Road Trip 2011: CA or bust - Weekly Update

Good news everyone..... 

Well, I have a taker for the first two legs of the journey. Mr. Iacopelli is going to join me from Jacksonville to Austin, with an overnight stop in New Orleans.  His application was selected for two reasons.  One he submitted it!  Two, his answer to the questions.

From where to where do you want to go? His answer: College towns and roadside strip clubs.
In 50 words or less, what makes you awesome? His answer: Andrew. Iacopelli.

We are tentatively leaving on the 15th of January.  Plan on arriving in New Orleans that evening, and leaving New Orleans when I can legally drive again.  Date TBD.  From NO to Austin is about 8 hours.

So the legs from Austin to Oakland are still open.

Also, if you live on the way and want me to stop by and say hi, let me know.

Counting down to the big move

Well folks, it seems like the big move in imminent.  Went through and ran a rough budget last night and I should be leaving Florida between January 10th to 15th.  Currently I plan to take 3.5 days to complete the journey from Fernandina to Oakland, stopping around Houston, Phoenix, maybe Vegas, then Oakland.

Now, if anyone is interested in joining me for a leg of the trip, I can extend the trip to hit points of interest and such.  You may apply by clicking on the following link:

Road Trip Application

Please allow up to two weeks for review and confirmation. Applications must be submitted by January 5th, 2011.

And remember folks, gas cards make awesome Christmas presents! 

Sure to Grow trial - Initial Post

Sure to Grow plug

SURE TO GROW

Today I received 24 Sure to Grow Clipper 2" media plugs.  The idea is that these are the perfect size for putting into my Deep Water Culture lettuce and herb system.  The plugs are made out of the same material that is used for batting/stuffing in pillows and sleeping bags.  It is very loose and squishy, supposedly making it great to maintain a perfect air/solution ratio.  We shall see.

 The back two rows in the above picture are my six week old bib lettuces.  They have been through hell and yet continue to press on.  Here is the list of things that I have done to these poor plants:

• Used water of horrible quality. High in iron, salts, and carbonates.  That is why they took so long to grow in the first place (see below).
• When I transplanted them into the DWC system above, I was still using the bad water and they developed a root fungus which nearly wiped them out. Out of the original 22 I was only able to save 11. However, now that they are in good water they are thriving, at six weeks they are where they should have been at two weeks.
• Too hot of temperatures.  When I first started around Halloween, the temperatures were in the mid 90s for awhile and the poor little guys didn't like that at all, especially combined with the bad water.

So hopefully this new batch will be able to do much better and actually produce a crop in 5 to 7 weeks like they are suppose to.  This is good news because I am suppose to be leaving Florida in 5 weeks. I doubt that they would survive the trip across country, not that I would attempt it!

10/29/10 - Bib Lettuce 5 days old

11/17/10 -Bib Lettuce 3 weeks old

11/21/10 - Bib Lettuce 4 weeks old 

12/6/10 - Bib Lettuce 6 weeks old

As you can see, the lettuce hasn't done so well.  Hopefully that is all behind me now!

Broccoli!!

The broccoli has been growing like a weed in summer since changing the water to distilled water.  Check out these pictures.  The broccoli seems to do really well in a NFT system. 

Broccoli - 11/17/2010

Broccoli 11/21/10

Broccoli Roots - 11/21/10

Broccoli - 12/6/10

Broccoli 12/11/10

Broccoli Roots - 12/11/10

How to start your own Hydroponic hobby

I undertook this hydroponic project for a few reasons.  First and foremost I like growing things but I am exceedingly lazy and hate getting dirty.  Two, Florida has a ridiculous amount of diseases, bugs, and critters whose sole purpose in life is to destroy your crops. Three, I figured it would be fun to do and allowed me to placate my need to be creative and to build things.  The whole thing was from the get go a learning experience.  I knew I was going to make mistakes, and I honestly didn't expect anything to survive.  I was half right!

I started with a Jiffy Greenhouse I have lost nearly all of my lettuce through a variety of problems and diseases.  It turns out that our well water is very high in iron and carbonates which forces out other nutrients from the hydroponic solution.  This results in slow growing, sickly plants that are prone to disease.

Jiffy Greenhouse

On the other hand, my broccoli has done quite well.  It is very hardy and while it didn't do much at first, it did keep living and now that I have everything dialed in it is blowing up!

I did read everything I could about hydroponics, but I learn best by doing, so that is what I have done.  For anyone that is interested, hydroponics is really easy and cheap to set up, I just went big.  So here is the how to based on what I have learned thus far:

6 Easy Steps to starting your hydroponic hobby

1. Start Simple! Do not start with a complicated and expensive NFT or Aeroponics system.  The more complicated it is, the more things that can go wrong. Learn the basics with a cheap and easy to build DIY setup, there are tons of plans and ideas online that use plastic totes and can be done for less than $50. Plans for a simple starter system. Use a tote instead of an aquarium.
2. Buy Local, buy only what you need. Buy the correct nutrients for what you are actually doing, not what you hope to do in the future. If you have a hydroponics shop in town buy from them and make friends with them.  Don't be cheap and buy online (I always went local), these people are a huge source of info when everything goes to hell.
3. Use Distilled Water. Do not use tap water or well water.  For your first system get distilled water - Walmart for $0.88 a gallon.  Well worth having a pure and sterile water source and not having to deal with all the issues I have had to.
4. Get the correct measurement tools. You don't need to go out and buy the greatest Conductivity and pH meters in the world, but you do need a way of checking your nutrient solution quality.  A pet shop with aquarium supplies will sell pH test kits for around $5-$10 that test down to 6.0 pH.  If you change your water weekly or every two weeks, you can get buy without a conductivity meter for awhile, but you will eventually want to get one.  Makes life much easier.  No matter what you do, check the water if not daily, at least twice a week for pH. 
5. Don't get crazy with your plants. Go to your local garden center and pick up something that you would be interested in growing, but is very simple. Lettuces and herbs are easy, amazingly hardy, and fast growing.  They don't take up a lot of space so you can grow them fairly dense. 
6. Have fun!

Further Reading

Maximum Yield - Indoor Gardening
Urban Garden Magazine | Hydroponic Systems
UrbanFarmOnline.com - Sustainable city living at your fingertips
Rosebud Magazine Hydroponics Lifestyle Growing And Entertainment!
The Growing Edge — Sustainable garden news, media, links and commentary for growers that are growing on the cutting edge.
The Hydroponics Blog

Updates on what I have been doing - not a lot.

Dry Wall
Over the past couple of months I have been slowly working on my Aunt and Uncle's place doing some drywall work and some other general handyman stuff.  For the most part it has turned out pretty well, even though I am no Michaelangelo when it comes to drywall repair, it is passable.


Word of warning though, if anyone ever asks if you can do drywall just say no! I had white snot for days after sanding the tape and mud.  Not fun. Luckily I am almost done.  But they are my Aunt and Uncle and I would do anything for them, even drywall.  To the right you can see a picture of the work 90% complete, just some sanding and filling left.


Hydroponics Update


It has been a few weeks now and I have learned tons about how to grow things hydroponically.  Well more like how not to grow things hydroponically.  Turns out that the system I built from my limited knowledge and no experience is more of an advanced system and prone to issue if you don't know what you are doing (who knew?) But regardless, this whole thing was designed to be a small scale learning experience and in that mission the project is a great success.

The results so far:
Strawberries - out of 10 only one survives.  It appears to be doing well and is growing new roots.  Hopefully I can get this one to flower.

Broccoli - These are the real winners! Three of the plants are flourishing and growing a great set of roots.

Lettuce - They are still going, although not growing as fast as they should.  However, I planted something like 40 in the hopes that a few would survive and so far most are still growing.






Here are two of the larger lettuces and the one on top of the channel is a basil cutting from the soil garden.

Pythium - the evil fungus and what to do about it.

Well after much research it has been concluded that Pythium was the cause of my strawberry failure.  The factors that lead to this outbreak were:

• High nutrient water temperature.  I set up my system in the fall thinking that temps would start to decline, unfortunately shortly after planting the strawberries we had record high temperatures.  The nutrient water climbed into the high 70's.  Read More

• Transplanting established plants from soil. I did rinse most of the soil off, but I wasn't aware of the dangers of taking a plant from soil straight to the hydro system.  It is imperative that if you must use plants that were in soil, that you thoroughly clean the plant from ANY organic debris.  It is preferable that the plant is quarantined in fresh water and continually rinsed to make sure that all material is off.  Then soak the roots in a weak (the kind you buy in the store) Hydrogen Peroxide solution.  This will get rid of any remaining organic matter and remove any damaged parts of the plant. Read more

• Make sure the plants aren't stressed.  In my case I was overwatering the strawberries and stressed them in that way.  Stressed plants will succumb to pathogens more readily than healthy plants.  Make sure that the growing conditions are correct for the type of plant you are trying to grow. 

• Sterilize the nutrient water OR grow beneficial organisms.
• Beneficial Organisms.  There is a lot of conflicting research out there about how beneficial "good" bacteria and fungus are for hydroponic systems.  Some say they help increase the amount of nutrients a plant can uptake and fight off pathogens.  Others say that the nutrient water is already full of nutrients in plant friendly forms so there is no need for these organisms that are useful in soil horticulture.  I vote it can't hurt, even if the plant isn't getting any additional nutrient benefit from the microorganisms the protection granted could be worth it.  
• Sterilization of the nutrient water. There are two common ways to sterilize your nutrient water:
• UV.  There are a variety of inline UV sanitation systems out there designed for aquariums as well as hydroponics.  They range in price from $50 to $500 and are fairly effective against killing off most micro organisms.  However, they may not destroy all spores.  You can use UV with beneficial organisms, but must turn off the UV for a few days to allow the organisms to colonize the root systems of your plants.  Otherwise you will just kill them with the UV. 
• Ozone.  Ozone is the nuclear option.  It sterilizes the water, but if used incorrectly can cause health problems to the operator and damage the roots of plants.  You can not use beneficial bacteria or fungus with Ozone, it destroys everything the ozonated water touches. Also, ozone generators are costly.  This might be a good alternative in a large scale system, not great for the home hobbyist.

Basically, make sure your plants are healthy, monitor your plants everyday (TDS, pH, visual inspection of the roots and nutrient water) and most importantly, keep everything clean.  This is what I have learned thus far, hopefully round two will be more successful. 

Hydroponics - Oh no, Root Rot!

Well, my poor strawberry plants had a fungus of some sort and the roots were rotting.   I am still trying to figure out what caused it, but I have made some changes.  Turns out strawberries do not like "wet feet", ie they shouldn't be saturated.

Unfortunately I didn't know this when building the system, and set it up so that a trickle of nutrient water was constantly going over the roots. I had been using a modified NFT (Nutrient Film Technique) system.  In an NFT system the plant roots must reach the bottom of the channel so that the tips are immersed in the nutrient water.  However, if your roots are long enough to reach the bottom, then you can't use this system.

Under normal propagation you let the roots grow long enough before transplanting them into the NFT system. But since these plants were store bought in soil, many of them didn't have long enough root structures.  Thus I was encouraging the roots to grow by running water through the net pots and down the roots.  (see the previous post for more info).

I was able to save enough of the roots by soaking them in hydrogen peroxide (it eats away the fungus and dead root material) and rearrange them in the pots so that the roots make it down to the bottom of the channel where the water is. My first big failure and lesson learned.  Hopefully the plants will survive, they are in pretty sad shape right now, and our little cold snap isn't helping I am sure.

Sadly I panicked when I saw the condition of the roots and didn't stop to take any pictures.  Next time I will get pictures!