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This is the coolest loving thread on the forums. That's some amazing progress from OP to recent posts, Stretch.
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Dec 2, 2016 15:34
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Thanks all.  Unfortunately I think my habaneros might have picked up mites from outside and they're just now becoming a problem. I'm trying to research a decent low cost mite removal spray. The plants themselves don't seem to be in trouble but I can see the little jerks on the leaves. For the time being I've blasted them with high pressure water so they launch down and into the tub away from the plants. The twilights seem ok though one has what looks like sugar crystals all over their leaves. Very bizarre.
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Dec 2, 2016 16:30
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Stretch Marx posted:Thanks all. Would soapy water help with the mites? I have a dusty memory about that being a cheap fix.
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Dec 2, 2016 22:21
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beep-beep car is go posted:Would soapy water help with the mites? I have a dusty memory about that being a cheap fix. I'll definitely give it a shot. It's weird. I can see their exoskeletons I guess but not them. I need to train ladybugs.
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Dec 3, 2016 03:44
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Cheapest DIY insecticides are soapy water and tobacco tea. Google for recipes.
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Dec 3, 2016 09:13
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So the soapy water seems to have done the trick as the mite genocide seems to be ongoing. Harvested my cayennes. Some are better than others. I think I left them on the plants too long. The twilights are almost all red and ready to harvest as well.
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Dec 14, 2016 03:42
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HARVEST DAY Collected all my cayennes and twilights together. Caboodle approves of the haul.  Here are them all together. I count 19 cayennes and 24 twilights.  Now I need to find test subjects. The twilights look really good. I think I'm going to keep going with them once my farm is up and running. Very prolific and I like the look of them.
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Dec 18, 2016 18:09
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I apologize once again for the long updates but there isn't much to report with regards to the plants. The spider mites won despite the piles of corpses I've left behind. So I've put the chilies out of their misery. I'm going to sterilize the bathroom and prepare for my next project. Now that I have my medical prescription, I'm allowed to grow marijuana in my home so I'll be starting on that. In the meantime, I have begun taking steps towards starting my hydroponic farm. I've reached out to community investors and I'm hoping I can get a seed loan to start. I calculate that given the current prices on lights and materials that I can get from Alibaba I should be able to start a profitable farm for under $10k in a space of 1200 square/feet. I've done some market research and know that if I succeed I'll be the only game in town to provide everyone with faster and fresher produce.
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Jan 5, 2017 14:54
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Jan 6, 2017 03:37
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So I met with Enterprise Saint John which is basically a start-up organization for the city and pitched my farm idea. I think I can start a productive farm for just over $5500 CAD and have it turn a profit after the first month. Assuming a bunch of things (such as never increasing my salary for two years, nor increase production, nor get any customers) by selling all my proposed stock I'd clear $2000 before taxes every month. And that was using conservative estimates. The farm in a 1200 sq/ft space could put out $7200 of lettuce a month or more if I add more layers. They were all for it and my contact is looking into a way to get an actual facility built in the poorer area of the city. I've lived there a good chunk of my life (old victorian homes that were subdivided into apartments. fantastic 1800s wood work) so I want help improve it. They agree and see this as a big economic booster for the area. So I may have my own farm this year after all. Wish me luck. I may not update in awhile as right now I'm growing medical marijuana in my rig and I don't know if that's appropriate for this forum. But as new information on the farm goes through I'll high light what's gone on. I'd like to this happen in more cities.
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Jan 10, 2017 18:30
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Interesting development. I went to Enterprise Saint John which is part of the "Enterprise (City Name)" network that is basically investment capital for start ups. I pitched my farm idea for the poorer part of the city as a public good and they agreed and are eager to actually make the farm a reality. At a bare minimum they'd offer me a $20K seed loan which is way more than I need to start a profitable farm. What they actually want me to do is go through their 6 month program where basically I take some seminars and workshops to start the business with the goal of having a completely functional/profitable business out the other end. If I pitch well I should easily get more than the $20K and Enterprise SJ wants the farm to be big. I'm meeting up with my former boss from the other farm to basically give him a bit of an ultimatum: get on board with my farm or don't bother starting your own since mine will be designed to undercut anyone.
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Jan 14, 2017 01:01
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So you aren't just talking to yourself here, Just wanted to say thats pretty awesome. Congratulations. I think that's a really cool idea and something that could really be an awesome addition to your town. Good luck, I've enjoyed reading your posts and have kicked around the idea of doing a little garden just for personal food stuffs but still haven't taken it further than that.
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Jan 14, 2017 05:55
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nostrata posted:So you aren't just talking to yourself here, Just wanted to say thats pretty awesome. Congratulations. I think that's a really cool idea and something that could really be an awesome addition to your town. Good luck, I've enjoyed reading your posts and have kicked around the idea of doing a little garden just for personal food stuffs but still haven't taken it further than that. I been getting people pretty pumped for the idea. I spoke to my previous boss that I'm borrowing the equipment from and he's cool with me using them here for my experimenting. I think eventually every city will have produce farms I just hope to get on the ground floor for Canada. Lots of people that need to be fed.
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Jan 14, 2017 21:09
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So I just pitched my hydroponic farm to a class of university business students and supposedly multiple student groups chose my pitch. They might be able to help me now get proper funding and networking and they'll make me a proper business plan for my farm. I'm hoping this goes places.
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Jan 24, 2017 03:20
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As in they've chosen to "adopt" your business proposal for the semester and work towards its success as a class project? Sweet deal, free labor.
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Jan 24, 2017 04:54
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Hello Sailor posted:As in they've chosen to "adopt" your business proposal for the semester and work towards its success as a class project? Sweet deal, free labor. More or less. I've already done most of the leg work so they don't need to put as much effort which helped sell it I think.
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Jan 24, 2017 11:57
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Really exciting to hear about the farm Stretch! Is it mainly lettuce your going to be focusing on? Back here my little project is starting up again. I was away for most of the summer and figured I could test and see how long the plants can go without a fresh reservoir of water/nutrients. Looks like ~4 weeks in the heat was pushing it a bit too much and most of my plants had to be put out of their misery. I expect some of this was due to me overdoing the pre-summer trimming of branches and roots. Well well... at least I learned something. Started some new plants in the fall, but a massive amount of stress at work made me neglect the plants and when I got an invasion of mites that I couldn't fight off I gave up. I disinfected the whole tent, all the equipment and sowed some new seeds on January 1st. Decided to skip on planting peppers this time as it took too much room and what I really enjoyed the most was cooking with fresh herbs and drying them to give away to people Pic from last october, a few weeks before pulling the plug  Pic from last week when I put the new plants in the system, this time I am going with basil, parsley, oregano and catnip (recently became foster home for a cat and figured this is the closest I can come to legally growing a drug)  Pic of my parsley plant today, 25 days after sowing 
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Jan 25, 2017 10:55
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Yep I've decided that I'm sticking to lettuce and maybe also basil for the start. They both grow fairly quickly and the basil can be continuously harvested for awhile. Plus I really like the smell of basil. Also I wish you luck with the parsley. Let me know how it goes as I've been thinking about expanding to that and spinnach as well if the demand is high enough. This weekend I'm going to move my pot plants to the hydroponics rig and we'll see how fast I can get them to grow.
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Jan 27, 2017 15:08
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Just a random update. I'm not sure if this is kosher for this subforum but this is basically what I'm up too. Once again to the hydroponic bathroom...  Can't sex them yet but I still have plenty of plant food and ph balance solutions so we are good to go. I'm sort of curious how much faster I can get them to grow this way.
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Jan 30, 2017 23:05
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86 days into this grow and everything is going good. Catnip, parsley and oregano are growing super fast. The basil is a bit slow, but I think its because I've been trimming it too hard.   I have harvested 3 rounds of parsley so far, and its really shooting up again fast. It takes about two weeks to get a good bunch from my two plants. Theres so much that I already filled one spice jar with dried herbs. @Stretch I would recommend growing some parsley, it grows fast when it gets going and gets big and good looking leafs.  Oregano might be a tad bit crowded, but I like having a small bush that I can trim. I lost one of my oregano plants early due to it drying out, but I managed to clone a few stems from this plant. All in all I'm happy with the progress so far and with skipping out on peppers this time around. For such a small setup they take too much space and make everything harder to manage.
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Mar 27, 2017 13:09
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Nice progress and thanks for the heads up. I don't know if it's a benefit caused by being hydroponically grown but I've found a lot of plants tolerate the abuse of multiple harvests pretty well. Basil did really well that way and every time you cut off a crown it split into two more. My medical marijuana plants just reached maturity and were sexed so that's exciting. In the mean time the farm is moving ahead at a slow but steady pace. The UNB business students want me to attend one of their lectures though I'm not sure for what yet. I've applied at a local year round garden store that has been slowly building up their hydroponics section. I basically sold myself as being one of the few people in the city that knows how to do this stuff and they checked my references today so I'm hoping to get on even if it's seasonal. Getting my drat visa paid off will make getting investment later easier.
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Mar 27, 2017 23:47
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Hi Stretch! Just wanted to say that this thread is awesome and I am looking forward to more updates. Wanting to give back to the community is an incredible thing, and I really hope you can get the farm started.
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Mar 31, 2017 23:36
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Thank you. I figure I should lead by example since this place is very hard to change being an old blue collar city. We're basically the Detroit of Eastern Canada. I hope this will draw more people to the area as well.
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Apr 1, 2017 20:12
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Hey, this is awesome stuff! Congrats! It's really interesting to me that you're turning this into a business. It never seemed to me like small hydroponics outfits could compete with the economies of scale of big commercial farms. Would you be willing to explain what makes your plan economical and competitive?
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Apr 3, 2017 01:28
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ohgodwhat posted:Hey, this is awesome stuff! Congrats! While this was true for a good while the technology has come along such that it's no longer so. Hydroponics allows for certain opportunities that traditional farming can't do: 1 - Scaling: Traditional farming relies on larges expanses of land to produce a sufficient number of crops to pay for the gathering of said crops (which most governments subsidize). They need that land to physically put crops into. Hydroponics doesn't require any soil and therefore the plants don't need to be grown in the ground. This means that plants can basically grow wherever there is space and are able to be stacked on top of each other. With hydroponics, if I had an acre size farm, I can make it multiple acres simply by adding more stacks of plants. Therefore, the hydroponic farm can scale to where ever it is situated since it can simply continue to add stacks as demand increases. 2 - Resource usage: Traditional farming is notorious for ground water pollution due to run off. Since they're outdoors, the sun will evaporate most water and thus traditional farms require a lot of water in order to maintain their plants. Because hydroponics run on closed loop systems, water stays in the system and doesn't evaporate nearly as fast. Thus a hydroponic farm uses a fraction of the water of a traditional farm. On top of that, fertilizers are solely for the use of the plants in the system and aren't leeching into anything. 3 - Time: With LED technology pretty much taking over the grow light industry it has become easier to cram more plants into an area. Older grow lights produced a lot of wasted heat, and thus wasted wattage, that LEDs don't worry about. They're also cheaper to run because of their efficiency. Because of that, running them year round isn't an issue for an indoor farm and thus growing in Winter becomes a possibility. As such, there is no window where produce prices suddenly jump due to lack of a growing season. 4 - Freshness: If the hydroponic farm is in the city, the logistical cost of moving my produce to the restaurants in the city becomes incredibly cheaper. Since most restaurants buy their produce from food distributors, they're paying for the mark up at the farm plus the mark ups of any distributors that touch that produce along the way. I don't have to worry about that and can directly compete with those food distributors. I can even charge more than the original farms because regardless of how much the distributors are charging, my produce will always be cleaner (no pesticides or herbicides), fresher (it's literally coming from across the city harvested the day before rather than from out of province where it's been sitting in fridges for weeks), and consistent (my prices won't fluctuate because I don't care about growing seasons). As time progresses I can start adding more and more items to my selection and slowly steal business from the distributors. The only operation that would seriously threaten the farm would be a second farm showing up in the city. But that would be overkill for an area like this and if I get the ball rolling first the chances of someone else doing the same plummets. That's the game plan at least. This evening I'm going to the university to collect the business plans the students have been building for me. I plan on taking those and going back to Enterprise SJ and see where we go.
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Apr 3, 2017 19:28
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I got the job at the garden store. I get a 40% discount on almost everything so I told them I'd run through their product line of hydroponic solutions and see what's worth it. They started carrying a brand called Holland Secret which apparently has been getting good feed back. Hopefully with this job I can pay off some of my outstanding debt so I can hopefully have an easier time getting investment for the farm.
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Apr 10, 2017 21:39
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Stretch Marx posted:I got the job at the garden store. I get a 40% discount on almost everything so I told them I'd run through their product line of hydroponic solutions and see what's worth it. They started carrying a brand called Holland Secret which apparently has been getting good feed back. You'll have to give us a review of those products. I can get them locally, and I'd prefer not to have to go to a headshop to get hydro supplies.
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Apr 29, 2017 01:23
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Stretch Marx, Do you mind sharing what ideal light cycles to use for peppers? I've currently got sweet bell pepper bedding plants waiting under sun blaster cfls, near a south facing window. I hope to be able to start moving them outside in a couple weeks. How long should I have the lights on and off for each day? The plants are still small, so I have been pinching the flower buds off, hoping to get more leaves growing.
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Apr 30, 2017 07:33
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SpannerX posted:You'll have to give us a review of those products. I can get them locally, and I'd prefer not to have to go to a headshop to get hydro supplies. No worries. It's less expensive that General Hydroponics which I honestly think is way overpriced now that I've used competitors. I'll definitely give a full run down when I can. B33rChiller posted:Stretch Marx, As far as I know, most tropical perennials like a lot of sun so I went with 16 on and 8 off and ran that through the whole thing. If your smaller plants are already putting out buds you might want to put the light on longer than you have been as plants tend to want to veg more than flower. Also check your nutrient mix. Higher nitrogen and phosphorous will induce vegging while higher phosphorous and potassium induce flowering more often. It's also why grass seed has so much nitrogen in it.
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Apr 30, 2017 17:00
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Stretch Marx posted:No worries. It's less expensive that General Hydroponics which I honestly think is way overpriced now that I've used competitors. I'll definitely give a full run down when I can. bedding plants
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May 4, 2017 21:15
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I've got a bit of a jungle on my hands. Last year I tried to grow bell peppers outside. I had great success in a small container garden with 3 plants that grew 3-4ft tall and then were just loaded with peppers. I was quite pleased with how well the grew with almost no attention apart from keeping the container filled with water. Then one day peppers started literally disappearing. There one day, gone the next-- right down to the stem. I assumed it was deer because the deer love to eat all my hibiscus to the point I've seen one flower on it in the 6 years I've lived here. It always looks like someone went at it with a weed whacker. To protect my peppers I made a little bamboo frame and covered it with netting, being careful to make sure there was no way to get in or under the netting. The peppers kept disappearing. The ones around the outside were first to go, so I now assumed something can reach through the 1" mesh netting and get to them, so I expanded out the netting frame to add a little room. Peppers continued to disappear. My plants took it in stride and kept being pepper factories but no pepper could grow larger than a tennis ball before being eaten. My HOA prohibits vegetable gardens in the front yard so building a wire fence enclosure was not an option. I gave up, destroyed all the pepper plants in a fit of rage (while also checking thoroughly for giant fat happy caterpillars on it). This winter I built a hydroponic garden in my kitchen. There are two Bridgelux Vero 29 Gen 7 4000K mounted on giant heatsinks with a Mean Well LED driver pushing 130W (theoretically around 24,000 lumens) in a 32"x32"x64" tent. The irrigation is an ebb and flow system made out of some Rubbermaid containers and the plants are in Growstone GS-1 Hydrostone media. I run the lights 14 on / 10 off with two watering cycles per day. I started with ~1000 PPM 23-9-31 nutrient, but switched to ~1200 PPM 17-26-29 once they were a couple feet tall. I don't know if any of this is optimal but it seems to be doing ok. Both these photos were taken about a week after I cut the plants in half because I was tired of trimming them every couple of days.  All of the plants were supposed to be California Wonder Pepper, but the first batch of seeds I didn't think was going to sprout (after like a month of nothing) so I bought a second pack of California Wonder Pepper seeds from Martha Stewart's brand. My original seeds did sprout though, so I ended up with a ton of little seedlings. I noticed almost right that the plants were growing quite differently. The Martha Stewart brand grew thin tall stems and my other seeds were short and fat and had much darker leaves. The plants have been blooming since they were less than a foot tall and eventually began to bear fruit. When the peppers were small I also had some lettuce in there, 3x Paris Island Romaine and one Buttercrunch, and those would put out like 4oz of lettuce per day. When they were about to bolt I cut them and ended up with 3lbs of bagged leaves. Here are some of my Martha Stewart California Wonder Pepper bell peppers:  And this is me @MarthaStewart  Does anyone know what these are? They are about 3-4 inches long and drat spicy. I have also planted a couple of these outside in the container and nothing eats them, but they grow a bit fatter and shorter out there. Also, because this is my first time successfully growing peppers... doooooo the plants ever stop growing and making peppers? I've been getting fruit for about 3 months now, almost 2 lbs of these spicy boys and, gosh, close to 10lbs of bell peppers. I want to make some changes to the system but I am waiting for this grow to be over. But... will it ever end? CapnBry fucked around with this message at 19:10 on May 6, 2017 |
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May 6, 2017 18:57
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As far as I'm aware most peppers will survive for 5 to 6 years if conditions are setup for them and will continue to poo poo out peppers for as long as you let them. So unless you want that all you can do is prune or cull. But it also means you always have peppers. Also is that eggplant on the left there? Also I like that setup. My marijuana have started to bud which is exciting for obvious reasons. I'm really temped to buy a vanilla vine from a nursery in Quebec and see if I can get it to grow.
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May 6, 2017 22:01
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Stretch Marx posted:As far as I'm aware most peppers will survive for 5 to 6 years if conditions are setup for them and will continue to poo poo out peppers for as long as you let them. So unless you want that all you can do is prune or cull. But it also means you always have peppers. Also is that eggplant on the left there? The plant on the left is an actual bell pepper plant which stayed pretty low until the other two plants started taking over the whole enclosure so it started to stretch to stay in the light. It also paused making peppers, probably because it wasn't getting enough yummy photons. It is back to blooming now. I might just remove the two spicy pepper plants and prune the bell pepper then do my mods. I am going to move the reservoir and stand outside the tent and just cut two holes for the ebb and flow to come and go. That will give me another 18" of vertical tent space. It has been a fun little project. The light was kind of expensive to build ($70 for LEDs, $55 power supply, $30 heatsinks, $20 misc parts) but everything else is fairly cheap (no more than normal gardening costs). It consumes just under 2kWh/day which would be around 20 cents but I have a surplus of solar power currently so runs about half that. Seems funny to put solar panels on the roof -> DC boost optimizer -> DC/AC inverter to 120V -> LED power supply to 60VDC -> artificial indoor sunlight. The whole hydroponic system is just fascinating to me though. I love to tinker so I can see endless projects messing with it. I had an idea to build a multichannel light controller with dimming and pluggable sensors like temperature, humidity, some sort of light meter (PAR or even possibly webcam-based spectrometry), etc. Of course I'd need to build a dosing machine for automatically adding nutrients too. Then I realized that light timers were like $8 and checking nutrient levels every few days wouldn't require a hundred hours of design.
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May 7, 2017 13:42
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That's the thing a lot of people don't realise about a lot of veggies and fruits. They came from tropical regions and are perennials who just happen to not be frost tolerant. So when fall rolls by and frosts the area they just accept their plants dying as annuals and doing the whole thing next year. But tomatoes and peppers are actually long living perennials that love the heat and sun and will be happy to continue making GBS threads out produce as long as they're given the ability to do so. Still you can always (if it's not too much of a pain) move some of them outdoors now and let the sun do it's thing.
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May 7, 2017 14:36
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Stretch, congratulations on all your success! You should write a book about starting a household hydroponics farm cause I'd totally buy it. most of the resources I've come across are really skimpy with details about the process, especially the very beginning, but just based on your posts in this thread I don't think that'd be the case with you. If you have any recommendations for cheap LEDs that work, I'd be very happy to hear them
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May 10, 2017 13:48
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indigi posted:Stretch, congratulations on all your success! You should write a book about starting a household hydroponics farm cause I'd totally buy it. most of the resources I've come across are really skimpy with details about the process, especially the very beginning, but just based on your posts in this thread I don't think that'd be the case with you. Honestly I would love to just teach people this stuff if I thought I could make a living doing it. I just enjoy growing things and find the whole process really fascinating. Makes selling flowers easier though. As for LED grow lights, This is basically what I use. 300W LED though this model is an actual Mars Hydro light where as mine is a knock off. Regardless, they work fine for everything I've grown so far and are basically plug and play. To make life easier for you I suggest getting a cheap power timer to go with it from a hardware store.
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May 13, 2017 21:02
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+1 interested person for your book Marx, just came across his thread and it's fascinating. I must say I find your ideas inspiring. Would you be willing to do a q&a on Skype to give some absolute newb tips?
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Jul 28, 2017 06:28
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I'd like to know more about how to build the water and planting rigs for these setups. Like detailed instructions. I live in an apartment and at one time I harbored ambitions of growing a full herb garden with some peppers and San Marzano tomatoes in a hydroponic rig, but I had no idea how to build one. I got a MiracleGro AeroGarden years ago that I tried to plant Carolina reaper peppers in. The plants got to be pretty big and produced a lot of flowers, but never bore fruit. I thought about planting more but never did.
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Jul 28, 2017 22:27
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I want to get into hydroponics. First stop: the garden centre, right? I went and asked them for stuff like rockwool, grow lights, and got strange looks in return (it made me feel dirty, like I was some really dumb criminal trying to grow weed in his house). I then went to a dedicated hydroponics shop, but I'd been wanting to avoid going there, cause it's got a stigma due to grow-ops and cannabis etc. I spotted a couple weed leaf symbols in the shop as well, which was a bit weird. I got a 65W light, an 80L plastic container that I'll spraypaint black, some seeds and a tonne of rockwool. They gave me nutrients I'm supposed to give to little seedlings, and said if it all goes well, to pop back to their store and buy a liquid solution of the stuff I'm meant to pour into the plastic container. I'm excited and can't wait to get started. I would start right now, but I need to buy wood to build a makeshift cradle for my light to hang over the box. I was gonna make it out of plumbing, but plumbing parts (t-junctions, right angle turns) are really expensive. I bought two types of lettuce, green chilis, tomatoes and radishes. The guys at the hydroshop said it's possible to grow tomatoes, I just gotta keep cutting it back, because I found it hard to believe I'd be able to grow a full-size tomato plant. What other veggies can I grow in my office? I'm gonna try cloning some coriander I bought already matured. Edit: I wish this thread was more active. I'm bubbling with questions. The only forums I can find relating to hydroponics have to do with growing weed. Qubee fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Aug 11, 2017 |
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Aug 10, 2017 13:48
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Ah... well, good luck! Few questions, - What kind of light is it? The purple LED ones are effective but very very ugly in my opinion, which can affect where you place your setup. - What are the dimensions of your growing area? Want to be sure you have plenty of room for everything You can buy these light hangers that might make it easier for you in that department. You might also want to get a timer for the lights. An oscillating fan is good to have as well. Not sure if you will have to worry about PH or not depending on which nutrients you are using, but if you do, you will have to.
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Aug 15, 2017 15:42
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