Aquaponics - Modular potting

When plants are small they don't take up much room.

I'm confident we all new that.

But one of the problems with having only a small grow house, is that space is at a premium. If I plant a seedling with enough room around it to grow into whatever it's going to grow into, I'm left with a stack of empty space for the next month or two.

One solution to this is to plant all kinds of fast growing little things between the big things and harvesting them as the big thing needs the space.

My solution is to make it so I can move all my plants around at will.

No doubt this has been done before, but rather than research and find out if there is anything wrong with doing this, I'm just going to jump right in. The fact that I don't know of anyone doing it, may well mean it simply doesn't work.

I'm not going to let that stop me from trying it anyway.

Before I made my NFT test tube, I had already bought some strawberry seedlings that were growing out of their punnet. I needed to transplant them, but didn't have the NFT tube built. My solution was to transplant them into their pots, and then just bury the pots in the main grow bed. This meant that they wouldn't have to go through any more transplant stress than they needed to, and could settle into their homes that would be theirs for the next few years.

You can see the buried pots at the top of this photo of worms being added to my grow bed.

I didn't have enough real estate in the grow bed to plant them out, and this way I could crowd them in while they were small, and then move them to the NFT tube when I got around to building it, without really transplanting them.

I think I'm going to try to use this concept throughout my system.