wall mounted herb garden idea

Hi folks, I would of posted this in the hydro forum, but don't have permission for some reason.

Anyways I'm developing some vertical grower for a project @ Uni (growing edible herbs and air cleansing plants).

One of the themes of the project is the use of recycled materials, the pots themselves will be made from upside down wine bottles with the bottoms cut off, and are then attached to a board a bit like this photo

except it will have a reservoir at the bottom with a pump to top row of bottles, which will hopefully trickle back down into the reservoir, in the same way a window farm would.

I'm thinking of using rock wool in net pots, then embedded in some sort of substrate (the bottles will be painted on the inside to avoid photosynthesis of the roots.

One idea I had was to use broken up corks as an alternative to clay pellets (moneys really tight, plus it would fit with the theme of recycled materials) does anyone think this will work, or would the top bottles absorb all of the water robbing the lower plants of their fair share.

If this is the case, would penlight work better (I have a sack of this kicking around so...)

thanks for reading, peace d

Bump bump!

its all good and will work fine , certain considerations will need to be met.

...such as?

would work great for herbs. But if you wanted to grow marijuana in it you would need bigger areas for the roots.

Seems reasonable for small plants. Would be fun to line the walls of my grow room like that. Still enough light to grow small stuff I'd guess. Even if all I got was popcorn and sugar leaves, thats still free hash where there once was unused space. Oh, and I'd paint the outside of the bottle to ensure there's no leeching.

Although, I have one question. Why not use shelves? Then you could stack them a couple deep, just drill holes for stability. Also makes maintenance easier, since you don't need to loosen a ton of straps. Oh, and another option for a cheap medium would be gravel. That's assuming you know of a location that you can find some. Every so often I see people get rid of extra gravel from cement mixing, landscaping, etc. in the classifieds.

Wicked thanks for the responses folks.

I kind of was toying with the idea of using them for ganja after I get my mark back, I was wondering if lowryders might cope with that space, if not roughly h0w big would the bottles have to be?

Im planning to paint the insides rather than the outside of the bottles as this looks nicer, although I do have concerns about the effect of the paint breaking down over time.

I had thought about shelves, kind of felt the simplicity of the clips would look better, however in reflection I think you might be right.

I started making the frame for the 1st prototype today, its fucking massive!
If anyones interested, I'll post the finished hangings on here, maybe with an aim to modify them into vertical dope growers

cheers guys