Sprouting Chronicles....

One important aspect of this project is to prepare and design a small working model that can be scaled up for mass production.  Therefore, every aspect of this project has to be efficient and as low cost as possible.  In order to have a constant supply of fresh vegetables there needs to be different stages of plant and fish development.  On the plant side there needs to be seeds sprouting, plants ready to be transplanted, plants in the rafts, and plants being harvested. 

While thinking about the above aspects I attempted to use two different medias for plants production.  As you recall in the previous post I used a media  of coconut noir/vermiculite (CV) and a media or Rockwool (RW).  Failure (I will comment on failure in my next post).  My plants did not grow well.  The CV media had a 75% germination rate and my RW media had about 12% germination rate.  Only one species, the leeks, sprouted in the RW media.  Of the plants that did sprout they did not take well to their environment.  I will comment on what I think happened in my next post.

 

Therefore, I took most of the plants out and started over.  I did take the opportunity to use the transplanted plants and put them in the system to test the procedure for drilling holes in the rafts and placing them in them.

I need to test, as stated above, how to efficiently plant and transplant to the system.  The seedlings are starting off in a tray with 92 slots.  The idea is to transplant the mature sprouts to 2" or 3" pots to go into the rafts.  Below you see some premature transplanted plants placed into 2" pots to be placed into the raft. 

The spring season is underway and I have no plants so I concentrated on planting summer plants in the above trays.  I do have some spring plants but mostly summer now.

tomatoes
serrano chilis
green bell peppers
jalapenos
squash
cucumbers
pak choi (spring)
leeks (spring)
cilantro
oregano
beans
onions

 I then cut holes needed in the Styrofoam.  It was fairly simple and will not take much time to finish the others.  Different plants need different spacing.  This is a small plant raft.

Here is the raft in the water with the premature plants inside.  I expect the plants to die and will discuss this in the next post.  For now I have gone through the initial process from seeds to raft. I look forward to a higher success rate with the plants on the next run. For now out...............