Thank you both of you
By "HP areo" you mean "High Pressure Aeroponic" ? Because I already stopped by
an article (french sorry) about it and it sounds very interresting. The fact that Ultraponic makes 5μm droplets whereas HP Areo makes 50μm droplets was one of my concern. I don't know if the nutrients are able to reach the roots at 5μm. But HP seems more difficult, and you need more materials (HP pump & fogger) wich takes some space (and I don't have some).
I found
your thread, and your pepper looked awesome ! And when I say "awseome" I mean absolutely INCREDIBLE !! (did you top them to have that "Y" style ?). I will definitely look more into HP aero
honestly thats just the way frutenses and bact's grow. they get real tall and leggy then split into 4's or 3's with lots of small uniform leaves.
chininses split way way lower down, and get the real big wide leaves.
all i did to that plant was remove the lower foliage.
yea the biggest drawback is the initial cost.
however i must disagree with you space concerns. my system was spread out onto a sheet of MDF because i wanted to be able to easily service it. however if you wanted... you could easily fit the entire system into a much much smaller footprint. you could even get a much smaller accumulator... less than a gallon if necessary. i suspect you could fit the system inside a 5 gallon bucket if you really tried hard. the distribution end of the system is just a system of tubing similar to regular drip irrigation tubing.
i also have to disagree with your assessment of my plants health lol.
IMO, those plants were miserable, the roots ran out of space very quickly, and the center rootmass died. It took me a very long time to come to terms with the fact that frutenses just cant take intense HPS lighting. the leaves were rolled and damaged when the light was any closer than 18" off of the canopy. DESPITE any amount of direct airflow over the plant canopy. if i did it again i would either not even bother growing large rooted, longer term plants, or if i did i would get much much larger containers. probably atleast 20 gallons PER PLANT... for a full blast 120 day+ grow.
IMO HP or AA aero is super well suited for small plants like leafy greens. not so much for big rooted plants like toms or peppers. the roots just spread out way to much, and you need alot bigger containers.
edit:
with respect to the 5micron vs 50 micron, i dont remember exactly, but i remember there being a number of studies that used 50 micron aerosols to achieve really impressive rates of growth. it seems like the studies were aimed at growing stuff for space flight or w/e, so its possible the original studies never even encompassed large vegetable plants at all. if you do ever get a chance to dig those studies up, id appreciate it if you could link them to me.
i remember reading cannabis grows using just fog transducers, and the plants were dwarfed severely, it seems like the tiny droplets simply do not have the ability to get the plant enough water.
the roots were insanely fuzzy, but very small and not growing outwardly. in HP aero you will see that the roots continue to grow the fish boney roots and spaghetti long roots, its just that they are all covered in fine white hairs. the droplets you will see, come to rest on these hairs kinda like dew on a spider web.
if you think about it. volume increases by the cube of the radius. so a drop that is 10x larger radius is going to be like ~ 1000x times the volume of the 1x droplet.
i think it will be worth your time to look into HP or AA before making the jump. its really not that complicated, it is just expensive.
