Window Farming: Do it yourself veggie garden in your window | Hacker News Reader

Window Farming: Do it yourself veggie garden in your window

npr.org

31 pointsbluesmoon11 comments

Here's my gardening advice:

Get 2 of each starter plant you want, get used to the idea of death. I see many first time gardeners get overly emotional about a couple small plants, this amplifies the stress of failure too much.

Start with herbs. Things like oregano and basil give a huge flavor/effort payoff compared to fussy plants like tomatoes. They are very hearty and a little goes a long way.

After you get fresh herbs on hand for your kitchen, you won't ever want to go back.

I picked up gardening last year and specifically tomatoes. I found it's a great stress relief - fresh air, direct Vitamin D, winding vines - and you get to eat the proceeds. We got killed by the blight last year, but if we get a dry season this year, we could be "farm stand" profitable!

I am in the process of making a couple of these to see if they produce better(and more plentiful) tomatoes than the inground variant:

http://earthtainer.tomatofest.com/

Time will tell if it works well.

I had seen those. They look pretty inspired. I'll be curious how they work for you. We're lucky to be on an old dairy farm so the soil is great and we get full sun. I found that cheap metal wire fencing provides just enough support for two rows of 20 plants each. Cost-wise it came out to less than $1 a plant. The plants were doing great too - about 4ft each - until the blight hit.

I've seen some people grow tomatoes upside down, ie, they grow out of the bottom of containers attached to the ceiling. Any idea about that?

OK, somebody make a product for that.

Why consume when you can recycle?

A social web 2.0 webapp where you can share your farming accomplishments, plus you have a leader board to compare yourself to others. Tie-in an iPhone/iPad app to easily update the webapp, and that also doubles as an alarm & reminder to water and care for your plants! The future! Is here!

</parody> Seriously, some hardware gizmo that automates care and data-logging. I can totally see that done with those new cheap programmable MCU/SoC boards, like Arduino.

A lot of the necessary stuff already exists for aquariums. If you search for "aquarium controller", you'll find things like this:

http://www.draquarium.com/

Edit: Even better (phone control, twitter notification, etc):

http://www.tankedcam.com/

Last line of the article: "For people who are excited about window farming but not so gung-ho about starting from scratch, Riley says her group will soon begin selling window farming kits".

I think it's just hydroponics, but DIY with used plastic containers.

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