This my first post after the little one came into our family. She is keeping us quite busy and happy. With all of us spending all the time with her, it is little difficult to keep up the blog and its demands. Gardening didn’t stall but blogging and responding to emails took the back burner. This time, blame it on the baby. This time I thought I will write a post on a system that is good when you don’t have time to look after. Here goes…

In this article we are going to see how to grow cucumber hydroponically. If you remember, I had posted a two part article on exactly this topic!. So why another post on this topic? Read on.. you will know.

When you have a vegetable garden in your terrace, watering them daily is very very important and it can become very tedious if you have too many plants growing. How do we solve this problem? Automating the watering via a drip irrigation is one way. But can be improve it further? What if we have a system in which we don’t have to water the plant at all. Sounds crazy? Impossible? One would think so..

I was looking for a system that will try to reduce maintenance if not completely avoid it. By maintenance, I mean watering, adding fertilizer etc. Since water availability is also a concern, I added another constraint. No water wastage( via drainage). In that process, I checked different hydroponic systems to see If i can achieve my goal of having a system that is very easy to maintain ( read it as no maintenance ), no need to water everyday and very easy to build. Though the goals are only 3, they are very difficult to achieve considering the fact hydroponics is known to be not “simple”. So I decided to try out a system I read about few years back. This system is called ‘Simple Non-circulating hydroponic system’ and was invented by a scientist called Kratky.

This system is the simplest of all and works like a charm* .

To build this system, you will need the following.

Requirements:

• Barrel/Drum with Lid – 100-200L capacity

• Netpots or Pots with lots of holes

• Expanded Clay

• Nutrient solution (Bloom Formulation)

• Cocopeat Pellets

• Drill machine/Hack saw blades.

I am going to give you the following steps for the system setup.

• Raise the seedlings from seeds.
• Transplanting the seedlings
• Prepare the lid and the reservoir
• Fill the reservoir with Nutrients
• Forget about it.

Step 1 – Raise the seedlings from seeds.

Expand the cocopeat pellets and sow the seeds in them. In about a week’s time, the seeds will germinate (sometimes sooner). Water them with half strength nutrient solution till they have two true leaves. If you don’t have cocopeat pellets, you can also use expanded clay/coco chips. But if you are a beginner, it is easier to use cocopeat pellets.

The pellets in their dry form should look like this:

Once you add water and expand they should look like this.

The best thing about using cocopeat pellet is it is so natural and the plant roots form as it would in soil. Regarding the water holding capacity, cocopeat pellet wins. With the biodegradable sack around it, it is my first choice for any seedling nowadays. The fabric is so thin it allows roots to penetrate through it, which is exactly what we want in a hydroponic system.A seedling germinated in cocopeat will look like the picture below. It is important to not let the pellet dry out. Once true leaves form the seedling is ready for transplanting.

Step 2 – Transplanting the seedlings

Prepare the Net pot/pot for transplanting the seedling by filling it with Hydroton. Hydroton is a brand name for expanded clay. Expanded clay is made by heating up small clay balls to a very high temperature.Due to the water contained inside, they pop up to form a light weight growing medium. Wash the expanded clay to get rid of all the dust. Once it is clean it is ready to be filled in a netpot. If you have net pots (bigger ones), then most of your job is done. If you don’t you might want to make a pot with lots of holes in the bottom. Make holes that are large enough to hold all the expanded clay. Larger holes will cause all the expanded clay to fall out the net pot into the nutrient solution. Transplanting the seedlings is very easy if you used Cocopellets. Cocopellets are also called as rooting plugs. It is as simple as just taking the seedling and placing it in another pot. Now your seedling is transplanted into a pot that contains Hydrotons. Proceed to next step.

Step 3 – Prepare the lid of the reservoir

Now this needs a little bit of work. The idea here is to make a hole large enough to make a pot fit in. Depending on the pot size, you can make a hole in the lid. If you have jigsaw/cutting machine at your disposal, then making a hole is piece of cake. If not you have have to make circular mark and use a hacksaw blade to make a circular hole. They are lots of tools available in the market for these things. Suit yourself.

In the picture below, I used the lid of a paint bucket to make a the hole. I later filled with expanded clay and transplanted the seedlings. Transplanting is as simple as taking the plants in rooting plugs and placing it over a layer of expanded clay balls and fill the rest of the pot with expanded clay. Isn’t that easy?

Step 4 – Fill the reservoir with Nutrients.

Now comes the best part. Remember I was saying how easy this system is? The drum/barrel is about ~75 ltr capacity. The barrel is filled with nutrient solution (bloom formulation) to a level such that the bottom of the netpot barely touches the nutrient solution’s top surface. When we transplant the plant, the roots would not have come out of the netpot so it may take few days for the roots to come out of the netpot and drop into the nutrient solution below. Till then care is taken to not let the netpot with expanded clay to dry out completely. Just water it with nutrient solution every morning. It will only take 3-5 days for the roots to emerge out of the pot and start to reach down for the nutrient solution. This is aided by the high humidity that is formed in the barrel.

The following picture was about a week to 10 days after the previous picture. Once the roots start to touch the nutrient solution, you can literally forget about this system. After that there is no maintenance in any form at all. For the nutrient formulation information you can refer to the Hydroponic Cucumber Production Part II

About two weeks after setting the plant on the barrel the roots have started to get a nice shape and are already looking like Santa’s beard. I am sure you might want to see how the plant looked at the time, looking at these healthy white roots.

Step 5 – Forget about it

Now you might ask me, what happens next? The answer is very simple. The plant grows taking the nutrients from the solution happily and yields all it can. As the plant grows, the nutrient solution level goes down. As the nutrient solution goes down, the root also reaches down by growing deeper. Wanna see?

In the above image, you can notice the big cucumber in the bottom that is ready for harvest and a fruit’ling ready to become a cucumber one day. The roots are no less, they grow as vigorous as the shoot and the following picture is the proof. It is so awesome to see all of the roots of a plant. I ended up showing this to most of my friends and relatives who come home and they were speechless. With conventional method of growing plants, uprooting is the only way to see the roots and that marks the end of the plant. Not in Hydroponics.

After the roots entered into the nutrient solution, I stopped taking care of the plant. Totally. No watering, No fertilizing. Just observing the growth every day, taking log of whole lot of parameters and watching out for pests. How cool is that? So how long can this plant continue ?

The plant continues to grow as long as the nutrient solution is present. In the image picture on the right above, you can observe that the roots have almost touched the bottom and there was only couple of liters of nutrients. Even then the plant showed no sign of stress except in the middle of noon. At that point, we got ~36 cucumbers from two plants. This was with 2 plants on a 75L barrel. If you double the reservoir size and reduce the plants to just one. You can reap the benefits for another month. More than the yield, I am impressed with the low maintenance part of the system. Especially when I started this cucumber plant, we had a baby and there was no time for gardening and this system came to the rescue.

There is one important detail I must mention. When the plant is growing at a good pace, the nutrient solution level goes down very rapidly. If you are in a location that is very hot it the nutrients can go down much faster. You can increase the reservoir size to suit your location. 200L is best if you can get one. One thing you cannot do is to add more nutrient solution when the tank depletes. It will mostly kill the plant.

What happens is, when the level of the nutrients go down, the roots develop lot of hairs to absorb moisture from the humid environment. When you refill it with more nutrient solution, it suffocates the roots and they will rot due to drowning. You can experiment with maintaining the level same but don’t increase the level it will definitely drown the roots.

Don’t forget to check out

Hydroponic Cucumber Production Part I & Hydroponic Cucumber Production Part II

The items/raw materials required for building such a setup can be purchased from my store Garden Guru

• Expanded Clay
• Cocopellet – Rooting Plugs
• Cucumber seeds
• Net pots (small)
• Net pots (Big) – Available at the store.

If you want more updates follow me on facebook.

On my next post, I will write about the Building an Ebb and Flow system and growing gourds in it( Bottle Gourd).

Happy gardening.

geekgardener

*Conditions apply… Naah I am kidding it does work like a charm

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Also, On Jan 8th, This blog completed 5 years. Now this sounds so less significant after the first news.

While the baby kept  me busy, I did find some time to grow spinach, Chinese cabbage and lettuce hydroponically in a all new hydroponic kit.  More details of the kits, growing methodology in the coming posts.

Thats all for now.

GG

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Many aromatic plants are in use in our everyday life. Mint, Coriander, Curry leaves, Rosemary, Sage, Thyme etc. We are gonna be covering lots of culinary herbs. Their propagation and growing ofcourse. In this post we are going to focus on Rosemary and how to propagate and grow it. Shall we?

Introduction

Rosemary is a perennial herb plant with beautiful flowers. The leaves are needle like and exude an aroma when pressed. Rosemary belongs to the same family as Mint. No wonder they smell awesome.  Rosemary is a perennial plant which means, you plant it once and it thrives in your garden for ever. It forms a nice bush and sends out lots of branches if you keep pinching them.It can add a nice texture to your garden. Besides aromatic leaves, rosemary also has beautiful flowers. Another interesting fact about Rosemary is its tolerance to drought. This plant is very hardy and handle drought very well. So don’t pamper it with too much water. Keep it dry and water  only when it dries out.

Rosemary Cutting

Propagation

Rosemary can be propagated by seeds and by stem cuttings.

From seeds

Rosemary seeds are slow to germinate so if you are the impatient kind, stay away from rosemary. It takes somewhere between 20-30 days to germinate. Sometimes faster . The germination rate is also not great. So sow little more than what you plan to grow. When the plants do germinate, take care of them by putting them in a  loose well drained mix . Rosemary hates lots of water and very cold weather. The growth rate of rosemary from seeds is very slow, by the time you harvest the leaves the first time, it will be almost an year. Nevertheless growing from seed is fun.

From Stem Cuttings:

Propagating a plant from cuttings is always fun. With a little bit of patience and good inputs needed for cutting, one can always achieve almost 100% success. Rosemary is very easy to propagate from cuttings.  Here are the list of items you need to do a propagation from cuttings

• Healthy Rosemary mother plant
• Rooting Hormone
• Sharp knife/scissors
• Potting soil
• Small cups/Propagation Trays
• Water.

We will cover the above steps one by one.

Choosing a cutting:

Choose a healthy mother plant that is free from diseases etc. Take few stem tip cuttings like the one in the picture below. Take out the last pair of leaves from the bottom of the stem. Ensure that there is a node at the step tip. Roots start from the leaf node.  You can see there is a node (where leave joins the stem) at the end of every stem.

Rosemary cuttings

 Rooting Hormone:

Rooting hormone is a substance that encourages root formation in cuttings. It is naturally occuring in plants. It is also synthetically produced for propagation purposes. Indole -3-Butyric Acid is a rooting promoting hormone. There are several products in the market. This time I used a product called “Rootomax”. It is a mix of IBA and Humic Acid.

Rootomax

Potting soil

For propagating cuttings, all you need is a sterile mix that drains well. There is no need for any fertilizer at all. However a dash of compost wont hurt. The following are good candidates for propagating cuttings. Cocopeat, Perlite, Vermiculite, Sand, Cocohusk or even regular soil.

Take good a container and fill it with potting media up to an inch or two from the top.Ensure the mix is draining well and also the container you have taken has a drainage hole. Water should not be stagnant in the container at all.

Rootomax

Now take the cutting and dip the end in the rooting hormone.  Ensure the bottom node is properly covered with the hormone powder. Then you can stick it in the potting mix.  Once you have stuck all the cuttings, give it a nice watering. The right time to do this is either in the evening or morning.

Remember the cover it up and form a dome to keep the humidity in. Covering with a dome is required with most of the plants. This saves from the plant from dehydrating and keeps it fresh. Rosemary is a little bit different. Since it hates lots of moisture, you may want to remove the cover after a week or so. Just don’t keep it in the hot sun since that will make the plants wilt. After, say a week or two later, you can remove the cover. Keep an eye on the cuttings every day and watch  for any rotting or browning of leaves.

Propagation Dome

The cuttings should root approximately in 2-3 weeks. In winters, the rooting may take a little more time than summer.Patience is the key. Just check for roots coming out of the bottom of the cup. If you had used a pot or something like that, gently pull the stem and if the plant offers resistance then it has roots! Yay!

If everything goes well, you will get this

Rooted Rosemary cutting

Rooted Rosemary

Now that the cutting has rooted, all you need to do is find a home for the cutting and pot it up. Next time you visit your garden, don’t forget to take a pinch of rosemary leaf and enjoy the aroma!..

What herb should we post about next? Sage? Thyme? Got a suggestion ?

Ciao
GG

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This year, things got bigger and the number of gardeners have grown so much that poor GG’s house/greenhouse is just not enough to house all green-hungry gardeners. So I joined hands with Oota From your Thota folks for this event.”Oota from your thota” literally means Food from your garden.

This time the kitchen garden day is on Aug 26th 2012. Its  a Sunday, so more reason to drop by. The venue for the event is

Shree Ramana Maharishi Academy for the Blind,
CA-1B, 3rd Cross, 3rd Phase, J P Nagar,
Bangalore, Karnataka, India, Pin: 560 078.

This time , we are putting up a stall in the event for all your gardening supplies/queries. All sorts of gardening products are available for sale. We are more than happy to answer all your queries. If you need anything specific, send us an email to sales@gardenguru.in

The whole of Garden Guru Team will be there at the stall. That means, our garden guru store in Bilekahalli, is closed this Sunday 26th Aug.

Also, there is a surprise for early birds to our stall.  Let me just say, get your gardening general knowledge polished… you might need it.

Once again, Garden guru welcomes you all to the Kitchen Day Celebration.

Check us out.

See you all at the event

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I am opening a garden store in Bangalore. Yes, the brick and mortar kind… I was busy with this last few months.

The store’s name is Garden Guru.  It will be open from this Sunday, 8th 0f July 2012. 

I am in this venture along with another green evangelist, Roxy Philip.Roxy Philip is a hydroponic enthusiast and he has experience in growing lettuces in greenhouse in Denmark.

Please drop by on Sunday to my brand new store.

A little bit of history is required on why I came with the store.

From the day I started this blog, the main intention was the following.

• Promote urban gardening
• Share the knowledge on gardening and horticulture.
• Provide detailed methodologies for growing plants in the Indian context.

I think all of the above 3 were fulfilled (atleast to some extent if not 100%) in the last 4 years of this website’s existence. 1000s of gardeners visit this site every single day. But do all of them succeed.? People who are successful, continue to garden and people who failed, thought they don’t have a green thumb. Is there a thing called ‘green thumb’?   People without greenthumb fail ?  No.. It is several small things that annoys people who start to garden.

Most of the times it was the non-availability of the materials that killed the enthusiasm of budding gardeners. There is no other to way to solve this problem but to take things in your own hands.  Another big problem in the gardening arena is below.

Most of  the people  don’t garden

those who garden don’t share

those who share don’t sell

and those who sell don’t care..

Garden Guru is an attempt to solve this problem.

A garden store by a  gardener for a gardener.

Location of our Store:

View My places in a larger map

Store Timings:   Morning : 10am-2pm

Evenings: 4pm-9pm

We are open all days of the week except on Mondays. Mondays we take off.

Store Address:

Garden Guru

Shop #4, Krisnnamurthy Complex,

60 feet Road, Shanbhough Nagappa Layout

(Opposite to Eagle Offset Printers)

Bilekahalli, Bangalore 560076

Phone: 080-42121000

 Products Available at the moment:

 Hydroponics/Potting Medium:

• Cocopeat
• Washed grade
• Washed and Carry packed
• Buffered greenhouse grade.
• Fine seedling grade
• Coco husks/chips
• Grow bags
• Ready to Use Planter Bags
• Perlite
• Vermiculite
• Hydroton

Drip Irrigation Accessories: (Coming soon)

• Drip Tubes
• Fittings
• Submersible Pumps
• Timers
• Emitters

Organic Inputs:

• Vegetable Seeds
• Flowering Seeds
• Medicinal Plants
• Panchagavya
• Compost
• Oil Cakes
• Neem Cake
• Pongamia/Honge Cake
• Castor Seed meal
• Cotton Seed Meal
• Organic Pesticides
• Organic Manure/Fertilizer

In organic Inputs:

• NPK Plant nutrients
• Orchid Plant food

Gardening Accessories:

• Pots
• 12″, 10″, 8″, 4″ – Black
• Ceramic Designer Pots
• Terracotta Designer Pots
• Hanging Baskets
• Tulsi Pots ( Plastic , Ceramic)
• Window Planters

There are more products expected in the coming weeks that will cover complete organic gardening spectrum. For localites, you can pick up anything anytime. For people from other states, an online shopping cart is getting ready and will be announced soon. If you need any of the items mentioed above. Send the list of items, your address and contact number to sales@gardenguru.in

This is what I was doing last few months, if you were wondering about the frequency of posts and delay in my replies.  Like the blog, I intend this store to be a helpful resource interms of encouraging budding gardeners.

With all your support , I think I can make it a successful venture.

As always, Happy Gardening and happy shopping as well.  A more illustrative and picture oriented introduction to the store is being made and will be posted in couple of days.

geekgardener.

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Back when I started this site, I never thought we would grow to where we are right now. The initial traffic was 13 visitors per month. It has been an amazing journey so far. It gives me immense pleasure when so many people write to me saying how they got inspired from this site and started gardening and this keeps me motivated.

last but not the least, watch out for new announcements in the next couple of weeks. I have a surprise waiting in store.

geek ‘happy’ gardener!

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Of all the flowering plants I grew, one of my favorites is Petunia. The reasons are very simple. It is easy to grow, flowers throughout the season and big attractive flowers with variety of colors.

Of course all these beautiful flowers come after some hard work. That’s what gardening is all about.

Lets get started:

Petunias are of different kinds

• Grandiflora – The type that produces large flowers and most popular type.
• Multiflora – Smaller than grandiflora but has lots of blossoms.
• Milliflora – Small, compact flowers.
• Groundcover- This variety spreads fast and used as a ground cover. Flower beds can be created with this variety.

Seed starting

                      Petunia seeds are very tiny. I mean very very tiny and also expensive. So don’t expect gajillion seeds in the seed packet. Based on the variety, you may get somewhere from few 10s to a 100s. The seeds look like the picture below. Sorry I didn’t place a known object in the pic to relate the size to.  They are smaller than a small mustard seed. Petunia seeds are surface sown. What it means in English is, you sprinkle the seeds on the top of the soil and don’t cover them/bury them with soil. The seed is so tiny and hence the food stored for the germination is less too. So don’t expect it to push whole lot of mud above it. Sow the seeds on the surface of the potting mix. Potting mix can be only coco peat or a combination of coco peat and compost. Since the seedlings are very sensitive, you can use 80:20 mix of coco peat and compost. Sow the seeds and then water them gently. Seeds are so tiny that they can get dislodged if water is poured over them. Cover the seeds with clear polythene sheet. Petunia needs light to germinate.

Covering the seeds with polythene sheet keeps the humidity high. Germination happens in 5-7 days. Sometimes more. Don’t get impatient. Seeds don’t know that you are a first timer, they will take their own time .  Seed starting petunias can be challenging but not impossible. Use the fresh seeds, don’t try expired seeds, they wont germinate.

Watch out for signs of growth. The moment you see a seed sprouting, immediately remove the polythene. Don’t let the media dry out.

Transplanting

Transplanting is a process moving a plant to its permanent place. Usually seedlings are raised in one place and they are transplanted to a different place. If you are raising the seedlings yourself from seeds, then transplanting is done after seedlings are about a month old. If you are buying small seedlings of petunia, from the nursery , then you need to move it to a bigger pot or something like that.

A good potting mix is required for growing flowers. To make a soil based mix, mix equal parts of red soil, compost and sand. The red soil should be the one that is used for garden purposes not the ones that are used in road construction. People sometimes get cheated. Get it from a good place. Lalbagh is ok. I will be soon making my own mixes available, if you are interested please get in touch.

Last but not the least. Location! Petunia needs good amount sunlight. At least 4 hours of sunlight. They do better when kept in full sun as well. So pick the sunny spot. Lesser the light, fewer the flowers.

Caring

Petunia needs good sunlight, well drained soil. Add a handful of compost to the pot when the plant starts flowering.  Periodically remove the flowers that start fading. Removing spent/faded flowers is called as Deadheading. This promotes more flowering.  You can continue to deadhead through out the season. If you want to save seeds, then you should NOT deadhead.

Enjoying!

You need me to tell how to enjoy watching petunia flowers? Get outta here!

Here are some petunia snaps for your viewing pleasure.

Purple Petunia

White Petunia

Petunia in a Planter

Petunias Cascading

Ok, you have grown petunias ,had them flowering and they did extremely well in that season. Next season, what are going to do.. head to the same shop/nursery pickup the same plant and grow ? Or would you like to be smart, save your own petunia seeds and grow it yourself and brag off later.. who wouldn’t like an ego boost. If you are interested in saving the seeds proceed further.

Petunia seeds are small, so first spend some time identifying the flower that is faded and withered. In the center of the flower you will notice a conical fruit bearing all the seeds in it. The idea is to let the pod dry out but before it bursts out, you come in the scene and collect the seeds. Wicked eh!

The seed pod inside the spent flower.

Seed pod full of seeds for your next season!

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The cherry tomatoes that feature in this video are actually grape shaped. They are grown in bag culture. Actually I wanted to put them in paint buckets but bag culture is simple and cheaper to setup. With automated drip setup watering the plant at regular intervals, the plants have no other job but yielding nice tomatoes.

I actually wanted to make up for a month’s delay in post by writing the complete cycle of growing cherry tomato like my previous spinach post. But with the time so less and ocean of activities happening (I will keep that for the next post), I thought this video would convey most of what I wanted to write if not all.

Here it is folks,

Hope you all enjoyed watching.
Check out my channel http://youtube.com/user/TheGeekgardener

Ciao
GG

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There are several plants one can start with. My recommendation is, always choose something that yields quickly and easy to grow. Spinach is a good candidate for starter project. Most of the times, I find myself explaining this. Hence I thought, I will make a video out of it. So without further ado, the videos of sowing spinach.

Part I

Part II

UPDATE: Part III.

UPDATE: Part IV

Hope you enjoyed watching this. If you like the videos, you can subscribe to my channel
Good luck on starting your vegetable garden.

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Thanks for such a good response on the videos. It is really motivating. Many of them wanted a video of the entire life cycle of the plant and also possible narration of growing methods along side.  That is exactly what I am doing now.

Some of the videos were shot without audio. Now, I am recording all the videos with narration. I used to think, that recording an audio/video should be very easy. You just talk..Isn’t it.. Apparently not so, when I started taking these videos. The moment I switch on the record button in the camera.. suddenly the situation changes.. one becomes all conscious, all kinds of disturbances happen only during that 10 minutes of silence you need… I have so many blooper videos which we keep watching and laughing later.. so anyway.. easy or tough, there is going to be lots of videos from now.

Here are the videos of Seedless cucumber growing in my greenhouse. Check it out

If you like these videos, don’t forget to subscribe to my channel, you can rate the videos, drop some comments/suggestions.

you can also follow me @thegeekgardener

Until next video

GG

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