Everything I've read about the vertical growers implies they're not up to snuff. seems like people pack'm too tight so not enough light gets to the bottoms and then the back sides don't get the same light as the fronts. I don't know. . . All of the research and pictures I've seen of commercial hydro strawberries was done running horizontal troughs. Not saying that's best. It's just observation.
I'm going to try my hand this year growing strawberries in EnF and NFT. my plan: 100 plants (50 charlie/50 camerosa) with half of each in each type. I think that'll roughly cover about 100 sq ft. I live in North Carolina and will hopefully line up the plants in early February to get planted sometime in mid to late march. I'll keep them in a temporary A frame until mid to late april and see what happens.
I've had great success with tomatoes and peppers but never started them particularly early (in Hydroponics) but don't see that it'd be a problem.

Thanks for that. I just got back from visiting a hydroponic farm in northern Alabama that has over 1 1/2 acres of hydro-stackers growing a wide variety of vegetables along with 20,000+ strawberry plants. It was definitely a sight to see, besides all of the great knowledge he passed along. Intersting enough, he grows everbearing strawberries rather than the June bearing ones. He plants plugs in March and then offers them as a U-Pick commodity from May through October or until the first frost happens! The means to offer strawberries the whole growing season, rather than just in late April through early June has definitely got me interested in spending the extra bucks for the complete system. But you're right with regards to overloading the stackers if you're trying to grow certail vegetables. For example, he only plants 4 indetermenant tomato plants per stack in the top two levels and has those levels 6-7 feet in the air, unlike the normal stacks that are about 5 feet high, with their vines growing all the way to ground loaded with tomatoes! If you can't tell, I'm definitely getting excited about hydroponics! Yeah, no more weeds!!

Just an update. I wound up buying a 50-stack hydrostacker system last January, planted 1000 strawberry plants and 130 tomato plants and couldn't be happier. However, I did learn a few lessons along the way.

The first one is that I needed to install a spray system to adequately spray all the plants with Neem oil or Dipel when insects were getting the upper hand. A manual spayer just didn't do the job. With the system in place it takes me 2 minutes to spray them all!

The second lesson was that day-neutral strawberries and the Alabama sun July-Sept don't get along too well. However once I built a grid system and put a 50% shade cloth over them which brought the temperature down at least 10 degrees, they were quite happy.

However, I also found with the strawberries, the bottom layer of the 5-planter stack didn't produce as many strawberries over the season as the ones on top of it. So this winter, I'm redesigning my configuration to have 4 planters per stack and using the now excess planters to build another row for growing a variety of vegetables.

But, overall, I couldn't be happier with my purchase and the support I've received all year from the hydrostacker folks.

Just thought I'd pass this along,

Ken Barber
Millbrook AL

hi. i am a hydroponic strawberry producer in Iran. I saw Hydro-Stacker system on the Net.Finally, I couldn't understand if this system has a serious light problem or not ! do u suggest this system ? you know that my country is in the middle east (light full !) do u suggest buy and install
this system in a wide area ? thank u