Vertical Hydroponic Farming: My first experiment
- I built my own Hydroponics vertical farm from scratch housing 180 plants from materials at Home Depot (many open source plans are available via YouTube and Instructables).
- I automated the water schedule using a timer for nutrients and had a 95% water reusability/conversion.
- I also planted saffron (world's most expensive spice) in the ground to compare the quality against my vertical farm.
- In addition, I planted a few Saffron plants upside down.
- I got my son and daughter involved and they loved the project and checked on the bulbs/project daily. They were the first to catch the first blooms.
- Outcome: I had greater success and had much higher quality saffron hydroponically, with many bulbs producing 2 or even 3 flowers!.
- I proved one of my hypothesis's that saffron can be grown upside down utilizing a bottle and coco fiber outdoors and indoors.
- I got more satisfaction and joy out of this 3-month project than I did from my 9 years working for Verizon in Consulting roles dealing with the daily grind.
- This taught me more about myself and I learned a couple of things:
- I enjoy the outdoors.
- I enjoy complex challenges and working on ways to solve new problems/issues/engineering challenges. This is a multi-disciplinary science utilizing the scientific method.
- Real Learning is an iterative hands-on process and tweaking your system or project daily can lead to near perfection after a series of failures.
- I need my own large scale laboratory and resources as I have always loved the sciences, but until then I will iterate using my home. Vertical automated farming is the future of our food supply and will become more and more important. The data science per indoor crops along with horticulture engineering is where the real challenge and value is going to be. These areas are very important in addition to energy technology, water technology, nutrient technology, and aeroponics/hydroponics/aquaponics. These will combine together to form the perfect storm and business case for large scale city adoption. Urban farming is only a stop gap due to energy and labor costs.
- Don't leave your 3 months harvest of Red Saffron Gold at home to dry out on the counter when you have your cleaning services come by, it may just disappear somehow. At least this is an indication that it was of good quality!
- Next version of my MVP will utilize a sump pump, better plumbing, automatic nutrient dispensing, automated PH monitoring and a different system drip irrigation system and crop altogether.
- Look forward to my upcoming update on Blackberries & Strawberries grown hydroponically and the data science behind standardizing basic collection metrics.
CEO & Founder of MClimate | Decarbonising buildings at scale
6yHey Mashaal! Congrats on the project, looks very good. Could you tell me more about the nutrient solution and water schedule you used? Have you experimented tweaking those parameters? Did you use natural or artificial light?
10 years CCIE certified Network Architect
6yHi, what is the medium yo used for the croms.. and have you tried using fogponics..
Analysing Data to Save and Make Money for Businesses
7yHi Ahmed , great project !! Could you send me the technical details , resources and timeline of your project at harshasnawal@gmail.com thanks.
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7yJuan, thank you for reading my article. Nutrients: Focus on phosphorus and potassium-rich Hydroponic Solutions with a little nitrogen (Botanicare) If your motivated and have time on your hands, you can mix your own, but not needed at this stage, get the premixed liquids, learn your fundamentals. For EC, you want to have a general EC reading of 1.0 for the rooting stage, and 1.5 for flowering (EC meter). For PH, keep the water reservoir PH between 5.5-6.0. If it drops below or above this adjust using PH solution. Measure and adjust as necessary using a PH kit. Temperature is interesting and should be between 60-65 degrees ideally, but the bulbs are hearty and will grow in MANY conditions. Temperature is important and can be used for more advanced methods but not needed to describe further at this stage. I grew during summer and the bulbs were fine. Longer daylight during the rooting phase is ideal (14-16 hours of Daylight (long summer days). Watering cycles- I watered twice a day, once in the morning and once in the late afternoon using a nutrient reservoir and pump on a timer. You do not want the bulbs to get overly soaked as they may rot (my drip Hydroponic system worked great for this reason). Keep in mind you will need roughly 200,000 flower blooms to get 1 kilo (3 strands of gold from each flower)!