Aquaponics - modular potting III

I thought I might take this modular garden design just one step further.

If I cut holes in 90mm PVC piping so that at one end they are close together, and then progressively get further apart, it should allow me to grow twice as much stuff in one length of PVC, because the gaps between the holes, only need to be the size of the different sized lettuce as they grow up.

If I plant say 2 lettuce seeds in a pot every few days, I should be able to move the tubes along as they need more space, and as I need to plant another pair of lettuce for continuous supply.

So to start with I plant a lettuce in the space on the left. I wait a few days, move the first pot to the right, put a new empty pot in the first slot, and plant some seeds in it.

If I keep doing this every few days, or once a week, I get a continuous supply of lettuce. Or whatever else.

Anything that grows for a long time, like say chilli plants, I'll put into the main grow bed, but all the smaller fast growing things, I should be able to at least double the number of plants I can keep. And all without having to transplant.

I'm guessing it might take 20 seconds to move 10 lettuce along each week.

I think I've become obsessed with seeing how productive I can make my 5 cubic metres of grow house.

Aquaponics - Modular potting II

I thought I'd formalize the idea of movable modular plants by changing a small section of my grow bed to test the idea.

I started with an icecream container and drilled some holes in it to allow nutrient rich water to circulate freely.

I partialy burried it in the media where my core sampler used to be.

The depth I burried it is set so that the pots would see around 10-15mm of water at their ankles.

I used the same black plastic pots that I used in the NFT test tube, so I can move them to a new home when they need more space.

Nine seedling fit in the test modular garden.

If all goes according to plan, I should be able to move these at will into the NFT tubes that I plan on making. It will be a bit like transplanting, but without all the transplanting.

I'm not sure how well it will work, or if it will work at all. Sometimes unforeseen things happen when I do stuff without research.




One potential problem I can see is the possibility of the roots just ignoring my boundaries and doing whatever they please.

I think that's what I would do if I were a plant.

But I'm not so I have no idea.

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.