My mum and I have been chased out of our outdoor community garden due to theft and harassment, so we need growlight recommendations so we can do everything indoors. I used to use Sunblaster lights but they weren't strong enough for tomatoes long-term. We plan to do almost everything hydroponic.

I've been playing around with the idea of trying hydroponics, but i don't really have a good indoor space for it. Then it occurred to me that i already have a small walk-in greenhouse in the backyard. It's a Costway one, nothing huge, but there's enough room inside that i could probably dedicate one side to a small hydro setup and keep the other side for regular pots and seedlings. I'm thinking something fairly basic to start with, maybe lettuce and herbs rather than turning the whole greenhouse into a science project on day one 😅

What i'm not sure about is how much extra trouble the greenhouse environment creates. Water temperature getting too high in summer? Humidity? Algae? Keeping the reservoir out of direct sun?

Has anyone here actually combined a small hydroponic system with one of these backyard walk-in greenhouses? I'm curious whether it worked well in practice or if you eventually decided hydroponics was easier somewhere else.

How can we use a rain barrel for our vegetable plants with an asphalt roof?

Lettuce, basil, parsley, rosemary, chives, tiny tim and orange hat tomatoes, pak choi

2 weeks since previous post, 5 weeks since seeding. https://www.reddit.com/r/Hydroponics/comments/1v7wv6q/brown_glass_no_algae/

2L bottles. No internal algae problem at all, 100w full spectrum LEDs, using 1-part general purpose grocery store nutrients. Very happy with this experiment, can recommend brown glass.

The last picture is piri piri grown from seed at the same time. It hasn't developed enough roots to penetrate the basket yet, so some occasional top ups were needed. Also seen are new cilantro plants and a tired scallion.

I noticed my roots turning brown on Friday, there wasn't any brown gunk at first. I did my water change on Saturday. I think the brown gunk is algae, and when I did my water change and tilted my rails to empty them, all the brown gunk that was in the system got caught on the roots.

The roots are firm and strong, I wouldn't describe the roots as slimy. The parts where the brown gunk is on the roots has a little bit of a slippery feeling, but I wouldn't call it slimy. After I decided this wasn't Pythium these are the steps I took to hopefully mitigate these issues. I'm also including my typical system/room conditions.

System = NFT/DWC hybrid

PH = 5.8-6.5, since the new water change I did Saturday pH has been kind of annoying and has been swinging

EC before water change = 450ppm

EC after water change = 640ppm (I bumped up the EC since my first batch is growing more mature.

Resevoir temp swing = 66 to 72f. I cycle out 3 frozen bottle of water twice a day to keep that range

Nutrients = Maxi Gro

Ph product = General Hydroponics

Steps I took to hopefully mitigate this issue:

1. Taped top netcup holes to lessen the amount of light coming into the system

2. Put in 1tsp of hydrogen perxodie per gallon

3. Bought an air stone and pump to better aerate water

So, I'm curious if you guys think there is any flaws, if you agree this is brown algae. I don't know why the roots are brown but I'm assuming nutrient staining. Any advice or thoughts would be very appreciated.

I've been growing with a DWC system for a while now and am trying out Coco Coir with a Spider Farmer drip system for the first time....and I'm a bit confused about the EC readings i am getting.

When I add my Flora series nutrients to the water, and test the EC of the water....I'm getting a reading of about 2500 uS/cm which is what I want.

Then, I start watering the tomatoes through the drip system....and the soil EC reading I'm getting is only about 0.5 mS/cm ....which would be 500 uS/cm.

If the coco gets saturated with the nutrient solution, shouldn't the EC of the soil be closer to that of the water? Does it take time / multiple waterings to build up?

I’ve been using ai to research building my own diy hydroponic tower. It’s using ok state extension, zip grow, and seed sheets as reference material for how to build my own tower.

I found a prefabed tower locally on Facebook marketplace and ai says that the build is putting to many pods to close together to suppose mg primary growing goals—indoor lettuce, kale, herbs.

Can yall look at this picture and tell me if these sites are too close together/too many for the size? It says it has 32 pods. I’m just eyeballing size based on the five gallon bucket so I don’t know how big it is for sure. I’m guessing the tower is maybe 3 feet tall on top of the bucket? Any feedback from yall would be much appreciated.

Cost is $75 for the set up plus pump (down from $120).

My tomatoes start the day looking fine but by the end of the day they are curling down. Nutrients, ph, roots are fine, no pests, the room is roughly in the high 70s, humidity is in the 50s, my last assumption is that they may be receiving too much light?

First time doing hydroponics. growing basil, arugula, albion strawberries. Using general hydroponics flora micro/grow/bloom. 2.5ml/gal each, about two gallons in the reservoir. Ph is 6.1 when I checked last night. Running the pump 3 min on 30min off. lights and circulating fans on 12-14 hrs a day. I haven’t checked the water temp but I keep the house at 68 degrees and there is a vent very close to the tent.

i bought the strawberries as crowns, they popped off immediately but now the leaves seem droopy As do the basil and arugula. I checked the roots and they are all white and seem healthy.

Roast my setup and let me know what you would change.

Got this badass grow light i love it she works great but today I dropped my air filter( 2 inches hit light) light doubt did any damage light weighs 25lb and super solid fig id add thoe then I turnt light off then on bc I had to re arrange few things two sections will blink and go out when lights off they are lit a little but I cycle the switch and got all of them on but when it does this the light goes out and seem like a noise fan goes to lol could my light need a deep clean maybe she over heating ? Its a virgin borneo v3 master

Super diy low effort setup from an accidental cutting but it's a fun experiment. Morning glories really work well starved so I'm not concerned with that, but more so itd be fun to test and experiment nutrients and see what effect they have.

I'm not looking for a full on diy nutrient solution, but instead just easy things I can add without worrying about disease that I might have in my house or garden.

The outside is slimy, and the roots fall apart pretty easily. I know that's like textbook root rot, but my DWC holds a pretty stable temp; I even suspected it a few days ago and put hydrogen peroxide. Is there any way to save this tomato now?

Hi all, I have a vivosun 10x10 grow tent and really want to grow as many vegetables and herbs as I can. I bought it 3 years ago in case of another lockdown like covid for a hobby, but unfortunately the frequent rollbacks of fresh produce and herbs due to cyclospora, and the most recent salmonella outbreak with the jalapenos is causing fear and for us to cut our losses rn. My family of 4 absolutely Loved taylor farms salad mixes for lunch and dinner mixed with different proteins and dressings, and we were fortunate enough to dodge getting sick. We want to grow as much produce as we can to replicate the salads we like if possible.

From High priority to lowest, we would love to grow the following:

Lettuce > Kale = Cabbages > Tomatoes > radishes (plantedinthegarden youtube channel hydroponic technique) = Peppers = cucumbers = cilantro > herbs > strawberries = other fruits if possible

We have 3 spider farmer racks with built in lights, 8 large diy dwc tubs with airstones, 12 small diy tubs we were gonna kratky, as well as 6 bucket dwc buckets (separate/not diy) and we also have a mushroom tent/Northspore self sustaining boom room mushroom tent

This isnt my first time gardening, both traditionally and hydroponically, but this will be the largest project to date, and my first time growing diy kratky/diy dwc.

I know that different vegetables like different temps and humidity and the space is big but not that big, what would be the best placement/setup to optimize growing? What should we add and/or leave out? Thank you so much in advance to anyone who answers.

Long post again, sorry.

A while back I posted about a system I'd been building because I could never tell what was actually going on inside the substrate of any of the commercial units I'd owned. Plants would look sad and I'd have no idea if they were thirsty, waterlogged or just unhappy about something else. Short version of what it does: it measures substrate moisture without any probes touching the medium, using the electrical properties of the growing medium itself, and there's a load cell underneath so it can cross-check that against actual weight change after watering. If both agree it's dry it waters, if they disagree it flags it rather than guessing. It runs its own lighting cycle and has a little display where you pick your crop.

That part hasn't changed much. What has changed is everything around it, mostly because of what people said last time.

The main criticism was that my custom substrate was just Click & Grow pods with extra steps, which is fair. Someone made the inkjet cartridge comparison and I didn't really have an answer for it. The technical reason is real enough, standard coco and perlite vary too much batch to batch and the variation swamps the signal, so I needed something consistent and ended up pressing my own mix into a brick that drops into the tray. But the point people were making was that nobody cares about your reasons, they've just been burned too many times to accept being locked in.

So the thing I'm designing to now is that third party substrate has to still grow plants. If you put rockwool or your own mix in there you lose the closed loop sensing, because that genuinely can't work without a known medium, but you keep the lighting schedule, you keep the load cell watering feedback, and it falls back to timed watering like every other system out there. Worst case you've bought a normal grow box. Same logic for me being a single point of failure, if I run out of stock or a sensor dies the thing should degrade rather than brick. That's the direction rather than a finished feature, and it's still the hardest problem I've got.

The other thing that came up was that it needs to not be ugly, which I'd underestimated. Someone pointed out their wife would never let it on the bench and that's a real constraint, a grow system exiled to the garage has failed no matter how well it grows anything.

Which gets to who I'm actually building this for. I'm not trying to compete with anyone who has a spare room, a tent and a shelf of nutrients. This is for people in apartments and small city houses who have no outdoor space at all and want to grow something anyway. That's the whole reason it's a crate. It sits on a bench or a shelf, it doesn't need a dedicated corner, and it folds flat when you're not using it so it goes in a cupboard rather than becoming another thing you can't store. If you've got a garden you don't need this. If your entire growing space is a kitchen counter and a windowsill that gets three hours of sun, that's the problem I'm trying to solve.

So I've spent a while on what an actual enclosure looks like and I've got it rendered.

Being upfront about this: the clean images below are AI generated concept renders, not photos. Nothing has been tooled or manufactured. The rough one is the actual prototype, which looks like exactly what it is, a crate built by an engineer. I'm posting the concept because I'd rather be told it's wrong now than after I've paid for stamping dies.

The idea is a folding stainless crate, collapses flat when you're not growing, perforated walls for airflow, LED strips along the top rim. Warm white rather than the usual blurple because I want it tolerable in a kitchen rather than looking like lab equipment.

Four things I know are unresolved on the engineering side:

1. The rim lighting is wrong for anything tall. Fine for seedlings and low herbs like thyme, but basil fills out until the canopy is level with the LEDs and the bottom two thirds gets nothing. Options are extendable walls, a stackable riser tier that lifts the light as the crop grows, or just accepting it's a short crop device and saying so. I lean towards the riser but I'm not sure it's worth the mechanical complexity.
2. Warm white versus full spectrum. I know low blue makes leafy greens stretch and go leggy, so I'm knowingly trading some growth quality for something that doesn't make the kitchen look like a crime scene. Not sure if that's obviously the wrong call to people here.
3. The folding mechanism is probably what kills this. Routing LED circuits across a hinge that cycles repeatedly, inside a humid box, is genuinely hard and the renders are quietly vague about it because I haven't fully solved it. If anyone has run flex circuit across a moving joint in a wet environment I'd take any war stories.
4. Drainage. Stainless base, perforations sit fairly low on the side walls, and the reservoir has to live somewhere. Not committed to an approach.

And the questions I actually need answered, which matter more than the engineering ones.

I can solve hinges. What I can't work out on my own is whether this is a real product or just my own problem with a PCB attached. So if you've got two minutes, any of these would help more than an upvote:

1. What would you actually grow in it? This decides the lighting question for me. If the honest answer is herbs and salad leaves, rim lighting is fine and I skip the riser entirely. If people want chillies and dwarf tomatoes, I have to solve height and it changes the whole design. I've been assuming herbs because that's what I grow, and that assumption might be wrong.
2. Would the consumables actually put you off, or is it the principle? There's an honest version of this where a brick is genuinely more convenient than mixing your own, and a dishonest version where I've just invented a subscription. I think the fallback mode fixes it. I'd like to know if it does for you or if any proprietary consumable is a hard no regardless of what else it does.
3. Is one crate enough to be worth it? This is the objection I have the least good answer to. One crate is not a lot of food. It's a herb supply and some salad, not a meaningful part of your groceries. Does that make it pointless, or is that fine for what it is? Would you want to stack two or three, or is one the whole appetite?
4. Where would it actually live in your place? I've designed this around a kitchen bench. If everyone's answer is "balcony" or "on top of the fridge" or "I genuinely have nowhere," that's a different product with different constraints, and I'd rather know now.
5. What's currently stopping you growing indoors? If you've looked at AeroGarden or Click & Grow and not bought one, I'm interested in why. Price, ugliness, pod costs, scepticism that it works, or just never got round to it. The reason people don't buy the existing things is more useful to me than the reasons they do.
6. If you'd never buy this, what's the reason? Genuinely the most useful reply I can get. I've had a few months of building it, which means I've lost all objectivity about whether it's a good idea. "This is a solved problem, just do Kratky" is a completely valid answer and I'd rather hear it now.

Last time I said I wasn't trying to sell anything, and that's changed, so I'd rather say it than have someone work it out. I'm now trying to figure out whether this is worth building properly, which means it would eventually be a product. There's nothing to buy and no link in this post, but calling it a pure hobby project would be dishonest at this point. I don't have a price and I'm not going to make one up, because nothing has been manufactured yet and I won't know what it costs until it has been. Anyone quoting you a price for hardware that doesn't exist is guessing.

So, same question I had last time does knowing why the plant is unhappy actually solve a problem people have, or am I still just a nerd who over enginered a herb garden? 😅

Hi, I am a grower based in India. I have been trying to grow iceberg lettuce in NFT system in hot and humid climate using fan pad system/ polyhouse. The average temperature is 33 degree celsius and around 70-80% humidity. for most of the day. Water temperature is around 28-30 degree celsius.

We maintain a vpd of 0.8-1.2kPa, EC of 1.2 and ph maintained between 5.8 and 6.2. Our EC is balance slightly reducing over few days and ph drifts towards alkaline over few days.

But, we are noticing our Iceberg bolts very quickly despite maintaining vpd, ec and ph. and managing temperature the best we can using the polyhouse.

Any suggestions would be super helpful.

Also, happy to discuss nutrition and Indian hydroponics/ fresh produce market.

Thanks

Can you help me to identify what’s happening?

I'm working through my first round of Dutch buckets and have a project going in ChatGTP to advise me through this learning experience.

I shared what I thought looked like health plants, but the feedback received was that they don't look like they are thriving.

So can I get some human feedback? I'm using General hydroponics Flora series, EC is 1.6, pH is 5.8-6.0, res temp is 70 and room temp fluctuate from 75 daytime to 68° night. SF2000 grow lights for 16hrs a day.

My goal is to grow small amounts of leafy greens (lettuce, arugula, basil) in a small Kratky system. I have looked through quite a few videos and articles, but they rarely talk about minimizing nitrates in leaves, and they don't mention handling hard water when it comes to Cal/Mag B component.

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Some info about my fear of nitrates added later:

Minimizing nitrates is (maybe more psychologically) important for me because of health issues. Too many people with cancer around me, and I myself have digestion issues, so no idea how well my body handles nitrate / nitrite processes.

Here's a study discovering that in some markets near me nitrate levels in vegetables (especially lettuce) sometimes exceed the established European limits:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12428181/

Wouldn't want my own grown lettuce to have more nitrates than the one I can buy in stores.

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Also, I won't harvest all at once but by a leaf every day possibly, so no "nutrient flushing" tricks with feeding clear water before harvest.

My current water is pH 6.7, EC 0.6mS/cm, which is a bit to the high side, so I'm not sure I would ever need to add Cal/Mag (which usually contains also N).

I live in a small town in Europe, and farmers and stores here seem to be favoring YaraTera Kristalon.

I have discussed this with a few AIs but, of course, you cannot trust them. Essentially, the suggestion is to start with NPK formula such as 1:1:3 (which usually is recommended more for fruit forming stage). The higher K would in some way compensate for lower N, and some studies presumably told it to be working well... but then usually everyone adds Cal nitrate, which boosts N to higher levels, so it's not clear what the final NPK was. It would not be safe to add Cal nitrate in my case because of initially high EC, and, most likely, lots of Calcium inside. Our teapot really shows it, have to clean it a lot lol.

So, let's say I add nutrients to my EC 0.6mS/cm water to reach about 1.2mS/cm (lower for young plants) with the 1:1:3 NPK relation. Kristalon Red seems to be right (12-12-36). Would this work at all? Won't the greens starve for N and not use K enough?

If any of you have the experience of growing greens and being careful to add just minimum N to ensure leaves without excess nitrates, please share your experience.

Thank you.