+1 on the cuukes. I want to try those too some day.

ALso: Carrots and other root vegtables come out of hydroponic media looking deformed a bit i'm told. Hydroton just not being the same as soil for making a normal shaped carrot. It would still work I think, you'd just have lumpy carrot. :P

Something else that does get done Cheri, is strawberries. :)

well I am giving it a shot this year, just seedlings at the moment but trying Charentais melons and Cucumbers, using 22 litre (~6 gallon) buckets in a drip system. Will try and keep you updated as the weeks roll on.

Thanks guys! I'll be interested in how it turns out! Please do keep me updated.

As far as carrots go, you're supposed to use pearlite and or vermiculite (sp?) instead of the hydrotron balls. You can get that pretty much anywhere. So I'm gonna try that I think. Do the double bucket drip system.

I have 'Lemon Cucumbers' I'm going to try and 'midget melons' too. just trying to decide what kind of system to do. I was thinking for the melons I'll do DWC.

Thoughts?

They say that you can grow carrots hydroponically using the NFT system, hmmm...been thinking of using either hydroton or rockwool as a medium but I guess trying it with perlite and vermiculite won't do any harm :D after all, hydroponics is all about experimenting and trying to discover what will work best for your plants, right??? :)

I've always heard washed sand was the best medium for carrots.
But what do I know, the thread title sent my mind to the gutter.

LOL @Grizzman.

As for carrots in an NFT in hydroton or rockwool??? Never heard that one. flood and drain yes, DWC yes, but never NFT, I'll have to look into that.
I think you're right grizz, I heard sand with vermiculite.

BTW, here are my melon plants day 13 :) Bottom left

"But what do I know, the thread title sent my mind to the gutter." - Grizzman

Me too!!! Glad I wasn't the only one.

I grew carrots in coco coir and perlite. They got humongous and many grew 2 legs (or whatever the technical term is). If I do it again, I'll omit the perlite.

oooh, great tip! thanks!

I haven't grown hydroponic melons yet but from what I've read, they say that the best medium for this plant is perlite and a drip irrigation system should be used to deliver the nutrients...I am thinking about growing it someday, but for now, I'll just stick with growing herbs :)

well, I've decided to use my drip systems (my first ones I showed before, not the homemade DWC) with hydroton at the bottom for support with my perlite/verm mix on top. Ive read that multiple times and it makes sense to me, so that's where I'm going :)
I'll do the same thing with my cucumbers.

I grew a watermelon last year using a drip system. It was one of those small types. I think it was a bush sugar baby. I only got 1 melon from one plant and it was the size of a softball. But it did taste like a watermelon. YUM.

I've also tried to grow carrots in sand with drip, but the sand was 'leveling sand' which should probably be called small rocks. The carrots grew to about 1 inch long given that the sand eventually clogged the drain back to my reservoir and I had to stop the experiment.

I grew cucumbers in a dwc system but my reservoir was too small and it kept running out of water and stressing the plant making all but a few cucumbers sour.

I just started a new set up where I'm trying some oriental cucumbers (I hear they don't sour as easy.) I have a pumpkin growing, and 3 bush sugar baby watermelons. The watermelons were just planted and having sprouted yet. All of this is using a drip system.

Check out the link below for more information on some of my experiments and the successes and failures. I have a ton of pictures and a couple of webcams in the basement. One of the webcams is over the non-sprouted watermelon. Should be a few more days until it sprouts. The other camera points at the cucumber plant and the pumpkin plant.

Here is a link that might be useful: mysimplehomegarden

Neat site, tbaleno. Didn't go through much of it, yet, but it looks pretty cool. What did you use to make it?

Doing mine DWC and so far they seem to like it, the watermelon though is stuggling and I will replace it over the weekend.

8 days difference, also I did a water change today and before that the water was just waste water from a nutrient change in another system, so not ideal...

I have not grown melons (soil or hydro yet), but have been planing to. In fact I have some started already that I hope to have in a system within a few weeks (if I can afford to build it), but I have done some research on growing them. I printed most of it out and may take a couple of days before I find it. I also saved it to the computer but that was a while ago and need a little time to find it again. But I have retrieved this article:

http://www.clemson.edu/extension/hgic/plants/pdf/hgic1304.pdf

It refers to soil grown Cantaloupe & Honeydew Melons, but has some descent info on growing them. I also have an article/PDF about growing hydroponic musk melons, that's the one I need to find again before I can post it. Meanwhile I hope the other one helps. I found information on growing melons, but hydroponic melons was not as easy.

P.S. I am new to this site so I am not sure the best way to make a link live, but you can always copy and paste it into the browser.

Here is a link that might be useful: Cantaloupe & Honeydew Melons

Well I still haven't found the particular article I was looking for, but you may find these useful also.

http://www.hos.ufl.edu/protectedag/pdf/106-112.pdf
http://www.uky.edu/Ag/NewCrops/introsheets/muskintro.pdf
http://www.hfrr.ksu.edu/DesktopModules/ViewDocument.aspx?DocumentID=1802
http://ohioline.osu.edu/b672/pdf/Muskmelon.pdf

AH... here it is
http://www.hos.ufl.edu/protectedag/EDIS/HS91900.pdf

This is probably too little, and way too late, BUT I am on my second crop of Savor Charentais in my 10'x12'x13' greenhouse located in Tucson, AZ using a drip feed system and Hydro-Gardens formulation for tomatoes. And it is my hypothesis that small black ants are the pollinators. There are no bees and no manual pollinazation. It appears that I will have more than seven melons from one plant, and if I had a clue has to what I was doing, the production would probably be greater. The two melon plants are creating a jungle in their corner of the greenhouse. The melons are really good eating, really good.

I have cucumbers now growing on a drip/timer system (perlite mixture). Got two plants growing like crazy. keeping two runners per plants, growing along the tomato support system. Getting about 3-4 cucumbers every other day. These are mixed in with my tomatoes and peppers.

I did some reading on growing Cantaloupe melons after I bought a started plant in a pot. They need a high nutrient level, such as compost. They need a warm soil, so they suggest putting compost in the soil to increase nutrient levels and temperature. Compost will warm the soil. You should keep the ground moist but not wet. They grow very fast, as I have seen mine grow in soil in the past two weeks grown to three times their size. The leaf count is increasing as well. I can see the growth from day to day.
Now if you were going to grow them in a hydroponic system, I would try to relate it to the ideal soil conditions. Keep the nutrient level high, and warm. If you bury your holding tank, it will be cooler than the surrounding air temperature, and it might hold back the growth. I would think that your watering frequency would increase. Just like cucumbers, they such a lot of water out of the soil, so you would have to be sure that the plant is not waiting on food, keep it coming. I don't know if mulch is acceptable in hydroponics, but without asking anybody, I would mulch the tops of the planters. It will slow the chances of drying between feeding cycles. I would closely monitor them for the first day or two, especially if the days are hot and sunny. It will give you a good gauge for how often to feed them.
If anyone has any better information, I am all ears. I've only repeated what I read, and added some common sense to the translation to hydroponics. Since I am no where near knowing much about hydroponics, my comments might be flawed.
Joe Trying to give a little.