Hydroponics - Week THREE and #sixweekhealth - destressing

How to de-stress? Simple, don't get stressed up to begin with ;-)

OK, not what you are looking for, I know, so how do I de-stress myself. With gardening. I know what you are going to ask next. How do I de-stress in the winter? I'm glad you asked! I will introduce you to my indoor gardening, Hydroponics, it is winter prof ;-) you can have your own greens year round and you don't have to buy greens in the store, that are saturated with all kind of chemicals that prolong the shelf life. And there is no mess with the soil, all you need is filtered water and some minerals. More about it at the bottom.

You said you want to see a BUNCH of original pictures, well you got them :-) Also somewhere at the bottom is teaching part, explaining how and what to do.

About two weeks ago I went to my garden to harvest some greens and only after a while I though to maybe take few pictures. Too bad I didn't think about taking picture before I started it was really green and it looked better than on this picture:

I have different types of salad and they are at different stages, some of them were already harvested once or twice. The one on the back is close to it's end, harvested several times already.

The one on the left shows some signs of tiredness while one on the right (butter-crunch) is doing quite well

Unfortunately I forgot to take picture after I was done, there was 3 times more salad than you see it on this picture

About week later I went to chop more salad, this time I did take the photo before i started:

This is "salad garden"

To the left is "oak leaf"

On the back is "slobot" I think, it has huge leafs

Different angle:

Butter crunch - it looks beautiful!

What science says about green color? It has calming effect. Can't you feel it? I'm quite confident, after seeing all these green photos, you just got de-stressed a little bit. Now if you would watch them in person, you would get de-stressed even more. Now, if you get a full bowl of this salad, with organic cider apple vinegar, virgin olive oil, home made pumpkin oil, I guarantee you, you would be de-stressed in no time ;-)

Just in case if you are not de-stressed enough, here are few more :-)

Not done yet with chopping, in this container landed more salad.

I think this is few days later or before last harvesting, I lost the time frame when I took this picture, but I wanted to show it, because you can see 3 small plants that I'm sprouting. Few more days and I will move them to glass canning jars. First phase. When they grow bigger I will put them into bigger, one gallon jars.

Next few pictures are from today. I'm going to sprout 6 more plants so I can over time replace the old ones. On this picture I already put seeds of two plants into rock wool. Seeds are sprouting at about 90% rate so I will start putting only one seed into rock wool instead of two as I mostly did in the past.

All 6 are ready, labels in place and at the end I add water and they are ready to be covered (too keep moisture inside) and placed under the growing lights.

And here are already placed under the light, but it was already late, so timer turned growing lights off by the time i was done and took the picture. Note 3 jars on the left side. Those are the three plants you saw couple pictures earlier. In about 4 weeks I will have first harvest from them.

Different angle:

So, what do you need? You need a nutritions, water and light. ;-)
And not every nutrition will work. If you go to your regular gardening store and you buy some fertilizer that is advertised as very good for your garden, it will not work! Why? Because those fertilizers are only additions. Whatever you are growing in your garden, is already getting a lot of needed stuff from the soil. These are different kind of trace minerals, that are in the soil, so regular garden fertilizers don't have them. Also, you want to have proper balance between Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), Potassium (K) also known as NPK ratio. Also you need Calcium, Magnesium...

This combination should provide you with everything, more or less ;-)

I bough from Agrogrow their Masterblend (4-18-38 NPK) and I use 2 grams per gallon (gallon is about 3.7 liter)
I also use Ca(NO3)2 (11.5-0-0 NPK) also 2 grams per gallon
Epsom Salt (Magnesium Sulfate), 1 gram per gallon.

Masterblend is the nutrition, that contains all needed traced minerals and other nutritions that is in the soil.

Bellow you can see my very first picture, when I just started. I found some 1 gallon plastic, food grade containers in the local store and I filled them with nutrient solutions I put them under the growing lights that I bough on amazon (4 foot long and there are 6 lights in it) I I enjoyed the growth. For a while. Here you can see them in different stages as I was sprouting them few at a time.

(side note, reading questions on Amazon about these growing lights, many were asking, if package comes as "discrete" so it is not known what is in it. LOL, must be, some were considering growing pot with them.)

Then I got into first trouble. After several weeks under strong growing lights, I have them on 15 hr a day, one cheap mechanical timer takes care of this, well after several weeks my water turned all green. Yep, green algae. And while I still insist that green color generally de-stress you, that time for some unknown reason that aditional green color in all of the containers actually had opposite effect. How strange, how is this possible? Well, maybe there was just too much green color and as we were all taught, that too much of something is well, just too much! ;-)

So my next step was to wrap alum foil around the containers. And that solved the problem.

Although those containers are food grade, I slowly replaced them with glass jars. Some are 2/3 of gallon, some are 1 gallon, whatever i can find in the store and usually they don't cost that much, around 4-5$ and you even get pickles in them lol.

I still have one problem I haven't solve. If you look closely, some of the plants have brown edges of the leaves. They are like drying at the edges. I'm not sure what is happening. Maybe some nutrients are reacting, called chemical sipping. Also, Hydroponics works best, if you are providing oxygen with an air pump. If I would have one huge container and then grow all of the plants in that one container, it wouldn't be problem. But I'm not going to buy 20+ aquarium air pumps. Imagine noise lol... So I'm trying with Hydrogen Peroxide, get food grade, comes as 30% so you need to dilute it 20 times to get 1,5%. Why Hydrogen Peroxide? You can look at it (simplified) as water (H2O) with extra Oxygen attached. (H2O2) This bond is not stable, Oxygen breaks away and you are left with water and extra Oxygen in the solution, which plants can use. I got somehow better results but problem is still not solved. I will have to do more research, maybe I will need to change nutrients. But this is not too appealing to me, since I have them enough for many years lol

Why food grade H2O2? The one in the local store has some chemicals added, stabilizators, that extends shelf life. Even if you use it just for rinsing your teeth, always use food grade!

Anyway, I hope we all got a little bit de-stressed and we all got a little bit richer, some with knowledge and me hopefully with few extra SBD's ;-)))

p.s.
And there is absolutely no selfies anywhere :-)