Couldn’t be more impressed Johan. Major grower envy. I haven’t done much in my greenhouse so far because I needed to get a lot of stuff growing this year. I have been dumping all my canned produce over 4 years old and that’s a lot that I want to replace with new. I agree about not wanting to be dependent on the purchased synthetic fertilizer for the hydro systems but for people in climates like both of us live in it’s the only way to grow year round or at least with greatly extended seasons. Important because of the war on food and the nutritionally weak food that is available in stores. Within the next two years we should know who won the war. If it’s the globalists then those of us that are still around will be eating bug concoctions and manufactured meats. If we win then it will be a good ten years before non-poisonous agriculture can be mostly reestablished. In the meantime anyone who produces at least some of their own food supply and who can teach others how to do the same will be essential. I know this war on food is world wide but anyone who wants to call it conspiracy theory is an idiot. Here is a list of food processing facilities that were somehow destroyed in the U.S. during 2021 and 2022. Many more were lost in 2023
The US food and drug administration has also decided that folks like the Amish farmers trying to sell raw milk and other foods are a major threat to the people of the country and water to irrigate the potato crops in Idaho are being cut off to farmers while the same precious water is diverted for use in cobalt mining. I’ve been trying to avoid being too political lately but people need to be aware that they are truly under attack.
It looks more like an ebb and flow type of system, not a kratky, but I am not sure exactly what you are doing so it might be a modified kratky. Kratky is a container like a 5 gallon bucket with a lid,filled to the top with solution, and you put a net pot in the top with no soil with a started seed. Then walk away.
With kratky, keep looking at the roots. You end up with microbes like fusarium,that turn the roots brown, which is what you don’t want. One way to combat it, is to oxygenate the solution, but then it is no longer a passive system. The other way is to add a few drops of hydrogen peroxide.
Yes, I have bought masterblend fertilizer set from https://hydroponicseuro.com/
Not the cheapest around but it is made for fruiting vegetables and for leafy greens.
I put it there for you mr Mannes
No, truth to be told it is still there since we planted in the buckets
Thanks Tom
Sorry to hear that you needed to throw the canned food away, I was under the impression that canned goods would last longer than that.
I kind of wish we had Amish farmers around here so we could buy food and groceries from their farm shops
Thanks Sean
There are floater valves in the pipes to keep the level constant and net cups sticking out the bottom of the buckets down in the solution so it is kind of the same thing
Ok, do you plant soil first, and then remove the bottom, and let the roots grow into the water?
Do you mix the fertilizer in water and then pump it around, or how does it work?
We planted the seeds in dirt first and then transplanted them without the dirt into cocosfibres mixed with perlite as a growing medium in a bucket with a hole in the bottom with a net cup sticking down. The net cup is sticking down in the nutrient water and the cocosfibre/perlite mix is wicking up nutrients and water for the roots. After a while the roots are growing so they are sticking down in the nutrient solution as well.
The pipes are gravity fed from the ibc tank through a floater valve to keep a constant level in the pipe.
No pumps or anything like that. The fertilizer is weighed rigorously and mixed with water
No worries Johan. Dumped 200 quarts because it was stored in a root cellar and the lids got some rust. If I have a good year I’ll be able to replace that and more. Not really a loss. It will feed the microbes in the compost bins and make powerful swamp water/JADAM fertilizer. Plenty more stored safely in the house.
Had to dig a while to find this video in the link above that I knew Tom had linked to and this was our first real serious introduction to hydroponics and I think it is a good video to watch first. My wife watched probably all of Hoocho’s videos but the one that really swung us over to the Kratky system was this one
We haven’t printed any of the stuff he has since we wanted to try it out first as cheap as possible but if we are still as happy with the system after this season I think we are going all in next year with those printed thingies he has.
It will come to use for the microbes but it is a shame with all the time and work put into it.
I have made that mistake too once and that is when I fixed up the ’cool storage’ in our basement. It keeps between 6C in winter and 15C in high summer (43F to 59F) but I find that ok for canned goods and beverages. That is by the way also where I keep the apple juice barrel with the floating lid I made last year.
This is the guy that got me interested in hydro. He doesn’t seem active on youtube any longer but just a ton of good information about different systems and also regular soil based growing. A likeable dude. You have to go back 11 years in his videos to get the some of the dutch bucket stuff. I have linked him before.
That is pretty much modified kratky. The original kratky was just cut a hole in a 55 gallon drum for a netpot, fill it up with all the solution you need for the season, and let it go. (he originally did it with tomatoes.)
It works better for lettuce and short term crops because the root rot fungus is anaerobic and builds up in the solution, and naturally it is controlled by an aerobic fungus. (gotta love the natural chemical wars that go on at the microbial level) For longer term crops, you should probably oxygenate the water somehow or add hydrogen peroxide.
You don’t have to start the seeds in dirt. I start them right in the netpots. The only purpose the netpots serve is for plant stability. I used a small strip of paper towel to wick up moisture to the seed, and put the lettuce seed kind of wrapped in it since the seed is too small and falls through the expanded clay media i use… most people use rockwool to start seeds in. For me, It is half a principle thing, and half a I don’t want to buy something else and store it if I can make do with something I already have and is cheaper. But that is the depression era/WWII style gardening I was taught. Even if I am only saving a dollar, I will probably do it.
The next thing I need to try is cottonballs. The seeds fall out of the paper towels strips.
Will these tomatoes taste the same as those we grow in soil?
Do the plants not take up substances and minerals that are in the soil, which you miss when growing in artificial soil salts, very doubtful about this.
I didn’t think tomatoes usually have a big flavor profile change. Usually you add micro nutrients to the solutions so the plant has everything.
Some veggies so taste different from different soil (and microbes) and nutrients, you see a slight variation with specific flavor profiles. So it is safe to assume there is some difference.
I think it was hot peppers that supposedly changed the most, because if the lack of microbes. The mechanism wasn’t that well understood as to what was missing.
But i say supposedly because the are protections for certain industries like saffron that they build into the market to keep the price up.
I think that our tomatoes and cucumbers, even strawberries, taste much more and better than the ones you buy at the store, but I don’t know if it’s due to harvest time or something else
I haven’t learned the varietys and names for the systems as I only am a beginner
I have to look into oxygenating the solution.
Jan, that is partly why this is a test for us. I would never put chemical fertilizer in soil for a number of reasons, mainly for the reasons Elaine Ingham teaches, but this is in a closed system so I am ok with doing a test.
If they taste like storebought tomatoes normally taste (watery, tasteless and so on) then some decisions have to be made around here.
It is easy to convert the greenhouse back to a normal one, just cut out the weed mat in the bottom and we do not have much invested in this, just the fertilizer and the buckets, the rest I had lying around the farm.
But since they are higher up and no weed makes the maintenance work like a charm, huge timesaver.
But we’ll see, as the old idiom says, there are no free lunches…
Strawberries get tasteless and watery because of irrigation even grown in soil.
I never looked at growing those hydroponically.
As far as aeration, i dont know how much is needed.there are several methods but the easiest with what you have is probably an airstones and airpump for aquariums.
Taste is kind of relative anyway but the same used to be said about what were called hot house tomatoes which were simply fruit grown in a large greenhouse. I find no difference between hydro and soil based fruit. I am personally only interested in the nutrition. As a matter of self sufficiency hydro eliminates many of the issues that can plague a traditional grower. The plants get exactly what they need to thrive without the threats of bad nematodes, or other soil borne critters and diseases. The same reason why your seed starting mixes and potting mixes are soil-less. My point of view is the same as the one that Bobby, the MHPgardener stated in his mission statement in the link above. Food shipped across country or the world losses it nutritional value day by day. It is chemically treated to prolong appearance and pretty much showered in pesticides while growing. Your body adapts itself to your climate and the types of foods you can grow in your area. It functions better if you feed it from foods grown that vicinity. For me, the only problem with hydro is that you are dependent on an outside source for the plant food. The MHPgardener did a lot of experimentation and found no organic solution that delivered the necessary nutrients in a balanced form that could match what the commercial solutions like Masterblend provided. Perhaps further work has been done in this area that I’m unaware of.
What I am worried about is that the plants, the fruits, do not contain what we need, just because they look good, does not mean that they are good.
I’m old-fashioned, but I’m skeptical of artificial things.
Not really artificial Jan but I understand what you are saying. In the end it’s a matter of biology and chemistry. Roots in fertile soil seem much more efficient than in a hydro solution. If you look at some of the Hoocho videos or the MPHgardener videos you will see them lift the plants out of the solution basins and the roots are massive. It appears that the plant needs to generate them to absorb the same amount of nutrition that the plant can get from soil. And I’m not anti-soil in any way. All the growing I’ve down so far this year is in the garden and so far so good. But of course I’m not just sticking a seed in the ground. Each plant gets a measured amount of amendments in the planting hole. Charged bio-char,compost and a couple of cupfuls of worm castings which provide an immediate source of food the roots can uptake while they wait for the soil microbes to break down the other amendments into something the plants can absorb. So far I have used no commercial fertilizers and just used the JADAM swamp water in some carbage cans full of weeds, urine and old canned goods. So far that looks promising.
Worm castings contain a lot of the aerobic microbes. In fact, the last two things I have seen, are about ‘compost extract’, which just doing the biological extract like you would do with a compost tea and stopping there without adding a bunch of solution and aerating it for a day to make the ‘compost tea’. But then you just spray on the compost extract.
Vermicompost is recommended over an aerobic compost pile. I do NOT know why they changed the dialogue. I suspect it is because it is much easier, and you are less likely to screw it up. You can just wash and apply, without all the rest of it, because the compost teas can go anaerobic depending on how fast the bacteria grow in the solution, and that is dependent on several factors, but simply it isn’t consistent as to the time it takes.
Another reasons is maybe they found out the fungus isn’t multiplying in solutions, and aerobic fungus, can help prevent plant diseases, like root rot, and can help speed up seed germination. There is even a fungus that is a parasite of white mold.
