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g000n

Experimental DFT starting up

g000n
13 years ago

Starting up an outdoor DFT (Deep Flow Technique) setup to grow some veggies in bulk. Test plants include japanese eggplants, a white eggplant, red and yellow peppers, and a few pumpkin seedlings I had lying around. The goals are:

1. Grow enough veggies for 1 meal a week.

2. Tweak, tune and document the use of DFT

Pictures can be found here: http://plantlab.lshd.us

Enjoy! :)

Here is a link that might be useful: PlantLab

Comments (5)

  • kac1986
    13 years ago

    That's pretty cool........I never thought about growing eggplant.

  • grizzman
    13 years ago

    I've grown standard black eggplant, maybe called black beauty.
    There wasn't enough for eggplant every week though. Something like 4 big ones for the season.

  • homehydro
    13 years ago

    I looked at some of the pictures on the blog, sorry I didn't read much of the text so you may have covered this. With regards to the strawberry those roots don't look healthy at all. From the pictures it looks like the container is sitting outside, I'm sure that's to get sunlight but I think the sun is also heating up the nutrient solution and/or root zone, especially if it's sitting on a cement patio that gets warm. The roots on my strawberry plants last summer suffered from high nutrient solution temperatures, and the roots looked much the same. The nutrient solution (and root zone) should be between 68 and 72 degrees for best results. Lower is fine as long as it isn't real cold, but if its much higher than 75 I would do something about that issue.

  • hex2006
    13 years ago

    Good job on the well documented diary.
    I didn`t see rootzone temps but may have missed it in the text.If it goes much above 22-23C the roots tend to suffer (cook). I think 900ppm is too much for fog, 150-200ppm may be better.

  • g000n
    Original Author
    13 years ago

    @kac1986, Thx. I thought it was a pretty cool setup too. :)

    @grizzman, Thx for the heads-up, was planning to have other veggies on the tubes so wasn't just depending on the eggplants.

    @homehydro, Thx for looking out. Strawberries were part of another experiment(hybrid aero/fog+DWC)where nutrient solution was unchanged for over a month. Nutes got too acidic (pH 4.0) and roots started to decay so caused the loss of nearly 2/3 of the roots (parts that were submerged in the DWC). Had to trim off the dead and slimy parts about 1 week ago. The only parts that are still alive were the parts in the aero/fog. They are slowly coming back, but it was a huge setback, thought they were toast for sure.

    Now for the other bad news, I've aborted the DFT experiment. The plants in that experiment were purchased by my better half and there were strict instructions that they could not die. After about 4 days in the DFT, the bell pepper plants started to develop strange splotches on the leaves and some of the leaves were starting to get pretty crunchy. So with that prime directive, I had to pull them all out and abort today. They were all planted back into a nearly conventional soiless mix (a la "Al's 5:1:1 mix" from the Container Gardening Forum). That mix has been pretty bomb-proof for other veggies I've been growing conventionally. If anyone has any ideas as to the cause of the splotches I'd love to hear it. Pics of problem plants can be found here: http://plantlab.lshd.us

    Thanks everyone for tuning in, there will be other experiments coming soon. I'll post an entry when I start another one up.

    Here is a link that might be useful: http://plantlab.lshd.us