25th of February. Seedlings. In my last post I started growing hydroponic indoors cherry tomatoes. This is the second of a series on this journey. I am using a General Hydroponics WaterFarm just like the one in this picture. It moves up the water with an air pump, using a clever system that pushes up [...]
I am doing a little project of growing tomatoes indoors, using Nanny as my teacher. I started about 2 months ago and have been writing about it. Now that I have several of these posts ready, I will be publishing them, so you can have a sort of “step motion” fast view of the project. [...]
We have been to Boston! We went to show Nanny and to learn. We did plenty of both, but also had time to meet the guy who runs Corner Stalk. First quality greens We bumped into his hydroponic lettuces in the Boston Public Market. Shawn and his wife Connie Cooney are entrepreneurs. In 2013 they [...]
In our last post we talked about controlling pest bugs using other bugs. Here you are a small collection of some of these killers, loved by all growers. We have chosen generalist predators, that will attack a variety of pests for you. Think of them as your little soldiers. Ladybird beetles There are thousands [...]
The indiscriminate use of pesticides is bad for the environment, bad for the final customer and bad for the farmer. They are so harmful that you should avoid them unless it is the only and last option. Moreover, it is not sustainable, because its continued use induces mechanisms of resistance in pathogens. This means that [...]
As promised, here it is the second part on how to grow healthy plants. The first step to have a healthy culture is prevention; you should start before planting. Clean and disinfect substrate, pots, pipes and growing chamber. Be thorough, especially if you had any disease in your previous crop. In this case I would [...]
For a disease to develop, three conditions need to happen: There is a host plant susceptible to the disease. The pathogen which causes the disease is present. Environmental conditions are favorable to the development of the disease. This is called the disease triangle. We may act on all three sides of it to keep our [...]
Three weeks ago we started beta testing Nanny. Almost every pure digital startup launches products while still in beta. That isn't advisable for a hardware company because when things fail you cannot simply release a new version as you would do with a web site. You want everything to work as a charm before selling the [...]
Have you ever thought about how much water has been used to make your shoes or the clothes you are wearing? How much to produce the food you eat? How much of this water have been polluted in these processes? You should know about the “water footprint”. We live in a world where water wars [...]
This is a technical post for those who want to optimize irrigation of their hydroponic installation. We will use the concept of Readily Available Water or RAW. RAW means the volume of water that a substrate holds, that is easily taken by the plant. It depends on the substrate characteristics and the pot size: Substrate [...]
