jumping right into soilless growing - $1000 budget - DIY flexible design / experiment

So I'm new here; my only other post is in the intro section. I don't grow pot - in Florida, it'd get me fucked pretty hardcore in no time flat - but pot growers are hands down the most efficient farmers I've found in my googling. I'm trying to grow all the produce I used to grow in a big garden - except I'm in a condo with a small balcony, seven windows, and as much space for artificial lit grow chambers as I can afford to build and light. In my former life, I was a science major, so I'm trying to be quasi-scientific about it all. I'm hoping that my experiments and designs will be helpful to you all - I am awfully grateful to all the time and effort you've put into helping others learn how to have great yields in small spaces. NASA would be better off hiring a few of y'all than the folks they've paid in the past!

Anyway, I want to make a completely versatile system from the ground up. I want it to be easily expandable to fit a small closet or a whole living room wall, provide supplemental lighting if it's in a window or 100% of the lighting in an unlit space, I want it to work with a few different nutrient delivery methods based on what works best for different crops... I also want it to be incredibly simple - I want to be able to buy as many of the components as locally, and I'd rather have to spend a little time DIYing them into useful stuff than paying for someone else to do it.

A side-project of mine: I'm going to learn how to make LED arrays. I'm giving myself $1000 there, too, but I'm not yet sure if I'm going to do it. It just depends on the numbers, and I've been concentrating on the parts of the system that already exist =P


SO: after four paragraphs of background... The first step in my project is to wrap my head around seed germination in soilless culture. I think I'm ok narrowing that down to three main variables - medium, nutrients, and method. To start, because I'm not really sure what to expect from hydroponics, I'm content to have to add moisture by hand. Once I've narrowed down the best/easiest options, I'll design a system around them. That also means I'm not touching aero of any sort yet - but maybe next week!

Anyway, at this point, I'm mostly looking at rockwool and coir for my mediums. I have the grodan AOK 1.5" plugs, the grodan 1.5"x1.5" blocks, and the grodan .25" grow cubes. I bought the 5kg of GH cocotek coir, and picked up a bad of the rapid rooter plugs because I've seen them recommended as well. Are there any other mediums you would recommend I look into? I have a list of other ideas a mile long for when I start playing with aero, but unless you guys have any suggestions, I'll be using those when I start the first batch on Wednesday.

As for nutrients, I've heard a lot of conflicting info, so I'm just going to try a lot of things. Some people say you should just use water, so my tap water (pH adjusted) will be the control. I also purchased the Canna line of nutrients, and will be trying the Canna Start. I'd like to try heavily diluting a couple of cheap fertilizers available at the home depot - I'm currently looking at the BGI Grow and Gain All Purpose Liquid Fertilizer, and maybe the Miracle Gro Quick Start Transplant solution. I will eventually be mixing my own - I'm that kind of anal, I guess - but in the meantime I'd like to find out if you can get close using cheap concentrated stuff available locally. What inexpensive nutrient solutions would you recommend I try out? The Canna line is definitely the only 'expensive' line I'm willing to buy. I have heard about Dynagro (one part systems appeal to me) and many others, but am up in the air as to what I should try. Remember that for me to put it in the Wednesday experiment, I have to be able to buy it locally tomorrow. Oh, I found this rooting hormone / vitamin solution called Superthrive - it's been discussed here - that is clearly either bogus or miracle juice. I'll be doing a set of experiments this week to see if I can see any differences between plain solution and solution with Superthrive.

I have about twenty more pages left to write, but that can wait until I actually have some seeds started! Any answers, advice, or experiment requests (if it's cheap and locally available, I might be willing to give it a try) are greatly appreciated! Wish me luck!


PS - if you guys know what vegetable crop seeds are most similar to pot, or if they make hemp seeds that are legal for me to grow, I'd be happy to add those in to all of my experiments, to make sure my designs work well for you guys as well =)




Back when I had a garden, I used peat pots filled with seed starting mix or the expandable peat plugs. I'd keep them warm in a tray with a dome till they were well sprouted, I'd remove the dome, and eventually I'd choose the strongest of each to plant outside.

Welcome to the board, I'll give a couple things a shot here...First, and especially because you're interested in making your own nutrients, http://www.usu.edu/cpl/research_hydroponics3.htm will answer a lot of your questions.

As far as LED's go, this is one of the better forums around as far as knowledge. There's a few threads and a couple grow journals all about LED pricing, performance, DIY projects, and the likes. Definitely a good starting point for your own projects, I'm interested in using LEDs at some point because the science is definitely there, but I'm only reading and learning(and saving) for now.

Medium is going to depend on your method. I germ in a 1.5"x1.5" rockwool cube for my hydro plants, direct in soil for (duh)soil plants and for coco I would do the same. I used rapid rooters successfully for seeds, but never had any luck with clones. If you wanted to grow using netpots and hydroton, sure-to-grow or lava rocks, you could pre-germinate and plant directly into that, either hand-watering or using a drip-feed to establish. That opens you up to dwc(and any modified version ie undercurrent/waterfarm), aero, nft. As far as expanding goes, they're all going to bring you similar requirements and issues. You can just add buckets or longer pipes to make them bigger, and they can all be built mostly with local supplies. Keep in mind that to grow different things you may want multiple systems depending on their ph/nutrient requirements, growth patterns, etc. I, and plenty of others here, would gladly help you design a system but as the options are so varied and based on preference, I feel like I'm just listing them instead of recommending one. So that part's really up to you. I'd check out some of the journals to see how people do with their systems, its time-consuming but a great way to learn about different methods and their respective advantages and disadvantages. Rate of growth, yield, ease of use, investment, maintenance, risk/safety(power outage, flood,etc), power consumption, temperature control, etc all come into play.

Nutrients, I'm going to recommend Dyna-gro for several reasons. They're not any cheaper up front, but they're stronger than other nutrient lines and last longer, working out to be one of the cheapest out there. They have the best ph stability of the nutrients I've tried(including GH, AN, and Foxfarm). They have REAL justification for every product and it's recommended application, unlike many companies that focus more on marketing multiple redundant products at you than r&d. And though I'm sure its largely user error, I've seen improvement of less-than-optimal plants by switching them to DG from those mentioned above. I do see people getting good results with just about every nutrient line out there though, and canna is one of them. I stopped looking, at least temporarily, after finding DG for hydro, FF for soil.

I use superthrive for transplanting, cloning, and about twice throughout the vegetative period. I can't say that it does anything substantial as I haven't done side-by-sides or anything, but several university studies have been done on its effects and it all seems to support its proper use, obviously an unknown for our application. Generally not recommended during the flowering/fruiting though as it interferes with the plants biomechanisms somehow and can slow and/or diminish production. Not sure of the validity or severity though.

You mentioned using tap water, do you have a water analysis to check out? You'll want to make sure its ok to use, mine isn't. ~.5-6 EC and 7.5-8.5 pH, tons of chlorine and magnesium, so I use a RO filter and add cal/mag back in.

And tomatoes are the closest thing you can get I believe, several peppers are pretty similar too.

Good luck!

Don't let the lack of interest get ya down. I'll be watching this one. Sounds like you are already familiar with many of the aspects of growing/building. I'd say pick a method or two & go for it. Two things I've noticed around here: It can be difficult to draw a crowd with the mention of veggies, but if you build it they will come. Brings me to my second observation. There are a plethora of folks with "big plans" and not alot of follow through. You've just gotta show em that you mean business.

I can attest to the rock solid PH, cleanlines and overall ease of use of Dyna-Gro. I recently switched from H&G Aqua Flakes and I'm sold. I'll likely be using this until I decide to get a hair up my ass to make my own, but it'll prob be awhile. Good luck!

Thanks guys! On you guys' suggestion - I've heard it recommended a LOT of places - I went ahead and ordered some Dyna-Gro. I also decided I absolutely can't trust my water quality report, as my water is a LOT more basic than they say it should be. Perhaps I'm doing the pH testing wrong? It's been a long time since I was in a real lab, but I can't imagine screwing that up. Regardless, I decided I don't want to start anything I keep a real log of until I have a pH meter and a EC/TDS meter. I wanted to have foggers for one part of the experiment, too, so I'm just going to put off the initial big germination for next week. I know medium will change based on my methods - I'm planning for some sort of passive system, some sort of ebb and flow, some sort of bubbleponics/DWC setup, and a few (yet undecided) fake aero / NFT / continuous flow / drip designs - plus some ideas I have that incorporate true aero. That's part why I'm starting with germination, because I've been trying to collect components that cheaply allow me to do ALL of that with a basic set of components with a minimum number of parts to change out.

No worries as to the limited response so far - I'm actually only posting it all here in lieu of setting up a website, because between work and spending every waking moment on this, I don't have time =P I'm fairly certain you guys are going to help me come up with something awesome soon enough. I just have to - as you say - prove I mean business.

Anyway, like I said, I realized I really am not ready to start the first big logged experiment, and have to put off till I have some more stuff. I think I was just getting antsy to get something growing, though, so I did a tiny experiment. I deliberately didn't make it very scientific or exact, it was just to keep me from going off half cocked.

So, my very first soilless mini experiment:

for liquid, I used tap water, tap water with superthrive, and canna start with superthrive. I planted seven different kinds of vegetables - a bean, a cucumber, a sweet pepper, a determinate tomato, a genovese basil, a spinach, and a radish.

The mediums I played with were:

rockwool 1.5" blocks - the kind with the tyvek wrap around them
rockwool 1.5" AOK plugs - the kind that come 96 to a sheet
rockwool .25" grow cubes - supposedly their driest product
rapid rooter plugs
cocotek coir - the kind that comes in the 5kg pail, with some fiber and a good bit of pretty fine stuff - I used scrubbie pads (think cheap scotchbright) to keep the coir from falling through the holes in the trays.

I used three different 1020 trays with drainage holes, one for each 'solution.' I will discuss my impressions of these after this first initial experience - I didn't really have any concept of how to pH flush the rockwool, or how to drain it before sowing, or how shallow I could make it... the coir was easier, I could treat it kind of like soil... I'm sure I did things that were less than optimal - on top of not being sure of my water quality. Plus, I'm using 2010 seeds that were kept in the trunk of my boyfriend's car from february to june - that's awfully hot in florida.

regardless of all that, it's now been 48 hours since I set them outside Monday evening. It's about 70 degrees at night here, about 90-95 during the day.

I HAVE SPROUTS! It appears that something - I think radish, but it might be spinach - my rows were close together and I won't know for sure until they all sprout - REALLY likes being planted in coir moistened with canna start and superthrive. The whole row was sprouted when I woke up this morning, about 36 hours after planting. Lots of other things are poking out here and there, and the soil is popping up over the bean seeds so I figure I'll see them soon! I'm not sure any of these will survive - they will probably be testers to see if any of my windows or my balcony gives any of these kinds of crops enough light to thrive through veg. that reminds me, I need to find some sort of cheap light meter. I don't care what it's measured in, I'm good at math and am addicted to excel, so I can do whatever conversion is necessary to get it into quantum or radiometric units.

On that note, can anyone point me towards RECENT threads discussing the cheapest ways to monitor hydroponic conditions? I'd like the system to be able to get by with just a pH monitor, thermometer, and a baseline water quality reading... but for MY experiments, I know I'm going to need at least the pH meter, the EC/TDS meter, and a light meter. If I weren't working on such a tight budget at the moment, I can think of a dozen other things I'd like to monitor. I'll have a whole post later, when (yes, I'm full of 'big ideas') I do some research on how much sensor chips are and whether I can work them into the LED arrays.


Seriously, I have nothing but time and a personal deadline of having units ready to donate to school systems by labor day. Yes, that's probably unreasonable - but those are my favorite kind of deadlines. I'm a planner, and every once in a while a project pops up that completely absorbs every bit of my brain - this is hands down the biggest, coolest, most educational, and probably the most important project I've ever undertaken. Seriously, when you're talking about applying the level of soilless production efficiency you guys have achieved to low-light requirement crops, plus the added efficiency of a well designed synergistic system, you're talking about MASSIVE possibilities for local food production in places that don't have the soil or water to support their populations.

yeah, sorry, got off on a tangent - but I really do think you guys ARE this decade's cutting edge of what will be a complete game changer for agriculture in the future. I'm just hoping there's a way I can toss in my talents to make it easy, affordable both initially and long term, plus designed for the kind of experimentation we're going to need to optimize systems for each individual crop. I should also say I'd like to find a way to make it pay my bills next year, I hate my job =P

edit: PS - mike, i reread that second post, and I think the second time around I realized something - you managed to put into one paragraph most of the goals of my project. I know different crops (even different cultivars/strains!) will have different optimum systems and variables - not to mention the other variables that individual growers might have to work with... My plan is to design a base system that can cheaply and easily be set up to match the exact 'needs' for each specific grow. At this point in the agricultural academic research scene, they're doing cool research and playing with it all - but it's all expensive rigorous systems designed to compare specific changes. If I/we can come up with a way where it's cheap and easy to have four side by side grows with almost everything the same but any! deliberately changed component, we can get everyone in on the experimentation. The more flexibility I can stuff into every piece of the design, the more versatile (and valuable) the whole system gets. Normally, this would get pricy, but if you've got a mind for puzzle pieces (most DIYers do) you can find cross purposed components, or even simplify portions of the basic system, and end up with a system capable of testing out anything you want - and repeating it in scale once you've found the 'best' setting for the particular situation.

I've got it in my head, looking at what I've got so far, that I should be able to design and produce a very flexible system capable of matching the productivity of the high end systems, at a cost much closer to the solid middle of the line solutions. If I'm right, I should be able to get the DIY cost for someone who puts no value on labor down to an insanely low figure. I've already got a few uber-cheap things to test that I am hoping work as well as I've imagined!