fast. the different type of seed that we chose for the two replants grows a bit quicker than the first seed, so hopefully that will kind of even everything out

Also, the first seed is growing just fine.

We’re surprised as to how little water is evaporating or being taken by the plants. We’ve only had to fill the system once since we first started, and that was just really a top off.

Two weeks after our first plantings, we still have had only one baby mesclun seed begin to grow, so we decided to replant the other two plants. we chose to plant mesclun instead of baby mesculn since it has a shorter germination period and a shorter harvest period, and will therefore hopefully be ready for harvest around the same period that the one baby mesculn will be ready for harvest.

In other news, our system has yet to leak again, so we think we have that problem solved.

Also, Brett made a larger reservoir for the bottom section of our garden out of polycarbonate, made to fit exactly into the box, which increased our reservoir volume by about 1/3rd, so this should enable us to run the garden for longer periods of time without topping off the system, allowing for the system to be more self-sufficient.