Scott and Kyle's Hydroponic System

Today we checked our plants after a long Thanksgiving break. I was hoping that our system wouldn’t run out of nutrient solution and that we would get some last minute growth. It turns out that our plants decided to grow and that our system maintained enough solution for the plants to grow. We now have lots of plants growing, however none of them seem to be done growing. We had to add more nutrient solution due to the fact that it hasn’t been maintained for a week. We also checked the pH and found it was around 6.5 which is a steady pH for our system. I did take notice that there is algae growing on the bottom of our “upper deck” portion of the system along with algae in the tubes that lead to the upper deck. This seems not to have an effect on the plants but we don’t quite know yet. Overall our system looks great and should have a good harvest tomorrow.

Today i checked our plants and they seem to be growing quite nicely. We have quite a few of lettuce plants growing on a daily basis. I would like to measure the growth of a week to find out how much the plants are growing. Our pH today was around 7 so i didn’t bother lowering any more. The timer seems to be affecting the growth in a positive way and we seem to be getting water to lettuce much more throughout the day which allows for better growth because lettuce is suppose to have a lot of water during growing period.

Today when Scott and I checked our lettuce we were happy to see that our plants had grown significantly lager. We finally got our timer working the way we want it to so our lettuce is getting the right amount of water it needs. We keep a close eye on our ph cause that is what killed our plants earlier in the season. We checked it in the beginning of class and it was around 6.5 which is pretty good. Then we made a fresh batch of solution and dumped it in cause we needed more water and then measured the ph was 7.5 which leads me to believe that the tap water has high ph cause we have been battling high ph every week. So once we saw the ph was at 7.5 we lowered it and it should be ready to go. If we have another week like we did last week we will both be very happy.

Today we checked our hydroponic system for the first time in a week and our seeds are growing great. We have a bout six lettuce plants growing very well at the moment, however the seedling that grew first seemed to have died and we believe it was because our nutrient solution pH was high. We decreased the pH to about 6 today and got our timer to work so we can regulate the water flow nicely.

Im a little worried about our lettuce. At first it looked great and it germinated quickly. I checked the ph an it was 8 which is extremely high so I lowered it. I hope this makes a difference. I also re-planted a couple seeds just to be safe. Hopefully they will germinate by next Tuesday.

Our hydroponic system seemed to do incredibly well over the weekend and now has a fully growing lettuce plant. We did have to replenish the nutrient solution a little and we had a slightly high PH at 7 again, however since the lettuce seems to be growing well we didn’t mess with the PH at all. We did acquire a timer for our water pump to regulate the water better and we hope this will increase growth in the plants. We did notice that one side of the system doesn’t seem to be getting as much water and therefore the seedlings aren’t growing. We are brainstorming solutions to this problem to hopefully fix it shortly. Sadly only one of seedlings is growing well and we are trying to figure out the problem, which maybe the seeds are to close together or not receiving enough nutrient solution. Hopefully we will have this fixed and growing more lettuce soon.

Our hydroponic system is flowing smoothly still however we had to add more nutrient solution to our system because the rock wool soaked a lot of the solution. Our PH was a little high at 7 but we figured it will lower in time. One of the seedlings is fully germinated and sprouted. You can see the leaves of the lettuce and stem slightly. I did notice one drawback to our solution and that i that the seedlings directly under the end of the tube where the water exits, seems to be the only ones germinating and growing well.

Today we checked our hydroponic system and everything seemed to be flowing well. We have still not acquired a timer for our water pump to produce a better flow of water to the lettuce seedlings. We checked our PH in the nutrient solution and it appeared to be alright at 6 to 6.5. We keep the water at a constant low speed again to allow for maximum hydration to the seeds.

Today we planted our seeds in the rock wool. We do not have timer for our water pump so we set the valve that we have hooked up on our house so it runs constantly at a slow rate. The seeds are going through germination so hopefully late in germination we have a timer so we can get more water onto the lettuce.