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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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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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I found the Ebb and Flow setup to be pretty easy to set up and not too expensive. The benefit over the Kratky Method is that the nutrient water always goes up to the same height so it works even if you're adding new plants every so often.
So 52 bucks total for the irrigation system and then some growstone media to grow in. I used 5x fabric pots and filled each individually, thinking I'd be able to just swap them in and out with new plants, but in practice that is pretty difficult to do because they are pretty packed in. Also, just get "by the foot" tubing and don't worry about it being clear. I spent extra bucks to get the opaque black vinyl stuff so I had to buy two rolls of $20 tubing. I tried to find a cheap 32"x32" ebb and flow flood tray to fill up my tent completely, but in practice the plants expand out into the open space so just a 26"x19" tub is plenty under my 2 LED lights. I did the work of reorganizing my little tent and moving the reservoir outside of the tent to leave more room for growing inside. I've removed those giant hot pepper plants from my setup and let the bell pepper plant have most of the space. Due to it having to really stretch out to find light under the canopy of the hot peppers, it was really scraggly so I just decided to whack it down to nothing and start again. May 25th:  The scale is hard to judge here but the tub everything is planted in is 7" tall so the plants are about 20" tall above ground. Currently:   I get about 6oz of red bell peppers per week, and rotate in a new lettuce plant every ~40 days. The buttercrunch lettuce visible is 45 days old and a paris island romaine should be sprouting any day now. I just put 2 seeds in a torn off piece of coffee filter about 1" square and stuff it into the grow media down below the waterline. CapnBry fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Aug 20, 2017 |
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Aug 20, 2017 17:00
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