Growing Tons of Vegetables in Water! Hydroponic Growing!

see if we can get the roots out of there look at the roots on this paper plant what's up guys this is Daniel from arms family homestead and we're out in the high tunnel early this morning it's gorgeous outside Oklahoma has had some of the most beautiful weather for about the last couple weeks we're not gonna be working in the soil today I'm going to go over and kind of review some hydroponic experiments I've been working on so last year you guys saw us grow cucumbers in 55 gallon barrels and we're doing that again this year kind of just getting that started but I've been working on a few other little kind of somewhat experimental things for me this is not a new method of growing basically all we're doing is the crack key style of hydroponic growing which means we don't have any aeration it would be aquaponics basically if we introduced aeration or fish or something hydroponics is kind of like an off-grid growing in a water solution pretty simple method of growing and I'm having some pretty good results we are doing this in the high tunnel but don't think that's the only way that you can do this so stick around towards the end of the video I'll take you up to the patio and show you some progress on a hydroponics tub that I've been working on up there that's completely exposed to the elements and has actually gone through a couple hail storms but we'll get to that so let's start off here and I'll show you what I got going on we're going so there's a couple different projects right here one is a cucumber growing and a five-gallon bucket so this cucumber plants probably about a month old or so it's doing really really well just a five gallon bucket drill the hole on the top drop the plant in there and the roots I can't even fit the root ball out of that top of that I'm not gonna try to mess it up but we grew cucumbers in a five-gallon bucket last year with some success until it just got super hot what I mainly want to focus on today though is this plastic tote and how I built this and what goes into this and what I was going on here so I know that these bok choy look terrible I've got two different varieties of bok Chile growing in the high tunnel this one variety specifically has bolted on me really really bad the other variety looks awesome I'll go show those to you in a minute but we're doing really really well these are and I'd have to look at look it up and figure out the exact date I've got some pictures I'll drop a few pictures in there if I can find them when we started these this is a lettuce here and guys we've been picking food off of all this stuff so this is not just untouched lettuce we've been picking obviously it's just growing like crazy this is called Tatsu a first time I've tried growing this in a hydroponic solution and this is kind of a miniature version of a Tatsu similar to bok choy it's got some really cool stems on it it's a really nice leafy Asian green and this by far has been my favorite leafy green this year growing in hydroponics so like I said this is five plants growing in one i believe these are like a 23 gallon tote I bought them on Amazon I'll get more into that in just a little bit but you can see look at all those roots in there and with these being black totes there's no there's no algae growing in here at all it blocks up most all of the sunlight and I don't really have any issues with mosquitoes I guess because we've got all the holes covered up priests and ugly with with the way the net cups are and the plants and all the roots but let me show you what goes into building that real quick now as I said we just started off with a tote that I bought on Amazon you can buy these at pretty much any big-box store or Walmart or anything this is kind of a heavy duty model you know a lot of them are real plastic real thin flimsy plastic these are pretty heavy-duty I think they'll hold up to the Sun just a little bit longer than some of those others but it's pretty pretty simple concept all I did was take my tub and just kind of measure out a layout I wanted five plants in each one so it took a whole saw on my drill and just drilled into the lid so I put two one two just like the number five on a and that spacing seems to work out really well if you had a different size tote guys you don't have to buy these exact totes you use five-gallon buckets any sized tote just a container to hold water but you can drill a hole in the lid so once you get your holes drilled then you use little net pots once you get your holes drilled then you move to these little net pots so this is just a a cup that's got holes all in the bottom of it now you could use like a Styrofoam cup or a plastic cup and just cut a bunch of holes in it something to hold your plant once you set it down in there and this will just sit flush on top of the plastic and then we use these clay pebbles it's actually called hydroton I believe and the concept here is this isn't necessarily to hold the water this is to support your plant so you're going to take one little plant and put in there and you can tease the roots and pull all the soil off wash all the soil off if you want or you could just use like a soil block or pull it out of a six pack and actually get most of the dirt off and put in there you don't have to get all the dirt off don't worry about that but put one little seedling in there one little plant I've never really started my hydroponics from seed in these pots I'm not saying it's impossible but I got I grow a lot of things from seed or even just go to the nursery and buy six pack of lettuce anything will work but put one little plant in there and then you just pack the the clay pebbles around your plant and the clay pebbles support it and then you just set your neck cup down in there which obviously I don't have a whole drill but it would just sit flush down in your container so when you fill your container full of water basically you don't want to drowned your plants so these plants that go in here need oxygen that's why a lot of people put air stones in there and air pump and that gives those roots oxygen but in the crack key method you don't use any electricity you don't use any air stones or bubbles so the plants grow what are called air roots so they'll have roots that come down into the water solution but they'll also have little fine roots up here at the top that absorb oxygen so when you fill your container you only want to get about maybe a quarter of an inch of water or so in the bottom of this cup if you put too much water if you get it to where this thing sits down in the water too deep you'll drown your plant you just won't ever be able to take off because you'll just immediately drown it now once you've got your container set up you got your plant ready to go in one important thing that you don't want to forget obviously it's fertilizer because these plants are not going to grow without food they need nutrients to survive so you're going to need a good water-soluble hydroponic style fertilizer if you just go to the store and buy just a regular ten twenty ten or triple 13 or something you're gonna have a hard time getting your plants to to really do well in that because it's not a good water-soluble now there's lots of good hydroponic fertilizers out there especially in the last few years since a lot of states have approved the legalization of marijuana of growing marijuana there's a lot of hydroponic marijuana companies out there so there are a ton of good hydroponic fertilizers but what I use is just a good old trusty master blend now I got this this is not something I came up with I got a lot of information from MHP gardener Bobby has grown hydroponics for years you can check him out on YouTube at MHP gardener the 55-gallon barrel method that I'm doing came from my good buddy Leon from gardening with Leon he's grown a ton of cucumbers and 55-gallon barrels but the master blend is a three part fertilizer so the the master blend tomato and vegetable vegetable formula this one's a four 18:38 and then you mix in calcium nitrate which is a 15 point 500 and then the last part is Epsom salt and you can find lots of different instructions on how to mix this up I'm not going to go into that in great detail on here there are websites out there just google master blend fertilizer mixture and there's calculators you can put in for the number of gallons or the dimensions of your container and it'll give you exactly how much to mix it'll say either what your mixture is for tomatoes or lettuce so think about it like this either a leafy green or a vegetable that produces a wouldn't it just be a fruit though anyways good water-soluble hydroponic fertilizer so I just really enjoy experimenting with a lot of different ways of growing you guys know we do the hydroponic stuff we've got our self wicking tubs we've got several videos on those they work really well and obviously just your typical raised beds I mean our raised beds are just doing phenomenal right now check out our squash and zucchini we're fixing to be eating squash and zucchini really really soon there's our first zucchini and then right down here we've got a squash actually that we could already pick if we wanted well let her we'll let it fill out for another couple days and then these are my favorite these are called Zephyr squash they've got that green end on them this yellow squash on the market right there Zephyr squash so let's take a look at a couple 55 gallon barrels these are food grade 55 gallon plastic barrels actually I got these from Leon he said they came from a Walmart and believe it or not what was in these was the liquid that you get when you buy those roasted chickens they put a little liquid in there apparently that was chicken juice anyways we're using it for cucumbers now so these two cucumbers have only been in here for I don't know a couple weeks I set them up just like I showed you and you can see there's still a little bit of soil I started those in a soil block back to my my clay pebbles in there and this plants probably what eight inches tall well let's look at the roots look at those pretty white roots reaching down into our nutrient solution and we grew a ton of cucumbers in these barrels last year and I don't think this year will be any different this one I'll take a look at this one the roots aren't reaching down too far yet but look how pretty and clean and white their roots are now over time the roots let's get that down in there so over time the roots will kind of get a little bit Brown looking a little bit covered in algae and that's pretty normal probably in those tubs or those barrels without having air circulation there's going to be some algae buildup so we haven't tried growing tomatoes hydroponically yet I know it can be done I haven't stepped off out into that yet but this year I am experimenting with some peppers I'm going to show you a bell pepper plant guys these I planted all my peppers at the same time almost I mean within a couple days of each other they were all in the ground or in the water okay so I'm going to start outside first and show you what they look like in the ground trying to survive out here all right so here's here's a pepper plant grown in the garden probably six inches tall that one kind of got nibbled by the frost just a little bit but I mean you can see our peppers are growing but they're not doing exceptional out here just yet then we'll move inside to the high tunnel which there's a few watermelon radishes behind these but there's a pepper plant that actually got nibbled off by a goat when it was small but here's one that didn't so this is probably Oh ten inches tall and it's it's doing okay and here are a couple that were planted in self wicking tubs at the same time I mean they're very healthy looking pepper plants they're not just taken off but they are fixing to start blooming and they're growing they're doing what they're supposed to now how about one growing hydroponically this is my first ever hydroponic pepper plant but as you can see it is it's growing so much faster than anything else we're fixing the bloom just like on the self we can tell peppers but the size of the stems I mean we're fixed we're we're just way ahead on the hydroponic ones see if we can get the roots out of there look at the roots on this paper plant so there's the plant and then the roots it's just doing incredible so I'm just really excited to see how this bell pepper plant turns out grown hydroponically how the peppers compare the ones grown in the soil or in the self wicking tubs so before we go up to the house and show you that the tubs and containers up there I told you I would show you the difference in the two varieties of bok choy that I've got growing in the ground I just put the wrong one in the self in the hydroponic tubs I may have to go back and grow some more it's just going to get too hot for bok choy pretty soon but so check this out there's one of my raised beds in the greenhouse this is the Tatsu that that I showed you in the containers over there a while ago and then on the back is that variety of bok choy that's bolting really bad so I need to get those out of here they bolted I'm just letting them flower because that brings in a bees but check out this little magical bok choy right here isn't it gorgeous it's a smaller variety but it is just booming doing great in the taut soy this stuff we juice a lot of it we put it in stir Fry's we put it in salads I mean these little leafy greens like this are just phenomenal and since I know you guys are gonna ask what variety of bok choy and Tatsu a that is a lot of my seeds come from Luke from my gardener he grows a ton of good vegetables but he's also sell seeds on my gardener calm now these seeds didn't come from in my gardener I bought these from Baker Creek so here's the tot soy it's a doesn't have a specific name I guess it's just called Tatsu a on here but if you want to want to look into that and go to Baker Creek sip it's actually rare seeds calm I believe you can check those out there and then the little miniature small bok choy that's doing really really well it's called Shanghai green choy and as you can see they're a smaller variety a lot of bok choy you have a really white stem that kind of has a green stem but oh man there they're both great varieties while we walk up to the patio we'll check those plants out but if you're looking to get into any of this kind of stuff it's it's a lot of fun just to play with I enjoy it but you can grow a lot of food in these little hydroponic tubs and buckets and things you don't have to have anything specific except you know the fertilizer is pretty important but just remember if you're looking for any of this stuff the fertilizers the the net pots the clay pebbles I bought all this stuff on Amazon and I will leave links in the description box you can go check that out pretty simple easy to find stuff a lot of it you can get locally except maybe the net pots and the clay pebbles all right so this tub here obviously is just sitting out on our patio it's gone through a couple hail storms it doesn't look perfect there are a couple things that you might have to do differently when you're growing on your patio mainly one of them being when it rains you're gonna get water in your tub you're gonna get extra water what are you doing back up Bella I'm talking here back up so this tub is not growing it's probably not as big as the one in the high tunnel but it's right next to our kitchen so we have been eating the lettuce we've picked it a lot of lettuce off here the bok choy looks a little beat up from the hail but we've been eating it this is actually a couple Swiss chard plants and I love Swiss chard for juicing and stuff and it's doing really well in here Bella get back the tot suey as you can see compared to the one in the high tunnel is not doing as well but I mean guys they're still growing they're still doing good the roots aren't aren't as white and I think that probably has to do with the rainfall because we're getting you know new water introduced so a lot of our fertilizer solution is diluted so after it rains a big rainstorm comes in you know a couple inches of rain I have to take some water out remember because our our roots will get drowned in there but our tops still full of water probably should add in a little fertilizer as you know we have to take water out since it's not in quite as a controlled environment as the in the greenhouse but it absolutely works and since we're here we might as well give you guys an update on on these two vertical planters these were from green stock they sent these to us we made a video on on how they work a few weeks ago they're exploding this one especially I'll talk about that one and what we're going to be doing different over there a little bit this vertical planter on our patio is amazing because it saves us from having to go all the way the garden to get a few dreams or a few herbs but wow it is just blowing up same time with the bok choy we trying to bolt but we've got Swiss chard bok choy lettuce beets mostly for the greens for salads and juices spinach is trying to bolt on me a little bit but the herbs this cilantro oh my gosh this cilantro is huge Houston's little mint plant so herbs are doing exceptionally well in here the strawberries aren't really liking it but that's probably mostly because our patio is pretty shaded so they're probably not getting enough sunlight but they're surviving they're blooming now the other one I went ahead and pulled all those strawberries out because I want to put more herbs in there since we're literally right next to the kitchen I think this is the perfect place for herbs but this was the one that we planted on video for you guys about what was that two weeks ago or so and you can see it's it's doing well I mean look at that little bok choy right there in it pretty nut tot soy different comes different kinds of lettuce spinach so I will leave a link to these in the description box okay look who showed up there they're a really cool American company small family-owned but works great self watering vertical planter so guys I hope that helps somebody out just a little bit remember the hydroponic stuff it's a fun experiment it's a great way to grow a lot of vegetables in a very small area you can do that on your patio on your porch you know even in a windowsill if you had a small bucket you could do this in a 1 gallon bucket in a windowsill grow a head of lettuce in grow I promise then you can pick fresh lettuce right out of your window the vertical planners worked great go check those guys out Green stock I will leave a link to those in the description box plus all of the Amazon links to all of the hydroponic stuff if you're wanting to get into that I think you'll really enjoy it it's a lot of fun it's an interesting way to get kids involved in growing stuff I mean what kid wouldn't be interested in and just growing that stuff in water it's just kind of like a little small miracle really what you say you are all right so guys like I said be sure to check out the description box for all the links if you have any questions leave them in the comments we'll get a good conversation going there a lot of other people out there that can answer questions I try to get to as many comments as I can but between YouTube and Facebook we get about five to eight hundred comments on every video we try but anyways guys that's all I've got for today thanks for watching we hope you enjoyed it y'all have a great day and as always we'll see you on the next video

Channel: Arms Family Homestead

Views: 463,425

Rating: 4.9323983 out of 5

Keywords: Arms family homestead, farming, homesteading, how to, container gardening, growing cucumbers, growing cucumbers in barrels, growing cucumbers vertically, hydroponics, hydroponic farming, hydroponic cucumbers, gardening with leon barrels, mhpgardener, mhpgardener kratky, mhpgardener dutch buckets, mhpgardener fertilizer, masterblend 4-18-38, masterblend fertilizer, garden barrel, complete growing guide, hydroponics nutrients, greenstalk, greenstalk vertical planter

Id: bSC1_qLnJB4

Length: 20min 34sec (1234 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020