Microgreens attempt #2

First off here's a picture of the wheatgrass smoothie I made from that wheatgrass I grew last week:

I finally received a shipment of Hydroton so my first hydroponics setup should be happening very soon.  The only big thing I really need now is a pH tester, which is fairly important for the whole setup.

Typically when planting into hydroton you will use some sort of pellet or cube of material to hold your seedling.  Most people use Jiffy Pellets or rockwool or some established type of growing medium.  I've been debating using Sure To Grow which is a pH inert plastic fiber cube.  My only hangup is that they are not reusable.  Granted rockwool isn't either, but at least for rockwool or some type of peat pellets I can buy them nearby.  Sure To Grow I would have to reorder every time I ran out.

Hydroton is the same, but you are able to wash the clay balls and reuse them a few times.  Supposedly roots will eventually pierce the hardened clay and can mess up plants after several reuses, but at least I can get a few good grows out of them.

I have a huge variety of lettuce and other greens ready to go.  With only 6 'holes' in my first system (a custom built NFT), it's going to be hard figuring out what to grow.  I went ahead and planted about half a packet's worth of various lettuce seeds in my garden, spacing them out into several rows.  I will go back and pick the weaker ones out when they begin to sprout to give the best looking ones a good chance.  The weather is damp and mild (mid 70's most of the day), which lettuce enjoys.  Hopefully another heat wave won't come by and spoil the crop.

Pictures of my latest microgreen experiement.

This time I am using the light I plan on using for my lettuce hydroponics experiment and leaving it on 24 hours a day.  I am going to get a timer for the light when I switch over to hydroponics and run that light 18 on, 6 off, even though that's a bit longer than the natural day, plants seem to thrive off the extra light per day.  The light isn't anything special, it is a 48" 4 slot t8 fluorescent workshop light i bought at Lowes for about $40, and I am using GE 'Solar' t8 bulbs which put out 2900 lumens each of a color temperature around 5000k (those were only about $6 for a pack of 2).  Not great for flowering but from what i've read, should be perfect for growing lettuce.

I've been reading up on the work done by Travis Hughey who has been experimenting and designing aquaponics systems for many years.  If you are interested in aquaponics I highly encourage you to check out his Barrel-ponics manual that he provides for free on his website here:

http://www.fastonline.org/content/view/15/29/

A great design with a lot of useable ideas.  I just need to figure out how to get ahold of some blue plastic 55 gallon barrels...