We were out at the Avenues last night with great success. Come join us every Tuesday 3p till 8p in the courtyard by the Pizza Gallery. Hope to see you there!

NFT is the style of system that we use in the greenhouse for all the lettuce’s. NFT stands for Nutrient Film Technique and describes the feeding system for the plants. We fill the reservoir with rain water or RO (reverse osmosis) water which is the purest water with a TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) of around 0 ppm (parts per million). It is important not to have any elements in the water before adding your nutrients as it will be unclear to what is already in the water. (For example: tap water is full of chlorine, fluoride, and numerous pharmaceutical drugs as well as toxic waste, all which are poisonous to our plants, as well as us!)

Once we have filled our reservoirs with water, we then add the nutrients. For the lettuces and herbs, we use a Grow formula which is high in Nitrogen which plants require during their vegetative (or growth) state. Since lettuces and herbs do not need to flower for consumption, we only need to use this one formula, we just increase the strength as the crop grows bigger. We did purchase a crop specific nutrient from the manufacturer of the system, American Hydroponics, but have not begun to use it yet. We’ll update you when we do.

Back to NFT, now we have our water and nutrients mixed and the system is running. Nutrient Film Technique sort of speaks for itself. The water/nutrient solution is pumped to the “top” of the system and then uses gravity to flow down the gutter. This creates a “film” at the root zone soaking the media (we use rockwool, as this is the most efficient media for the NFT system). The water then flows into a gutter at the “bottom” of the gutters and drains back to the reservoir, creating a recirculating system.

We were there on the first day of this new market and the response was awesome! Big thanks to Barbara for getting us out there. We will be out at the corner of US1 and 192 every Saturday from 10am – 3pm. Stay tuned as in a couple weeks we will be out at the Avenues in Viera for an even bigger market. The Viera market runs Tuesday evenings officially from 4pm – 8pm but there are vendors set up as early as 1pm! Come out and support us at these two wonderful markets! (Give us a couple weeks to ge out to Viera. Our target start is February 16.) Thanks to all of Pam’s friends that stopped by from Lou’s Blue’s in Indianatlantic! And special thanks to grandpa for stopping by too!!!

These photos are from Monday 1/18/2010.

So we’ve been keeping you up to speed with how awesome the NFT is doing on the back porch, now time to give you a little behind the scenes. We couldn’t be happier with our first run and growing on a large scale and we were doing it the easiest way we could think of.

Typically with a hydro system, you want to change your reservoir every week. It is recommended to you RO water (reverse osmosis) which should have a ppm (parts per million) of 0. Tap water generally has a ppm of about 200. When you use tap water with a ppm greater than 0, what this means is there are particles in your water that might not necessarily be beneficial to the plants, or even worse, could be harmful.

How did we do it to start? We took the garden hose, running city water and stuck it in the system. After we filled it up, we through some nutrients in and made sure that our ppm’s were around 800 (accounting for the city water). We let it rock out, and just monitored the ph every day. The ph climbed every 24 hours, so every morning we had to dump in some ph down to keep it at the level that we wanted. When the water level got low, we put the hose in then adjusted our ppm’s. That’s all we did, and you’ve seen the growth we got.

6 weeks in to our growth, and we decided to actually change the reservoir over to RO water. We did 35 gallons of RO water and then 25 gallons of rainwater (which usually has a ppm right around 0; if it doesn’t register that’s good). Then, we added our nutrients. We’ve been using the Dutch Master A and B for this first run, with a little bit of Liquid Karma and some Hygrozyme. Once we had our water at 60 gallons, we added 500mL of the A and 500mL of B. (After you add a nutrient, it is important to check your ppm. Let the system run. Since this one is a large system we give it a few minutes, but smaller systems should register faster.) We then added 300mL of the Liquid Karma and 300mL of Hygrozyme. After checking our ppm we were sitting at about 600 which is between quarter and half strength.

So today we got the roof going. We ran into a slight snag in our original plan to make a hoop house out of the PVC. We decided to just frame out the roof, this way we can actually put a hard poly roof on in the future without to much manipulation. Our new systems arrive tomorrow, along with a dump truck load of rock for the floor of the greenhouse.

The NFT on the back porch is looking good! Got some new starts put in the system this week. We started them from seed about 2 weeks ago.

So it is 1 week later and we’ve about got our greenhouse framed out and the NFT is doing awesome! We should be ready to harvest in a week or 2. The greenhouse should be complete with poly roof, screened in, with 4 NFT’s rockin’, by the end of next week! The NFT in the photo is 4-5 weeks along. On the bottom is some red fire lettuce, in the middle is mesclun mix, and on top is basil. The last three pics are from the raised bed gardens in the front lawn.

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This was a fantastic event that we did on October 1. We had great success in talking to students interested in growing their own fruits and vegetables to reduce their carbon foot print. Check out some of the other companies and campus awareness groups that were there with us!