Even though I had dabbled in hydroponics before, I learned alot from this first pass. And in spite of some setbacks, the results amazed me. I chose to use rockwool for the initial germination. While rockwool has performed great for me in the past, with this project I had a chance to test it on several different plant types and with some the performance wasn’t so hot.
I took a block of about 70 of the rockwool cubes and broke into slabs of 15-20 each. After spending too many hours researching what to grow, I bought a bunch of seeds on Ebay from some very professional hobbyist gardeners and settled on Orange Chards, a variety of Strawberries which doesn’t have lots of shoots and is heat tolerant, Yellow Chards, Nancy Buttercrunch Lettuce, Rex Buttercrunch, Collards, Bok Choy, Grand Rapids lettuce, Basil, Lemon Basil, a few herbs I still don’t recognize and a bunch of tomato varieties. I debated the tomatoes because they get big but I went for it knowing I would have to construct something to support them down the road.
Most sprouted and I placed the rockwool cubes into the clay pellets that I filled the PVC tubes with.
That’s really all there is to it besides adding proper nutrients and adjusting the PH. All I had to do was wait. And I didn’t have to wait very long. These photos were taken on April 27th, 2011.
They all grew extremely rapidly. I opted for a weak nutrient solution at the beginning and the plants took to it. I do not change the reservoir every week or even every other week as I have let them go much longer in the past with excellent results. Check out the amazing growth over the next few weeks.