Grow 6

Well it has been a while since we did another major grow in the indoor room. We were busy helping all of our friends getting ready for outdoor spring planting by starting their plants for them in our AeroFlo36 not to mention all the Rion Prestige Greenhouse activities which we call the Berry House. Hey, what are friends for right?

We love tomatoes but I have to tell you, growing them indoors with an eight foot ceiling is challenging - especially if you hang grow lights from the ceiling. We have traditionally grown only heirloom and organic seeds but I am trying a hybrid now out of necessity - height limitations.

We have three tomato plants, two indicate that they are bush tomatoes (Bush Steak Hybrid and Bush Early Girl) and we are also planting a Tumbler Hybrid but it is not a bush tomato (just trying it out).

In addition we have planted Romaine since we eat it so fast, organic cucumber (another climbing wonder), Zucchini (we have had great success with these), Jalapeno, Red and Yellow Sweet Peppers.

Another test is for the Ultimate Plant Cage (http://globalgardenfriends.com/the-ultimate-plant-cage/). We have a challenge with our peppers and tomatoes getting top heavy with the fruits and our Ebb n Gro system does not have nice insets for PVC pipe like the PowerGrower does to help support the plants. We have tried netting, but it didn't work as we thought it would to support the plants from the PowerGrower.

So with the new grow, a new product test and some new plant tests...stay tuned. We planted seeds today and will be back to you soon on the results

Geeting Ready For A New Grow

As you can see we have cleaned up the grow room and have pruned all the plants that were crowding everything else in the room. We have a few remaining tomato plants in the AeroFlo36 that we are proving to a friend for his outdoor garden. The PowerGrower has been cleared for new plants as well

We have several varieties of bush tomatoes we are going to plant along with zucchini and more pepper plants. We may even add another cucumber plant.

We will be trying a new device in our grow room and will give you more details on it when it arrives. Hopefully it will help us with an irritating issue we have been having with potted plants.

Clean Those Systems!

Our PowerGrower started having problems over the last week.  Water was not leveling out in all of the PowerGrower units; water was not dripping from the rings as it should; and one of my pepper plants was starting to have issues. 

Well, we just got so busy and we started manually taking water out of the reservoir and distributing it to the PowerGrower units until we could spend a day to really do a lot of work in the grow room.  That day came yesterday.  We had added FloraKleen to the system last week to help loosen the salts anticipating the cleanup was coming.

What we found:

     1.  Several plants (Zucchini mainly) had root masses that were so large
          that they began to grow back up into the water connection lines
          between the pots.  The growth choked off the free flow of water
          between the pots.

     2.  The air pump needed a serious cleaning as salt and dust particles
          were clogging the normal flow of air to the lines.  Several lines
          were not functioning at all.

What we accomplished:

     1.  Since our zucchini plants were had already served us well and were
          on their last legs, we removed them from the system.  Our yellow
          pepper plant was also struggling so we added it to the compost bin.

     2.  We removed all of the debris from the air pumps, changed several
           lines, and ordered a rebuild kit in case the pump went south in the future.

     3.  We have the system running normally again  -   Lesson learned
           - MAINTENANCE SHOULD NOT BE PUT OFF

Grow Room Update

We are busting at the seams here in the grow room.  The eggplants are taking over with elephant ear sized leaves, we have harvested several zucchini, cucumbers, yellow peppers, and of course fresh romaine lettuce each day.

Our Roma tomatoes are doing much better now that we have raised the pH level to about 6.5 on average and reduced our nutrient levels to the minimum recommendations of Canna.

We have zucchini

Picked our first zucchini this morning.  Just couldn't stand it any longer.  This baby is huge!  About 12 inches long and 4 inches in diameter.  We have many more on the way.  The White Eggplants are flowering nicely and we anticipate seeing some eggplant soon.  Picking Roma Tomatoes here and there.

Zucchini Transplanted

The zucchini plants we placed in the AeroFlo36 have 4-6 big leaves on each plant and a nice healthy root base so we planted two in each of the PowerGrower and Ebb n Gro systems.  pH balanced R.O. water was used to "top off" each of the grow systems.

The zucchini was planted in the systems using Hydroton as a base medium.  We have come to really like this "days gone by" product in lieu of the newer ones based upon our grow room experiments.  We have placed a Hortinet (basically a plastic 4x4 net) over the cucumber and Roma plants on the Ebb n Gro system as they are getting larger and require constant support.

Grow Room Video Update

We posted some photos of the peppers, eggplant, and zucchini today but also wanted to give you the broad view of the grow room.



We are ready to fill out our PowerGrower and the remaining two spots on our Ebb and Gro system with the Jalapeno peppers and Zucchini we just transferred to the AeroFlo36 system.

Changed the water and refreshed the nutrients on both PowerGrower and Ebb n Gro systems today. Taking out the Cherry Tomato plants was bittersweet but we had eaten so many that I felt it was time to move on. We did clone the plants and also started another from seed so it won't be long before we have more.

Grow Room Cleanup

We took out the cherry tomato plants and one Italian Parsley plant today so we could clean the PowerGrower system and make room for the Grow 5 zucchini and jalapeno pepper plants that we transplanted to the AeroFlo36 today.  We now have 5 openings in the PowerGrower and 2 openings in the Ebb and Gro systems.

The nutrients were refreshed in both the Ebb n Gro and PowerGrower systems to support more flowering and fruiting.  The Canna products continue to perform very well for us as you can see by our video and photo updates.

The fennel, mint, leeks, and a cherry tomato plant were transferred from the AeroFlo36 system to the Ebb n Gro system to support their size and expansive growth.

Grow 5 Planted

We have seeded Grow 5 with 4 Jalapeno, 4 Zucchini, and of course more Romaine Lettuce. Germination should occur over 7-10 days and we will bring you more info then. We continue to harvest the Romaine we plant almost every day. We start several new seeds every few days as the germination rate is quick, and once in the AeroFlo36, we get full heads in about 7 days.

Grow 5 planning

We are documenting "Grows" with new plants we have not germinated or taken to maturity in the grow room. We do sub-grows (like Grow 4a, 4b, etc) each week that are mainly romaine lettuce almost weekly. It is taking about 2 1/2 weeks to go from seed to table with our Romaine so I thought documenting each would be a bit tedious and boring for you.

Grow 5 will have 2 new heirloom plants, jalapeno peppers and zucchini, and of course we will put some lettuce and other fast consumables in the grow. We have the Rockwool cubes soaking now and they will be ready tomorrow. Since we have not grown these plants before, they will start from seed.