Bumbling In Botany

I have a tendency to bulldoze through anything - I rarely approach anything slowly with great thought and research. I get blindsided by inspiration often - I'll just be toodling along and suddenly will think I should take up learning Udo or maybe live in a Yurt. In Idaho. While raising Alpacas and then next thing you know I'm attending YouTube College getting my PhD in Binge Watching How To Shear Alapacas. David is a big Nope on many of these ventures if they incude requirements such as Work  Visas, snowshoes or livestock. His take is I will lose interest as soon as the next Fun Thing comes along and he'll be in charge of a herd of bleating sheep. And he doesn't like sheep. He might not be wrong. But if it's something that doesn't require anything from him, moving or a loan and might possibly of use he's ok with it. Which is how I ended up playing with hydroponic gardening. 

I have a few reasons I'm interested in this - you can do it year round, it can be inside or out and if I can get to the point of growing real food - we will be saving tons of money plus decreasing our footprint. I initially started looking in the pot growing shops and quickly abandoned that - the investment was way out of my comfort zone. Lighting starts around a thousand dollars - and that's just the lighting. Most people frequenting those shops are pot farmers and start ups, not zucchini and lettuce people. So - on to Amazon. My set up plus the pump, plus the lights came to under $200 so I was happy with that. In the relative scope of things that's not bad for a hobby. We have a closed in sun room in the back - i was going to start off in the grow room under the house but realized starting out it would be difficult, there is no water hooked up down there so I would have to carry buckets of water up and down the ladder for the weekly water change so that was off the table. Plus David pointed out we have plenty of room up here so aside from the fun factor of telling people I was gardening under the house there wasn't any benefit to it. 

So, my first round of seedlings I had about 20 survivors, I just added the second round. I am going to be gardening outside with raised beds but I want to get this down pat for the winter. David is also building me a greenhouse off the back deck - the whole idea is to be able to grow vegetables all the time. I had no idea what I planted in the unit but it's become apparent a good number of the survivors are zucchini. I have no vegetables yet but I have blossoms and when they open I will have to pollinate. So far I've had two flowers but they were both males so it was a no go. My second round of seedling are bell peppers which I grew from the seeds I took out of the peppers I used for dinner. I put them on wet paper and then in the dark for awhile, they all sprouted! So during this I decided I wanted a bigger pump than the one that came with the unit. I found a reasonable one - Amazon again! When it came I realized this one did not come on a timer so I had to order that and then wait for it's arrival. That came and  yesterday I started hooking it up with David trying desparately to ignore me as it was not going well. No indeed, not well at all. First, the tubing was too big so I tried a rubber band, then David used a clamp. I fired it up and it leaked like crazy out the top and then down the side. 

Of course. 

Sigh. So David taped and clamped it - sucess! I had just drained the water and refilled the reserve bucket so I plugged it in and went to figure out the timer I had bought. I was sitting at the table with the directions when i heard the not so gentle sounds of a waterfall.Hmm. Took me a second. I ran in to see the water gysering out of the unit - gyser!! Thank goodness the floor is a deck so the it just drained out - I got it unplugged and I guess it's a bit more powerful than i had anticipated. I reinstalled the old pump and all was well in Plant World once again. And no, the new stuff with not be wasted - i will be doing a dutch bucket system for the fall so it goes into the future greenhouse pile. The other thing I've discovered is around here we have a lot of pot farm fails - people think they'll make their fortunes but reality is the competition around here is fierce and then by the time you get through all the government regulations....but the upside is I bought about a thousand dollars worth of fairly new greenhouse equipment giant grow lights, fans, etc.... for $75. Even if I don't use half of it there is almost nothing invested - she even threw in extra filters (they're huge!). It all smells vaguely of pot but for $75 I'm good with it. David is working on the raised beds and then I'll transfer the zucchini out - it's growing like crazy as you can see in the picture but it's overtaking the entire unit and covering the new seedlings. I think in the future I'll be growing lettuce. Or whatever sprouts!!