Hydroponic garage garden – Tips & traps

After winter dramas and a couple of months off, the garage garden is back in full swing but not without issues.
Who knew ants could be farmers?

Check out the 2nd story build video for my diy NFT hydroponics system https://youtu.be/vm6gcJ-nXpk
And here’s the original system rundown https://youtu.be/ess21Jf2Uok

Good day there I’m a hydro hack and you may remember me from such videos as the garage nft series now I’m also a bit of a YouTube hack because I haven’t posted anything for about uh 4 months and that video was over a month old when I posted

It that was back in July which is the middle of winter here in the Bass Coast region of Victoria for those International alley viewers that is the southernmost state of the Australian Mainland but now I need to try and catch you up because I’ve got an exciting new

Hydroponics project going on and I’d really like to show to you but first I feel like I need to provide closure to all of those people who wanted to see what happened in the garage nft back in August when it was cold and nothing was growing I actually shot all the material

For a season finale video but I never got around to editing it and cutting it together and posting it so this next part of this video is that video then at the end I’ll show you what’s going on in the present day in the garage nft that

Is right at the start of summer early December then in my next video I’ll take you through my exciting new outdoor hydroponic veggie garden but now let’s Flashback 4 months to colder times good day there and welcome back to my garage nft and my propagation shelf it’s been 5

Weeks since my last video and things are not really going very well in the garden everything down here on the first level has bolted and gone to flower and the basil which is also bolted hasn’t really grown at all in the 5 weeks since my last video the chilies up here are

Looking quite anemic uh on one of the plants back here we’ve got quite a bit of dback and you can see there’s no color in the new leaves there is still fruit on a lot of these chilies but it’s all ripening while the fruit is still well under sized these chilies should be

A lot bigger than that before they start to ripen and my Research indicates that this could be a sign of stress now the thing that I think is causing this stress is the current Victorian winter temperatures I think it’s just too cold usually chilies would be dying off a bit

At this time of year and even though these ones are indoors with an ideal light cycle it’s probably a bit too cold for them now I’m going away to somewhere warmer for the next two weeks and I won’t be back to check on the garden so

I’m going to clean out this first level this weekend and we’re going to retire that level until spring when things start warming up again I’m going to let the chilies keep going but I think I’ll Harvest some of these ripe fruit even though they are too small in my last

Couple of videos I used the hoos cotton wool method to plant some new seeds in here we’ve got cos lettuce Water Crest uh bok choy and pack Choy and some more bok choy and pack Choy that’s been in there for 2 weeks less these were planted about 7 weeks ago and I think

The cold weather has also impacted these uh would have expected them to be a lot more progressed to 7 weeks um and these 5 weeks ago I think and I think everything’s just been growing slowly because of the cold temperatures when I pick this up under here you can see

We’ve got good root growth out the bottom and we could put those in the puck propagator now if we wanted but I think I’ll do that in 2 weeks when I get back from holidays I am going to start planing ing a bunch more seeds so that we’ve got a

Whole bunch of seedlings ready to go when the spring comes and we can get more plants back into the system as things are warming up all right so I’ve pulled a couple of those rails out of there here we’ve got the basil and you can see that’s never been quite right it’s

Gone to flour now uh so we’re just going to get that out of there and throw it out um the coriander also is bolted and is is shot up quite high and I’ve been cutting that back for the last couple of weeks just to keep it under control when

I haven’t had time to maintain it so we’ll get all of that out of there over the back here we’ve got some bok choy that’s also gone to flour and uh pacoy that’s been fling for weeks now and I just keep stripping it right back so we’ll take all of that

Out look at the roots on that basil there’s hardly anything there you can see why the plant’s not healthy it’s the same on these other two Basel so clearly something wasn’t right with them the roots on the bok choy and pack CH weren’t too bad although given the

Time they were in there and based on my previous growing experiences there’s actually not much there again I’m putting it down to the cold weather it’s just the other two rails I’ve got another cup of coriander on the end here and they’re not worth keeping so I’ll throw those

Out that’s not a bad final hul a lot of that’s very [Applause] usable so that’s level one retired until warmer times I’ve got to work out a better plan for the chilies up here but whatever that is isn’t going to happen until I get back from my holiday in a couple of

Weeks I will quickly pick a few of these rip looking chilies but obviously I’d like these to be growing to full size so when I started this I really had no idea that the cold weather would have such an impact when the plants are inside and have ideal lighting conditions but you

Live and learn and we’ll try and time it a little bit better next season I guess that means this could be my last video for a month or two but I’ll definitely be back with more come spring when I plant out the nft again and possibly set

Up some other systems I don’t think nft is the best system for Chili’s in hindsight I probably wouldn’t do that again so we’ll see what else we can come up with for those these are just a few of the chilies that we got off those plants we actually got quite a lot and

We use them for all sorts of things uh including making a really tasty chili oil and here we are back in the present day and I hear you asking what happened to those chilies well they stayed in the nft for another month or so then I

Picked all the chilies gave them a hard cut back and moved them into my new outdoor system I wasn’t sure how they would react to the transplant from the nft into this outdoor potted media type system but they’ve been out here for a couple of months now and they seem to be

Going pretty well they’ve all got a lot of new growth uh if anything this end one here which I can’t even remember which one that is it’s lagging a little bit but you can see it’s got plenty of new growth on it it’s just uh taking a

While to get going now it’s the beginning of December so of course I’ve had the nft back up and running for a couple of months now but you’ll notice that I’m not running the top layer at the moment and there’s a bit of a story

To how we’ve got to this point at the moment I’ve got some bok choy in there that’s about ready to harvest I’ve got this anemic looking Co lettuce that hasn’t been getting enough air you can see that from the Browning off around the edges of the leaves I’ve got some

Basil that’s going great and a mountain of Water Crest that Water Crest has just gone nuts that’s been a really nice surprise uh it’s very very tasty and also apparently super nutritious you’ll note that the system is half empty at the moment and that’s because I’ve been

Continuously harvesting and I ran out of seedlings to keep replacing the harvested Bok chy I do have a new crop of seeds growing in Cotton wool and they’ll be ready to go into the system I reckon in 2 weeks but before they go in I need to clean this out completely and

I’ll show you why aphids those little white specks you can see are aphid lar and we don’t have to look too hard to find some mature apids in there it’s clearly not ideal and you can see that the plants are suffering because of it but fortunately the aphids only seem to

Be impacting the BOK chy in pack Choy so the other plants aren’t showing any signs of damage so the question is how do aphids get into my indoor garden and I think the answer is here I’ve noticed these ants for a little while now I noticed the ants

Before I noticed the aphids and I’ve done a little bit of research apparently it’s a thing that ants will transport aphids into new areas and then protect them from predators because ants eat the Honeydew that is produced by the Aid’s feeding so I basically have an ant

Managed aphid Farm now I also have these little bugs I don’t know what they are if anyone recognizes those leave me a comment please and if anyone has any clever ideas on how to keep pests off my bok choy I’d love to get those comments as well now you might be wondering why

Am I not leveraging the top level of this double story nft when I planted out the system in late September I had Co lettus and bok choy up the top even though the weather’s warmer now and everything was growing beautifully everything was going to flower really quickly and it wasn’t just restricted to

The top level everything down the bottom here was also flowering including the Water Crest and this bok choy which has was already starting to flower before I turned off the light but ever since I turned off the light up top my premature flowering issue seems to have stopped so at this

Stage and I’ll keep testing but at this stage it looks like it might be my spider farmer g4500 grow light which is a fruiting and flowering grow light I bought it for the chilies but maybe it’s not so great for green vegetables in hindsight this could actually be a

Partial explanation for why everything was bolting so quickly in the first layer back in Winter anyone with a lot of experience growing under lights I’d love to get your thoughts on this anyway I’m going to leave that light off and keep running this experiment with the

New batch of seedlings and we’ll see if we have any premature flowering issues then now I’m actually going to harvest some of this Water Crest now we’re going to stir that up with some garlic and eat it for dinner tonight so thick and there’s what’s left of the

Water Crest uh that that back one there oh I might have gone a bit hard on that but we’ll see what happens next week hopefully it BS us back back and there’s the Harvest it’s pretty massive actually considering I did a cut bag like that about 3 weeks ago I’m really happy with

How those Water Crest plants are actually going in the system I’ve also just harvested some basil going to make some pesto I’ve cut those back fairly hard but hopefully they bounce back nice and bushy and that pretty much brings us up to date with the garage nft so to

Close out this nft update let me take you through a few of the things that I’ve learned over the last 10 or 11 months of nft growing first thing make sure you’ve got plenty of air flow until I put a fan on my crop I was getting Browning and shriveling in the dense

Centers of all My Bushes second plant plants that have the same nutritional requirements everything was going great when I was growing my leafy green vegetables at a half strength nutrient but when I introduced the chilies I upped that nutrient strength and the leafy grain started to suffer when I

Lowered the nutrients again the chili started to suffer finally plant plants that have similar lighting requirements we just spoke about what happened to my leafy greens when I introduced the fooding and flowering light if you’ve got this far into the video and you’ve got some time and space then I fully

Recommend that you have a crack apart from a few issues the whole thing’s been pretty fun not too labor intensive or complex and pretty rewarding from the perspective of being able to regularly Harvest loads of fresh green vegetables if you like this video hit the thumbs up

And if you’re interested in my new outdoor hydroponic veggie garden h hit subscribe so you get notified when I show you through it in my next video thanks for watching Hydroponics