Our house has a real, live used to be illegal grow room under the house - it's in the middle and you enter it through a closet floor. There's a built in ladder and it's a pretty good size - maybe 12 x 16 with a low ceiling. There are drainage trenches and ventilation, lots of outlets. We didn't do too much with it for the past couple of years, it was really just storage for the overflow of stuff we hadn't gotten to. But the past year as the house has progressed we've sorted and put things away, donated - David did a bit clean out about 2 months ago and it's back to being pretty empty. We have of course through out millions of moves scaled down, then scaled down again - moving across country we really shed a ton of stuff. We sent Adam most of the stuff that was near and dear to him (he said to me at one point he didn't even know what he had) and Jackson took most of his stuff last year so there is little danger of us using it for actual storage.
One of the things i've become interested in is hydroponics, I had seen a commercial unit but yiked at the price - $800 for a small basic unit. So I started watching YouTube and then sorting through Amazon of course - I realized I could pretty much do the same thing with twice the amount of plants for about a third of the price. People will yap at you "it's nothing but PVC pipe - you can DIY it for pennies. Nope. No you can't. If you happen to have a bunch of PVC pipe laying around your yard, you have access to lots of tools and have oodles of time you could probably save save 50 bucks. Or 10. I bought the unit from Amazon and it came with the pump and tubing too for $114. I also needed a way to sprout the seeds, the liquid fertilizer, the lights......But I found it on Amazon. I did go to a hydroponic store and the guy was super nice but the light set up to start was between 500 and $1,000 dollars! I'm growing zucchini here bud, not a cocaine farm - do I look like Scarface? Back to Amazon - $64 for the standing light and $21 for the little one.The growing unit came in a box full of PVC pipes and a single sheet of instructions with 4 steps. Sigh. Back to YouTube. FYI - I have learned how to do everything from a long tail cast on for socks to building Ikea furniture with Handyman Hank. It turned out to be super easy and took about 30 minutes to get it up and running.
I have the unit upstairs in the sunroom off the den - according to everything I've seen when I truly get it up and running I should only have to change out the water once a week and then check on it a couple times. But for now since I'm experimenting I check on it a couple times a day. The first set of seeds only a few sprouted- it was too wet and I didn't keep them warm enough. The second go around I ended up with over 30 sprouts! I've only got it half full - I figured if it didn't do well I wouldn't have to replace too much. And there is the figuring out stuff - like HOW to change the water. The second time went much better, I swing the discharge pipe to an empty bucket and turn on the pump so it pumps out the water. You have to dissolve the fertilizer powder or it clogs the pump. I have figured out the timers so the lights are on for 12 hours and the pump circulates every hour.
And weirdly - so far not bad! Out of the 36 plants so far 32 have survived the first 3 weeks. I've been asked what they are - I don't know. I bought a whole bunch of seeds and whatever sprouted got planted. And they are planted in sponge cubes which are reusable. I started now because if the plants start to fail I can transfer them into regular soil and then into my summer garden. This is really for the winter because what I hope is to eventually use the grown room year round and we can have fresh vegetables year round. It has been really fun though so far and very interesting. I'll let you know what happens!
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