Cheap Homestead Mason Jar Hydroponics

all right so on today's video we're going to be doing a little bit about Hydroponics and generally when people think about Hydroponics it's growing food in uh in water you don't have to have any soil um it doesn't take long for you to realize that you can spend an awful lot of money doing this Hydroponics thing so I have done it you know the expensive way and bought the stuff but I've also done it the cheap way and uh made my own stuff so I'm going to walk you through uh making a hydroponic set up with stuff you probably have lying around the house so there there may or may not be a shopping trip you might have to go and get some store-bought yogurt and you can you know feed that to the dog or the kids or whatever it's going to work for you um but I'm going to really try to um to limmit special tools so come on this ride we'll uh we'll do some hydroponic lettuce all right so the first couple of times I did this I used the um these are hydroponic net cups are like 15 cents a piece they're not a lot but um you have to order them online well I do cuz where I live there's no hydroponic plays if you got one down the street by all means go and buy those um but then I used a 2in hole saw to make that fit in there and I told you we wouldn't use any special tools so we're not going to do that so the first thing I did I have a lot of these a lot of homesteads have a lot of these and I have a couple different varieties I've got the wide mouth uh we really need to use quarter bigger uh the wide mouth the narrow mouth but then we have some of these the old bail tops and some of them are missing the wires so those fit perfect uh and they're just about the same size neck as the as the narrow mouth so I went to the store and I brought with me Rings just the Rings I didn't bring the uh the jars with me because I thought they'd already think I was odd and then I tried on containers pre-made plastic containers to fit my stuff and I found quite a few different varieties that fit my rings so this is uh made by Stony field oh my yog it's not bad um but the container fits the container also fits in the jar without a ring which is good because we're going to have water in this and the Rings will Rust uh the brown cow fits in the wide mouth uh I I got these cuz they had peanut butter stuff in them but in the end they don't hold they don't they fall through the Rings so those aren't going to work for me um that's one of the uh om my yoges those are great and the Greek yogurt really popular right now that doesn't really fit down in but I think you could make those work if that's all you had um I like these this is uh the Dan and Light and Fit carbon sugar control and that fits in a small mouth and these are really cheesy plastic and uh they're going to be easy to work with so when we go on to our next step that'll help us out quite a bit so I told you we wouldn't use anything special so I'm going to try to not use anything special but we do have to have some stuff my um this is a breakaway you see the little things you can break it off so you get a nice sharp point to it um that breaka away so you're using a sharp Tool uh be careful when you're doing this but if you poke in there and you got to go all the way down to the bottom remember you're trying to make it look something like this it's got to be able to hold the plant so I just cut down around there careful not to cut myself and I got rid of those little those little things and that works pretty slick and that'll let the Roots come down through which is just exactly what we want and that's um that would be my second favorite option and there those cups that I showed you are really easy to cut my favorite option is if you have one this is is just a wood burner or a solder iron let it get good and hot make sure you're working in a ventilated in place because um this will smoke and nice and easy now I didn't take the paper off it'll burn off and we just go right down and I went across the bottom a little bit I put a hole in the bottom put another hole in the bottom um but I'm trying to make this look sort of like like these which are the store-bought ones so and these will last for more than one one planting to grow lettuce indoors takes uh about 6 weeks uh 45 days or so so it depends on how much light you're your window I happen to have a really good south facing window here so this to me is the absolute easiest I'm not worried about cutting myself uh I can hold it up by the rim and I can be vaguely artistic if I want [Music] to so that's going to work just fine for us so I'm going to finish that up and then we'll go on to the next step so I got a couple of these ready uh in the end when I went through I really don't like the size of these the ones for the wide mouth jar and I bet you can make them work but when you see the rest of the process I think I think you'll understand what I'm saying so I use what you got but if you have something that's small enough to fit in a smallmouth jar I really think that's the way to go so we're going to continue with our Smallmouth jar um next we're going to take a gallon of water and our fertilizer which this is actually generic Miracle Grill it's all it is um this is a guaranteed plant analysis of 1535 it's just a all over plant food um I do kind of like the mirac grow tomato formula it has different stuff in it um the directions on here for indoor plants because you're going to be raising these outdoor plants indoors is uh one teaspoon per gallon of water apply every two weeks but we're not going to be applying every two weeks these plants are going to live in this solution so or for constant feeding use a mild Solution by mixing a/4 teaspoon with one gallon of water and apply every time your plant needs water which is easy because our plants are going to live in water and I have my handy dandy4 teaspoon and this isn't a heaping teaspoon kind of environment this is a level teaspoon kind of environment if you can figure that out with this stuff it's kind of granulated mine looks like it's wet that looks like we're going to put that in there we'll cap that up will close that back up because if you don't it turns rock solid put that back in there and we'll shake now that fertilizer was blue and you can see there's just barely a blue tin in here that's exactly what you want so now we'll take our quart jar and we'll take our thing that we're going to put in and we want to fill the quart jar to about A4 of an inch over the bottom so not not all that so so can you see that the bottom the plastic is sticking down in there just a little bit okay so I'm going to reach up here and grab my plants about a week and a half ago I started these uh there is two different kinds I have a a red lettuce and a green um and these ones over here those are started in the Hydroponics hang on I got them right here the AOK starter plugs from groan this is hydroponic Rock wo and it's actually Rock that's heated up and then it's rock wool so those are inert they don't have anything in them but you have to go someplace special to buy those and I told you we wouldn't have to so you might recognize these that is a jiffy pot they come compressed and you add water and they inflate and we're going to take that Jiffy pot and put it right down in there so you can see now why it wouldn't be so great to have the larger container because that thing would just swim around in there it's too too too much so I want to show you on these let's see if you can see it can't see it on that one can't see it on that one the yeah wow the uh The Roots will actually start to grow out through the sides and that's exactly what we want you can see this one has a root that's already fallen down through the bottom and it'll feed through this solution this is called the crack key uh the crack key method of Hydroponics and what happens is as the plant uses the water it uh the water level drops and you're not supposed to add water because this is a quart you may have to at some point um but you're supposed to leave a good air space the plant will actually develop air roots that absorb the oxygen that's why you don't have to have any electricity you don't have to uh aate the Water none of that so we do have to protect the water from light because it we have light on it it'll grow algae and algae will eat up the nutrients in the water so take a piece of newspaper and I folded it down to the height and I wrap it [Music] around we want to exclude the light this is a a single full piece of newspaper and then I take my handy dandy packing tape and I put that right on there and then I want to exclude as much light as I possibly can so I have there they are uh rubber bands and I'll put a rubber bander on the top so the great thing about this is is that plant grows because it's pretty pathetic down in there right now as that plant grows you can pop that off and pull that out and check the roots and put it back down and everybody will be happy um but we've excluded light so this is pretty easy setup we get going um takes about 45 days so if you started uh two of these a week you'd have two heads of lettuce every week uh well starting in about six weeks so take our little our little plant there we drop him in make sure he stays standing up so the bottom has to be touching the liquid and then we take our newspaper I already had this one ready put that around there and put that around there so those are ready I'm going to keep those in a bright south facing window um but these the bail top jars this one actually has a crack it won't hold the wire anymore those are perfect for this so if you happen to have some of those lying around you know you're not supposed to really use them for canning anymore we like to keep Dry Goods in them but they work just peachy for this so there you go beginning Hydroponics I I'll get you some pictures at the end of the video so you can see what these look like when they are uh much Fuller grown and you can do lettuces and you can do Bach Choy uh any simple shortterm planting would be just fine for the for the crack ke method so good luck

Channel: Mefford Endeavors LLC

Views: 1,209,353

Keywords: +mason jar, +hydroponics, +food, +cheap, +grow your own, +simple, +homestead, Mason Jar (Product Category), winter garden, mefford, endeavors, morris, Connecticut (US State), mason, jar, fresh, lettuce, winter, gardening

Id: A-DNrQoKcnc

Length: 13min 46sec (826 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 08 2015