• Do you need help identifying a 🌶?
    Is your plant suffering from an unknown issue? 🤧
    Then ask in Identification and Diagnosis.

Tower Garden I believe the hype!

R

rlslmshdy

I purchased my Tower Garden after watching an episode of Growing a Greener World on PBS. They did an episode on alternative growing methods. Their expert almost had an orgasm talking about the TG. I was skeptical it was actually that good. I figured they had paid for the good review. She said she'd have at least one TG every growing season. Anyways skeptical i decided take a chance bought one.
Well i made tacos last night after work. I figured i had a bulgarian carrot ripe by now. So i took a flash light outside to the TG. I havnt been really paying much attention to my plants/tower Garden because of being sick with crohns flareup. The TG holds 20 chile pepper plants. After looking closely I was blown away! I had a reaper ripe plus all my plants loaded with pods. The plants are pretty good size and continuing to grow bigger. Ive grown in bags for the past 3 years. Ive never had a reaper this early. Ive never had this type of production. Only plants that ive had production like in the TG this year has been overwintered plants. My hot paper lantern plant the pods on it are almost twice the size of my pods last year in bags. The kicker is the first 3-4 weeks i pretty much tried to kill my plants lol. PH was all over the place. PPM i went by tthe back of the bottle. I was burning my plants up. But once I got my ppm meter and ph gauge. The water was right. Man those plants have grew like weeds. Someone that knew what their doing would kick tail with thing.
 
Just teasing with the photo. But also kind of not - would love some pics. I have a tall retaining wall along my entire backyard. Ive been wondering if some sort of vertical garden would be good use of the space.

9887CA78-9418-4C17-A461-7DE336C5EF74.jpeg
 
Wow! That's definitely impressive!
 
For whatever reason, I thought you meant the wall gardens. Hence me commenting on retaining wall. But that's still super awesome.
 
Price seems pretty steep - how is it holding up? I might consider one for next year as something to try if I knew it'd get 10+ years out of it.
 
blueapplepaste said:
Wow! That's definitely impressive!
 
For whatever reason, I thought you meant the wall gardens. Hence me commenting on retaining wall. But that's still super awesome.
 
Price seems pretty steep - how is it holding up? I might consider one for next year as something to try if I knew it'd get 10+ years out of it.
Click to expand...
It is so simple to grow. It saves so much time vs. Grow bags. Its worth it to me. I did 45$ installments. As far as it lasting for 10 years. As long as you clean it regularly everything but the pump should last a long time. I havent used the pump before so i dont know the life expectancy of a water pump. Im already getting excited about production from it with overwintered plants. Plus im planning on getting a second one. Big bonus ill just move the whole unit into my basement for overwintering. 20 plants overwintered in space of one bag. In the past id only have room for 2-3 plants.
For any newbies to hydro/aero. Id recommend getting a ppm meter and ph gauge from the start. It makes things alot easier and avoids making rookie mistakes like i made. I burnt my plants up the first month.
 
But you also said before that you have to throw frozen water bottles in the reservoir everyday...  I'm not sure if I'd call that simpler than traditional containers. What happens when you want to not be at home 24/7?  LOL
 
rlslmshdy said:
Sorry I dont know why it does that to all the pics i post.
Click to expand...
 
it's because many cellphones store the actual pixel data only one way regardless of how you had the phone oriented when you took the photo.
instead of actually rotating the pixel data in the saved image, metadata in the image is used to indicate that it should be rotated later when viewed. it is then up to the software displaying the image to see this and apply the proper rotation. it seems that web browsers don't do this automatically.
 
http://sethfowler.org/blog/2013/09/13/new-in-firefox-26-css-image-orientation/
 
possible fixes are:
  • users manually do a 'proper' rotation in image editing software before uploading
  • THP applies the image-orientation CSS property to uploaded images (probably will only help firefox users)
  • THP writes a plugin or something for this forum software to automatically 'properly' rotate the images when they're uploaded. this is what i've done on my forum using imagemagick's auto-orient feature
 
solid7 said:
But you also said before that you have to throw frozen water bottles in the reservoir everyday...  I'm not sure if I'd call that simpler than traditional containers. What happens when you want to not be at home 24/7?  LOL
Click to expand...
 
 
Hmmmm, yeah, I could see the reservoir heating up. Especially if I had one down here where we had 4 days of straight 110º heat this year.
 
But the flip side is if the reservoir is large enough, and you could wrap something around to insulate a bit, then  you could go away for a while and not worry about it.
 
It's definitely piqued my interest.
 
blueapplepaste said:
But the flip side is if the reservoir is large enough, and you could wrap something around to insulate a bit, then  you could go away for a while and not worry about it.
Click to expand...
 
 
Outdoor hydro is hard and expensive.  I tried this for years.  Works great in our winters.  But past March 1, forget it.  I refuse to devote attention to keeping a reservoir cool.  It might be OK, if you recirculated through an old refrigerator/freezer or something (if not a proper chiller), but you're going to pay for that...
 
This should only be done if you're really committed, and don't mind the expense and hassle. LOL
 
If you have alot of days over 100. You water will get over 80. Youll have to do something then. I never experienced any plant problems due to heat. I just read over 80 was bad. So did the frozen bottles as a precaution. Ive done the water bottles prob 10 times. Ive been sick jus spent the night in the hospital. I havnt been doing anything to it. My plants are still doing fine. Im sorry. I love the thing. Watch the PBS show. The expert on there was amazed by it also. Plus she was further south than i am.
 
solid7 said:
 
 
Outdoor hydro is hard and expensive.  I tried this for years.  Works great in our winters.  But past March 1, forget it.  I refuse to devote attention to keeping a reservoir cool.  It might be OK, if you recirculated through an old refrigerator/freezer or something (if not a proper chiller), but you're going to pay for that...
 
This should only be done if you're really committed, and don't mind the expense and hassle. LOL
Click to expand...
I havent touched mine but once in 2 wks. Just to add water and ferts. My ph drops a little each week. I quit doing the frozen bottles. Im not sure I ever needed to do the bottles anyways. For me its been way easier than grow bags.
 
rlslmshdy said:
I havent touched mine but once in 2 wks. Just to add water and ferts. My ph drops a little each week. I quit doing the frozen bottles. Im not sure I ever needed to do the bottles anyways. For me its been way easier than grow bags.
Click to expand...
 
So I looked up the weather data in your area for the past month.  It seems odd to me that anyone can grow with hydroponics outdoors in the middle of summer. I see that you have daily temperature dips down into the low 60's, with daytime temps that are rarely exceeding the 80's.  That could very well explain why you've been so successful, while others may not have been.  Temperature is huge in hydro, and there's no easy way around it...
 
solid7 said:
 
So I looked up the weather data in your area for the past month.  It seems odd to me that anyone can grow with hydroponics outdoors in the middle of summer. I see that you have daily temperature dips down into the low 60's, with daytime temps that are rarely exceeding the 80's.  That could very well explain why you've been so successful, while others may not have been.  Temperature is huge in hydro, and there's no easy way around it...
Click to expand...
Weve had mild summer for sure. This is my first time doing hydro. Ive been using grow bags for past 3 yrs. Still though the expert on pbs lived in NC. Their summer temps had to be hotter than where im living. She loved it also
 
rlslmshdy said:
Weve had mild summer for sure. This is my first time doing hydro. Ive been using grow bags for past 3 yrs. Still though the expert on pbs lived in NC. Their summer temps had to be hotter than where im living. She loved it also
Click to expand...
 
Please do continue to post updates - even if you run into difficulties.  I am definitely interested.
 
I do have mine off the ground completely. So air flows underneath. I have 2 strips of hardwoodfloor on each side of the resivior on a rug on my patio. This helps keep cool.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top