Plants plants everywhere. Biweekly pruning becomes a necessity.

It is still very much winter here in Chicago and the plants are acting like it is mid summer! Except for flowering, the peppers hint at flowers sometimes but haven't had some open yet. I have to prune two large handfuls of plant material off the tops of them plants every few weeks to keep them from smashing up against the sides of the greenhouse too badly.

This is what the greenhouse looks like today. (March 23) My previous two posts show pictures from early and late January.

My plant biomass is very high and quite crowded. Hurts me to prune them back so heavily since it wasn't so long ago that I was struggling to get them going. As you can see form the middle picture (and all of them really) it is about time for a prune. Especially the one site that faces my window gets denser. I will try to pull some of these plants toward the other side and into the wire trellis. 

Now the only part I am missing is some flowers so I can get some fruit going! Wondering if the temperature needs to be higher for that. We will see what happens as it gets warmer outside. But the plant biomass and health is excellent so I am not worried! 

Hydroponic tomatoes, peppers, and basil take over!

From January to march I have had explosive growth in my tomato, pepper, and basil plants in the green house. A few months with the LED lights made a huge difference in the growth. So much so that I have had to make some changes to the greenhouse.  But first look at this! This is only three weeks after the picture in the previous post was taken.

Some of the updates:

Water tubes clogging and root issues:

Once you get a significant amount of roots they start to find their way down the water tubes and if you get enough roots this can really start to hamper the flow of water. Worse case scenario, the outlet/return water lines get clogged, water cannot return to the reservoir, over flows and dumps water all over the floor, and the pump runs dry. It has happened. It is okay to trim your roots back, the plants have no problem growing more as long as you don't go too crazy. 

Debris in the water reservoir clogging the pump:

Pretty common problem. There is a brown silt light sludge that come out of the plants, looks and smells like a river bed, seems natural so I am not worried. I did encase my pump in some screen (for screen doors or windows) it was only a few bucks for way too much of it from my hardware store. I also made a little basket of screen that my water return lines strain their water into before it dumps into the reservoir. This has really cut down on any larger organic material chunks getting into the pump and clogging in. Now what I have is a fine silt like material that settles to the bottom of my reservoir tub and easily washes out when I clean the tub. 

The LED light strip:

The plants were obviously getting to big for their original hanging lights so I used velcro to attach the light strip to the top of the green house. 

Trellising:

The tomatoes, and to some extent the basil, really benefit from some structure to lean and grow on. To address this I screwed 4 eye hooks about 3/4 the way up on the four corners of the inside of the greenhouse and used green floral wire to weave a square wire grid. It is hard to get a picture since the wire is thin and green, but hopefully you can see what I have done. Then I carefully pulled up some of the plants and laid them on top of the wire. 

I also snapped this picture in the middle of the day one day. Just proves that my greenhouse is actually working as a greenhouse and keeping moisture in! Very cool. 

Hydroponic growing in the dead of winter! LED light strip saves the day.

My seedlings were not doing very well and I assumed it was due to the lack of a strong light source. (they were thin and leggy) I get good sun though my south facing window but its is the middle of winter (when the picture was taken) and the hours of sun where low. I decided to add in a LED light strip and have had a lot of success with that.

The LED light strip: http://www.adafruit.com/products/306

RGB 32 LED strip with programmable colors in any all the colors of the rainbow. From various sources it is known that red and blue light work the best. Simple science, plants are greenish yellow to our eye meaning they reflect those colors and absorb the other in the visible spectrum, namely blue and red.

I had to add a 5V additional power source to get the maximum light out of stripe since the pi does not supply enough power on its own.  There is plenty of documentation out there and tutorials with this strip if you decide to use it for your project. It comes with a demo program that seriously runs for nearly 10 minutes with all the flashing, waves, pulses, colors etc that it is capable of doing. Seems a little overkill now to just ask it to run on its blue and red LEDs.

As soon as I put the light in my plants responded very well, the lights are on for about 16 hours a day. This picture was taken on January 2nd in the middle of a Chicago winter and my plants are happily growing! I consider this a hydroponic success. This was exactly the point, to continue to grow plants in the dead of winter!

You can also see here that I zip tied a short piece of wood to the light strip so that it would lay flat. Can also see the purple hue of the red/blue LEDs.