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.