Hydroponics
Sprout Farm had a strawberry ‘faze’ twenty years (or so…) ago. For three maddening weeks in June we woke up early, crawled around on our hands and knees, picking berries. We then would sit at the end of the driveway selling quarts of strawberries until afternoon.
After a few years we realized it was way too much work!
Last year we started our second strawberry faze. This time we were smart and invested in a hydroponic pot system from Verti-gro.
The hydroponic system is a vertical stack of square insulated pots. Each pot is offset from the one below by 45 degrees (caddy corner). Plants are then put into the exposed corners of the pots.
The pots are not filled with soil. Instead they are filled with a ‘medium’ of pearlite & vermiculite. To give the medium a little bit of weight we added a little bit of peat moss. Just a little…
To water the stacks of pots, water is dripped into the top pot of each stack. The water then flows down through holes in the bottom of each pot to the pot below. The power of gravity at work!
When we first planted the strawberry plants, they didn’t look like much. In fact, some of the plants arrived frozen! We crossed our fingers, offered up sacrifices of rainy weekends to the sun gods and waited.
After a slow start including gloomy weekends and many cool days, the strawberry plants are starting to look like more then just sticks. If we looked closely, we could even find flowers!
The local chickadee population considered some of the hydroponic pots to be an excellent spot to nest. Here is a few seconds of video showing just how persistent the chickadee’s are as they try to work through bird netting.
Verti-gro website
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The vertical pot system was pretty neat, but we didn’t stop there!
Next to the field of pots we started a field of ‘grow bags’. These 3 gallon plastic bags have a few drainage holes on the bottom and are filled with the same ‘medium’ as the vertical pots.
The grow bags are going to hold tomato plants. These particular plants were started in seed trays a few weeks ago and kept in the green house during the cool spring.
With the warm weather arriving, the tomatoes have been transplanted into the grow bags, with the root ball put several inches below the medium surface.
The type of tomato plants we are growing is a ‘bush’ type plant, so no staking will be needed. The plastic matting will keep pests from coming up through the ground to attack.
