Monday, October 27, 2014

Update

On this update I am going to write how my plants are doing as well as list some of the issues I am encountering and how I could prevent them.


This is a picture of one of my lettuce plants new leaves coming in. Some of the leaves edges and or have a scorched look to them. I was doing some research and I believe I have found what is wrong. Lettuce plants have a sensitivity to nitrogen. The reason they are getting too much nitrogen is because I am giving them too much nutrients. I have been giving them about 850-900 ppm because the peas and peppers need that much.According to this webpage http://www.tomorrowsgarden.net/node/11 lettuce should be getting in-between 560-840 ppm. When I was selecting what vegetables to grow I didn't realize that they have so different of nutrient needs. The other big lettuce plant is doing pretty good though.
These spots on the edge of the leaves I think are also an effect of too many nutrients.



I also read in a book that for the plants with smaller seeds you can just plant them in some wet hydroton that you keep moist. I tried it and it worked really good. I initially had been starting them in plant starter grow blocks but it was really hard to transplant and then the stem kind of drooped over for a while like in the picture below.




One of the problems I had with my actual system was how I placed the water line tubing. I placed attached it to the end of the PVC pipe by a hole in the cap like in the picture above. The problem with this is that sometimes when the water is shooting out really fas it can start to leak though the net cup that the first plant is planted in.I fixed it by cutting out a piece of a plastic cup and hot glueing it to the inside top of the pipe, that way it will hit the piece of plastic and go straight to the bottom of the pipe.It is working really good.If I made my system again I would drill the hole in the top of the pipe cap so that it would just hit the bottom in the first place.The picture below shows the piece of plastic I glued on the inside.
Other then those issues everything else seems to be doing really well. Here are some pictures I took today.









4 comments:

  1. Great post William! Very informative. Glad you are learning something from this.

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  2. Hi William,
    This is awesome. Many years back, for my first science fair, I did a hydroponics project. It was a cool project. I grew some controls in soil and charted the growth differences. A few years later, I had an after school internship at the Pittsburgh Water Treatment plant studying Legionella. They were both great learning experiences. Have fun with this.
    Santina

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