Close-ups of plants after 1 month of growing

Well it's nearly a month now, and I was hoping to have cucumbers on the plants and tomatoes - but of course part of the problem is that it's heating up- it's about 35 degrees during the day now and about 25-26 at night (celcius). No signs of flowering on the cucumber or beans and the tomatoes are quite small still.

Growth slow

Well, things are not growing as fast as I'd like them to. However, there is progress - the beans seem happy and the cucumbers are growing massive leaves. We will see if they ever bloom!

Trellises

I installed a few hanging ropes to help the plants grow up, that was missing. Yesterday I visited a farm in Aurov
ille that has started using Hydroponics for tomato cultivation - very interesting. He uses the normal method of two solutions that mix into a 100 liter barrel which he then drip irragates into his hydroponic containers. The containers are actually bags of coconut fiber that he punches holes into and plants the seedlings in. There is a drainage hole at the side of each bag. Water is fed in to the bag through a dripper several times a day.

Slowly Growing...

Here are a couple more pictures of the progress. Apparently beans normally flowers after 30 days, so we have about 10 days before we should see some flowers or figure out that the aquaponics system is missing some crucial elements.

Freshwater Test Kit Results

Now after nearly two weeks if waiting I received my freshwater aquarium test kit... It tests for pH, nitrate, nitrite and ammonia levels. The results so far are:
Ammonia : 0-0.1 ppm
Nitrite: 0 ppm
Nitrate: 0-3 ppm
pH: 7.6

This is the water that has been sitting in my ant channel that circulates around the house. The water is clear and has plenty of fish in it, it's developed its own ecosystem. I wonder if the nitrate levels are too low for the plants?

Here are some pics of the plants as they look today.

Seedling Still Growing

This post is just to show the latest pictures, after 3 days of growing. I was out of town and left the system on. When I got back the water was not flowing for some reason, probably an air bubble in the pipe. I would probably need to reposition the pipe (inlet) so no air bubbles form. The beans are really going for it, and the lettuce is starting to take shape slowly.

Seedlings Growing and a New Control System

Yesterday I completed the new aquaponics control system - basically the same as the old one but just in a nice enclosure. I'm planning to add two leds which will indicate whether water is flowing in or flowing out of the tank. This can easily be done with the analog input that I have from the float meter pot.
The bean is really taking off and the cucumbers seem to have settled in. Not having any prior growing experience, I was wondering how long it would take. It's now less than two weeks since we planted the bean seed, and it is already about 1 foot high. The lettuce is sprouting its second leaves and I have transplanted some of it from the sand to the gravel.
I think the gravel is too big and so the plants dont really manage to get a good roothold.

Aquaponics Update

Here are pictures of seedlings that were planted, 10 days later.
The water is now cycling from a fish channel that runs around the house. The pump switches on every 2.5 hours or so,and fills up about 150 liters into a barrel on the roof which then drips down back through the channels into the fish tank.

Getting Started

I'm not a farmer. Never even really interested me. What does interest me is conserving our environment, reducing the amount of energy/water we require to live a comfortable life. So far my experiments/interests have been primarily in energy (electricity) and electric vehicles. However, one post on KeelyNet about portable farms using aquaponics got my attention and then somehow lodged itself at the back of my head. On March 5, 2009 we (monica and I) went to visit a farm in Auroville, south India. After a tour of the farm, which uses sprinklers throughout, we were shown the 'hydroponics' experiment that they had been doing. Gino (the guy working there) explained to us that using this technique you would use less water and grow more in the same space. We had an empty bird cage at the entrance to our house and somehow this got us motivated. So the next morning we drove into the city and bought a whole bunch of stuff.
I won't go into depth about hydroponics here since all the info is any on the web, but what we wanted to do was to use the NFT (nutrient film technique) to circulate water through a system of channels.

Here are some pictures that will show you how we built the system.


4" Pipes ready to be cut


The bird cage, and two 200 liter barrels


The pump (0.5 HP) that will circulate the water


Top view of the barrel with float in it


The tank with float level Pipe from roof Barrel on the roof


4 drips, using adjustable flow rates for each channel


Outlet to collect water and cycle it back


How it works

The water sits in two barrels. When the lower barrel is full, it switches on the pump and the water is moved to the top barrel. Using gravity, it runs down the pipe and drips out of the drips into each channel. This has the effect that water is oxygenated and is constantly running. The water collects at the end of the channel and runs back into the lower barrel. The lower end of the channels needs to be higher than the top of the collection or 'sump' barrel.

I developed a small electronic controller and used a standard float ball to take care of the pump's cycling. If anyone is interested I can post the schematics. Going to make a PCB for this too but still did not get around to it.
The basic idea is that a pot (5k) is connected to the float and the analog value tells me the water level, it's pretty precise. I have a small microcontroller (16F676) and two buttons to set the max and min levels. Then a small relay that switches on or off.