The Indoor Winter Garden - Part 1
...the Kratky hydroponics experiment
Welcome to my first Newsletter.
I am excited to get to share this journey with you. I hope that you will find these weekly newsletters to be informative and inspiring and, if nothing else, entertaining.
The beautiful thing about gardening, in its many forms, is that the interest in it can come and go during different seasons of life and can vary as widely as there are types of plants and trees to grow. Our childhoods often hold the key to what brings us pure joy, sparks our curiosity and leaves us amazed and in wonder of God’s creation. Some of my earliest and most beloved childhood memories revolve around gardening and animal husbandry.
A few years ago I began making a true effort to have a winter garden, where I normally only took advantage of 3 seasons. Last year was especially good with the more mild temperatures we had over winter. As a seasoned gardener, I know not to take this for granted. This year is no exception as some back to back low temperatures in the teens took their toll on my cold loving kales, cabbages, beats and carrots that were hoop house covered. Even the kales and celery in the cold frame are alive, but stressed. However, my disappointment is slightly muted by some success I am having with my winter experiment with the Kratky hydroponic method.
I can’t change the Plant Hardiness Zone I grow in unless I move, but I can step out of my comfort zone.
In mid-November 2021, I wanted to think of something I could do indoors this year besides waiting to do cuttings, propagations and seed starts in February and March. What if I could have some sort of indoor herb and vegetable harvest by late February or early March?
Truth be told, hydroponics has never been a growing method that has been of great interest to me. I think I had a sort of gardening purest prejudice against hydroponics to cover for the fact that I was intimidated by it. Without knowing much about it, I had labeled it as something that required too much equipment and seemed like something a chemist would enjoy.
During my investigation of this method of growing I plotted a plan to make it as simple as possible so that I could chip away at the intimidation factor and hopefully still have some success. I watched several different YouTube videos before settling on the Kratky method. There was a man in NYC who had several pepper plants growing successfully in buckets with their primary source of light coming from the large windows in his small apartment. I thought, if he can do it in that living situation, what excuse do I have not to try it?
I chose the Kratky method in particular because it wouldn’t require having a bubbler system to keep the nutrient rich water stirred up and aerated. Turns out that plants will grow the different types of roots they need to grow. There are air roots and water roots. So the trick with the Kratky method is to give them an air pocket in your bucket for those “air roots” to develop and have access to air. It is just a matter of not filling your container all the way up.
Also, I went with premixed hydroponic solutions that have a mixing chart with them to take the guess work out of proportions of nutrients I needed for different stages of the plants’ lives. I chose seed varieties that had shorter days to maturity (under 90 days) and were known to be more compact varieties. I am currently growing lemon basil, a small pickling cucumber, a small sweet pepper and a cherry tomato. I started 2 to 5 of each of these seeds with the wet paper towel method and then transferred the sprouts to soaked rockwool, placed them in the baskets with clay pebbles (to keep light from reaching the water) and suspended these over 1 quart jars (wrapped in mylar) and placed under grow lights.
There are steps to “up potting” the plants, but this is really no different a concept than starting seeds and moving them into bigger containers with potting mix before putting them in the ground in the garden. See the picture below to see what the lemon basil looked like 10 days after I started the sprouting process and moved them into their first container. Throughout the entire growing process I have used either fluorescent or LED grow lights for at least 16-18 hours a day. I have been using reflective walls in my homemade “grow chambers” for two seasons and it works better than just putting plants under grow lights alone. All the containers are wrapped in mylar to reflect light away from the containers to prevent growth of algae in the nutrient solution.
Once roots had grown down into the water of this quart sized jar it was time to move it up into the 5 gallon bucket. It was just a matter of scaling up the container and moving the net cup with the plant growing in it. I only placed about 4 gallons of water in the bucket, but enough that the roots could reach it. The nutrients were mixed based on that volume. About every two weeks I put more nutrients in and add a little more water, but am cautious to maintain an air gap. I was able to start harvesting and using some of the lemon basil at about 4 weeks into the growth cycle, as well as taking cuttings for starting other plants.
There are more details on what supplies I needed to gather before getting started, where I sourced them from, how I prepared the 5 gallon buckets and built a grow chamber that would allow climbing vegetables like cucumbers and tomatoes to be able to be supported as they grew and started to produce fruit and how pollination is achieved. However, I can see how this process could already sound more overwhelming than I intended! You’ll have to let me know in the comments if you want to know more about that.
So far, I am very pleased with how this foray into hydroponics is going. In my mind the true test is if I get cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes. I’m especially encouraged by the blossoms and fruiting bodies I see on the cucumbers and the peppers this week. If all else fails, I’ve had success with the delicious lemon basil.
Its become more and more evident to me that to grow as a gardener you have to be willing to step outside of your comfort zone, be fearless in your experimenting and stay curious. The rewards can be delicious!