Just put my hydroponics windowsill kit back to work after I cleaned it up months ago – hopefully we’ll get a nice harvest this time. Last time my mountain strawberries grow very well… they just didn’t produce any fruit. I’m hoping that was just a consequence of the plant dying off before it had a chance, and that I’ve now removed the reason for it’s death too. I think I also made the mistake of letting them grow as tall as they could, when a better idea would have been too cut them back going for more outward than upward growth.
Just spent a few hours rescuing my hydroponics greenhouse. OK, so that’s a slight exaggeration, it’s probably more realistic to call it a hydroponics TOY. But it’s been sitting on my Kitchen windowsill for many months in desperate need of some attention – all the plants are long dead…
It was doing the job of growing a strowberry plant with only water very well, but then it caught a nasty infection – almost certainly from the mouldy leftovers next to it meant for the compost heap.
So my first job was to clean up the growing medium which no doubt had remanents of the attacking spores as well as all the dead plant material. I’m not sure what the growing medium is but it looks like small white pebbles, that absord water, a bit like packing paper but harder… anyway, I had to filter all the rubbish out, so I commandeered the kitchen for its utensils.
First a filtered out the large things with the collinder, then used the strainer to get out the tiny particles – I attempted to seperate again by shaking up the particles in a bottle and by floating in water, but neither gave satisfactory seperation, but that was ok as much of the filtering had been successful.
Then to wipe out any remaining infection I boiled up the growing material in some water (the smell wasn’t very nice, you might like to cover you mouth here), now it’s sitting on the side drying. I also washed the plastic parts thoroughly, and I think it’s no ready for another go.
