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Below you'll find info about our indoor gardening experiences, including how to build your own
hydroponic gardens! It's organized in chronological order starting with the oldest at the top.
This way, I find it easier to follow what I've done and see progression. For questions, email cjoye @ mit . edu
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Late October/Early November, 2006
We decided to start with an "experimental" hydroponic garden consisting of a small ~2 gallon
rubbermaid container with a block of styrofoam floating in it. We cut a four 3" holes in the styrofoam
for cups. Each cup has a few holes cut in the bottom and the water level is only 1/8" deep in the cup.
Then we put 1 or 2 seeds in an Oasis Cube and put the whole thing in the cup.
[pictures coming]
We bought some commercial nutrient solution, Fox Farm "Grow Big," a fairly strong concentrate at 6-4-4
(that's 6% Nitrogen compounds - 4% Phosphates - 4% Soluble Potash). We diluted it according to the
instructions. After a while, the plants that started so well began to die. Once we got a pH probe ()
we found the pH dropped down to about 5.0, which is way too acidic for lettuce (pH 5.8-6.5).
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Early December, 2006
First lettuce harvest from the experimental hydroponic garden! It was great having clean, fresh
lettuce for your sandwich every day!!
The soil lettuce is much slower in growing. I read online that soil lettuce takes 50 days, but
hydroponic takes only 33!!
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Mid-December, 2006
The hydroponic pepper plant started flowering, but the flowers kept dying and falling off. I think
the plant decided it needed to be taller first before making peppers.
Lettuce continues to grow well, but the pH dives low every few days becuase of the big pepper plant,
forcing us to do water "transfusions" to keep the pH up.
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January 11, 2007
First hydroponic peppers start to grow! We have been gently flicking the stem with our finger near
the flowers to simulate pollenating bees! It seems to have worked! [Photo]
We also cut a pineapple near the leaves and placed it in a dish with water and oasis cubes. It
should start to grow roots in a few weeks, or rot!
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January 27, 2007
We took apart a garlic bulb and put the 6 biggest cloves in a pot with soil about 4" apart. Will
they grow 6 new bulbs of garlic??
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January 29, 2007
We not have 7 long yellow-green hydroponic peppers growing on a single plant!! The soil-based
pepper plant, which was planted first, still has no peppers! Hydroponics are again faster than soil.
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February 9, 2007
We received our electrical conductivity meter to measure the total dissolved salts in the solution.
We measure it in micro-siemens/cm. 1000 uS/cm = 1 mS/cm = cF 10. I have a hydroponics book from
England that measures everything in "cF". Typically, we keep the tanks around cF 20-25 (which is too
strong for lettuce), so we haven't grown lettuce for a while.
We also got some Ionic "Grow" 3-1-5 solution, which is supposed to hold it's pH better. We'll see
if that's the case.
I was shocked to find out our tap water has a pH 8.8!! Since it doesn't contain much salts (cF
0.5), it does affect the solution much.
Two of the soil-based garlic cloves sprouted!! They are 3" tall already.
We constructed a large hydroponic tank (10 gallons) that we call tank #1 (the early smaller tank is
now called tank #0) and planted 2 zuccini, 1 cucumber, 1 tomato.
They all died the next day, probably because the pH was too high (pH 7.3) due to our tap water! I tried
lowering it with lemon juice and got it down to 6.2. The new set of plants seemed happy with that.
We also put our pineapple in tank #1, since it started growing roots!! Amazing!
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February 13, 2007
We continue to do transfusions on the water in tank #0 (currently home to only a thriving pepper
plant), because the pH keeps diving below 5.0 after 2-3 days!! I bring it back to about 6.2 each time.
Our soil garlic plants are now 9" tall! All of them sprouted!!
We have 9 yellow-green hydroponic peppers now; and 3 big fat dark green bell peppers growing in the
soil version!
First bell pepper photo.
The zuccini is really scaring me. The leaves are about 3" long already and there are 7 of them!
I'm afraid they will take over the house evertually at this rate!
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February 14, 2007
Valentines day was a wonderful day - Even the soil watermelon flower finally opened after
about 2 months! Everything was going right until 8pm. That's when I discovered tiny tiny light green
bugs crawling on the watermelon leaves. They were so small I'd never seen them before. There must
have been over 100 of them. I went to picking them off with a toothpick tipped with glue. We caught a
larger "teenager" too. They were so small I had to photograph them up very close and magnify it to see
what they looked like. Turns out they were THRIPS! I never heard of them until that night, and from
that moment they became my worst enemy. Thrips eat the leaves and spread bacteria that often kill
tomato plants. That explains why some of the watermelon leaves would die and dry right out. Thrips can
really multiply fast if you don't get rid of them. The females lay 50-200 lively eggs whether or not
they've mated. The adults, though only 1/8" long and with wings and able to fit through small screen
doors, will even bite humans if they get tired of the plants or can't find water. They have a long
lifespan of 40 days and have few natural predators (pirate bugs being the main ones, ladybugs might if
they're hungry). We definetely did NOT want to add bugs in our house, even if they were predators!
A week later, we killed our beloved watermelon plant and refridgerated the dirt to kill any
remaining larvae living in the soil. It turns out, had we refridgerated the soil for 3-4 weeks before
using it, all the larvae in the soil would have been dead. I imagine freezing the soil would work
faster.
Watermelon flower (some tiny thrips may be visible).
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February 26, 2007
We picked our first hydroponic pepper two days ago!! A nice 4" long yellow-green one. Nine more
coming!
Our hydroponic pepper plant doing pretty well! Ten peppers are there.
Today I built tank #2, another 10 gallon hydroponic tank. This one has just airstones, no water
pumps. We plan to grow artichoke (takes 6 months!!), and a few bok-choy, watercress type things.
Mostly, I was fighting with tanks #0 and #1 to get their pH's up and cF's down!! It's a never
ending battle.
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March 16, 2007
[Hopefully I'll post some pics again soon]
As of today, we have only 3 yellow-green hydroponic peppers -- Not because we picked the other 5, but because they turned
BRIGHT red over the last two weeks!! We were very surprised when they started turning from light yellow-green to bright red.
The dark green soil bell peppers are still about 2" long and slowly growing.
We moved one zuccini plant from tank #1 to the new tank #2, which still had a high pH of about 6.4 -- Now it's down to
5.9. The tank #1 zuccini has been growing steadily and is now take up 18" diameter space near ground level with large leaves.
The cucumber is very cool. It's large like the zuccini, but grows up up up! It has a new tendril about every day that's
about 5" long and grabs onto whatever it can find, usually the nearby tomato plant. I've been making them grab a piece of
string streched to the ceiling instead.
We often use green onions in soup, so we buy them from the store, cut the top off and plant the roots part. We plants one
in tank #2 and it grew 9" in 2 days! The soil one, by contrast, grew only 3"!
The soil tomato plants have been steadily growing as usual. One has 9 tomatos, the other 3.
Garlic is still going too: about 18" tall leaves now.
We also picked our Korean radish ("Moo") and it was a lot smaller than we expected, but still quite big for being grown in
a small container. It was about 2.5" diameter and 5" long. We cut it up and used it for soup - It was very good!
We also got a grape vine from Gurney's - It looks dried out now since it's been through the winter. It's in soil and will
probably take a year to produce grapes! Gurney's is sending us 25 strawberry plants, a blueberry plant, and a mini orange
tree tomorrow! I hope we have space for them!
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, 2007
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