Updates: Hydroponics edition

Today is officially 2 weeks into starting my little hydroponics experiment to grow some of our own food. The recap for why we’re exploring this: a desire to reduce our negative impact on the environment (less packaging waste, less trips to the store), more locally sourced food with no harmful pesticides, healthier routine dietary habits… There’s so many reasons behind this, honestly. Learning how to setup and sustain a thriving hydroponics system could have much larger reaching impacts. In our local community there’s one charity that does an organic community garden to produce food for a food pantry. How cool would it be to do something like that with hydroponics, so that fresh food wouldn’t be limited by the seasons? Less wasted water, more food production possible, etc… (I know—I’m getting too far ahead of myself here—I barely know anything about hydroponics at this stage!)

Now, enough of my babble—onward to the updates! Most of the seeds have sprouted and are thriving (the chives and one of the deer tongue lettuces look like duds). My boyfriend and I wound up also purchasing a couple of pre-started plants as well to see how well they’d transfer into a hydroponics system.

So - now for the pictures, and more explanations (if needed).

First up, a variety of lettuce plants in the first 3 rows. The back row, from left to right is: basil, chives (no luck, this one is a dud), and dill.

Next up is the right side of the aerogarden bed. The picture is showing one of the cherry tomato plants (which is looking pretty happy), as well as one of our transplanted spinach plants. This will be an important comparison note against the picture after this of the DIY hydroponics system. I’ve had to trim up the spinach of dead leaves in the aerogarden (I have two of them transplanted here, and they seem to be adjusting nicely). Not pictured is the second cherry tomato plant, as well as one bell pepper sprout. The second bell pepper seed may or may not be a dud. Another few days will reveal that one.

And lastly, the DIY hydroponics set up. This was our second attempt at a DIY - the first one started immediately killing the spinach so we decommissioned it until we can dedicate more time to research and troubleshooting.

As you can see, the transplanted oregano is pretty darn happy with its new home. The spinach on the other hand? Yikes. Massive leaf death. Had to cut away a lot of shriveled misery. I see a couple of new sprouting leaves in the centers, but these are not happy spinach plants. I honestly do not expect them to survive (but my boyfriend is more optimistically cheering for them). That said, I would love it if these little plants did survive.

Of note: the nutrition type and ratios in the DIY are different than in the aerogarden. The way the water and air is handled is also different. We’ve got a pH testing kit and some pH up and pH down modifiers. They just arrived this weekend and have not carved out time to get familiar with them yet, but we suspect the pH could be an issue for the spinach.

Not pictured: garlic chives and lemon balm. They have not been transplanted yet to hydroponics, but are still thriving well in their nursery pots. Once we get the pH and nutrition levels sorted in the DIY (or the other custom DIY not pictured) these little guys will be next on the transplant list.