There has been a lot of change in the hydroponics system over the last few months, with some problems that needed resolving or working around, and some fairly uninspiring experiments. At the moment, I have some very nice basil (which seems very easy to grow reliably) and some more experiments in the form of two Micro Tom tomato plants which are now in flower. They really are even more “micro” than i was expecting, but the larger of the two (more directly under the centre of the light) looks vert healthy. The height of the larger one (pictured above) is just less than 15cm, which is actually what is advertised on the packet. The smaller one which looks a bit stunted even for a dwarf variety, is less than 8cm tall at this point, though it also looks fairly healthy and has a fair few flowers.
The problems that I had were after I took the system apart for a “deep clean” which ended up taking quite a few weeks to complete, with all of the other things happening in life at the same time. Putting the system together again after that, I found that the expensive Atlas Scientific pH sensor no longer worked properly, though rather than being flat-out broken, it instead gave bad readings and I was unable to calibrate it to give sensible results. I don’t understand the cause of this - although I didn’t store the probe tip in proper storage solution as I should have, I stored it in water, thinking it would be less than a week before it was back in operation. The probe is meant to be able to last for years in liquids of all sorts of pH levels, so I cannot think that this alone was the cause. Anyway I spend many many hours trying to get it to work and in the end just bought a cheap standalone pH sensor and display which has worked beautifully since I got it. It is a shame I can no longer get access to the data to log it and display online in my in-progress new website that i’m building, but I will come back to it when I have the time. For now, the system is back and working reliably.
I also had some issues with leakage after the cleaning process, which I have mostly corrected but really needs a proper dismantling to address fully. Since i’m due to be moving home in the next 6 weeks, and everything will have to come apart for that, I will tackle it down the line - it is currently very minor so not quite bad enough to catalyse a total dismantling!
The other thing worth mentioning is that due to increasing energy costs, I have again reverted to a very simple system with just a single “layer” under a single LED light panel. So experiments have been on a much more modest scale recently. A couple of months of coriander-only experiments led to some decent results, but they were not as reliably good as I want to achieve. This was at least partly due to the problems I was having with maintaining a reliable pH during the young stages of the plants, so I will try again when the system is once again set up in the new home.
