Hydroponics - Growing Made Easy

 Sally Richards, Hydroponics Master Gardener expert, joins us today and gives us the story of the team she was instrumental in creating within our local county Master Gardener organization.

Year-round venues featuring hydroponic systems to view by the public are few and far between, so listen and learn how easy it is to grow the hydroponic way.  Learn how to have year-round vegetables and fruit grown indoors or out. The Team has been active in updating the Great Park Farm and Food Lab’s system to a “wicking” system which you can duplicate at home.   Like the hungry roots of that lettuce plant, get your feet wet here with hydroponics for both the home or apartment gardener.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

We've tuned in to the In the Garden with UC Master Gardeners of Orange County Radio Show here. And boy do I have a guest for you today and a show for you today. I want to welcome back to Studio A uh Sally Richards, our um our renowned radio host and expert in all things hydroponics, and that's our topic today. We're gonna discuss live here in the studio all about hydroponics and what she's been able to give the public and some of the questions that I have, and I'm gonna welcome you, Sally, back to Studio A.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

It's good to be back. This is the most fun thing I've done in in the Master Gardener program when I started, and I really like the radio station. We did a lot of changes here. This is really nice.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

We're gonna get off to a start here with the topic, but who are the Master Gardeners? I'm gonna give you your opportunity to explain it to you and what you mean to it and how you fit in.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Well, I started um doing hydroponics and became a master gardener um in 2016, and I'd always wanted to be a master gardener for a long time and I lived in Michigan, but it was a two-hour drive for me to take the class. So um I decided that when I moved here to California that I wanted to become a Master Gardener and applied for the program and I got in, which I thought was gonna be easy, but it's there are a lot of people that apply, and so you really um they're looking for people who like to talk, and uh that I can do.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

That's how you got on the radio team. You've been so good. You've got all kinds of different topics that we have podcasts for that you've hosted, and very, very well done. We miss you. And I know you're so busy with the hydroponics. So that uh tell me about um the hydroponics itself and how that started with the master gardeners here in Orange County.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Well, when I moved here uh from Michigan and we had nice acid soil and I could grow everything in there, and then I moved here. I didn't realize that the soil here was alkaline and that I had a lot of clay in my yard. So when I started to grow green beans and they weren't growing, I thought, well, there's gotta be something wrong because I've been gardening a long time. I had a five-acre farm and gardened on there and I didn't have any problem at all. So then I realized that um I have a smaller yard now and um I'm gonna try hydroponics. And so that was when I started. So that was about 2017, and I started looking up on the internet because there wasn't very much about hydroponics now. There's tons of it on there. And so when I became a master gardener, I thought, oh good, this would be great. And I looked in our syllabus and there wasn't anything about hydroponics in there. And I so as I got more accomplished in what I was doing in my yard, I started to ask, how come we don't have that in our program? And have been trying to get it in our program since about 2017. And finally, we um it's our time has come. And so last year um we just started our hydroponics team at the um through the Master Gardeners because Alvin Lamb, who is also a a new Master Gardener, did indoor hydroponics, and I had always been doing outdoor hydroponics for the home gardener, because as a master gardener, we want to grow things that people in our communities can grow that don't cost a lot of money, that's easy to do, and um hydroponics is a way to do it.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Yeah, some people think that uh maybe hot hydroponics can feed the world eventually. I know that it uh takes very little water. You think it takes water, but I mean a lot of water, but it really doesn't. It doesn't use up a lot of water. We'll get into that a little later. Since you've started with the Master Gardener and actually formed the Master Gardener Hydroponics team, how many how many members do you have on your team? Do you know?

SPEAKER_01 3:49

On our team we have um we have about twenty-five members and fifteen really active members. We're actually gonna have a a big celebration this year and we're gonna have a wind up of um how we've done this year and what we're going to do next year with and we decided to use a team concept. So instead of having anyone come in and become a hydroponics um on the hydroponics team, we actually did training. Alvin did inside training, I did outside training because we wanted our people to be able to answer every question about hydroponics that they get asked. And if we have just the general program from Master Gardeners, they're not taught hydroponics in our program right now, and hopefully we're gonna work on a syllabus to to develop that in the future. Um so we actually did training with our people. So we have so we do pop-ups in a whole bunch of different ways in the community, and we'll talk about that later. Um, but the people that you talk to on our team definitely know what they're talking about and be able to guide you.

SPEAKER_00 4:49

I attended uh your last public class that you t that you um put on for the Centennial Farm here in Orange County at the Orange County Fairgrounds, and it was, you know, I was there doing something, uh I was photographing you and um making photographs available for the um for your advertisement, but I had I picked up on a lot of things that you were talking about. Your uh your instruction is so it on the surface it seems involved, really involved, but then it is a simple system that you want to cover today. And I met some of your team members and they worked with the class members uh up from the public, and there were about twenty-five of them at least, and uh did a really good job in explaining how they can get started. They took all their supplies home and got started. So, what is exactly what is hydroponics?

SPEAKER_01 5:44

Well, hydroponics is growing you um vegetables and you could even grow flowers in it and fruits, um some fruits not we haven't been able to do trees yet, but other you can do other fruits, strawberries for sure. And so um it's growing in a water solution and uh it started with um Dr. Cracky. Actually it started way longer before then we don't realize it, but in World War II, the army actually had was growing vegetables hydroponically in the Aleutian Islands for our troops and the British troops also. So they actually had uh um cement tubs that they grew uh fresh vegetables because they couldn't get them any other way, and the British Air Force came in and with their airplanes and picked up the stuff and took it out to the guys in the field. And uh it kind of just faded, people didn't think about that anymore, and so that was one of the first ways. But uh but the modern program now is um developed by Dr. Krake in Hawaii. Now, if you think about the soil in Hawaii, it's all lava. So we have nice soil that we can um put things into and grow, but there they can't. And so he wanted to develop a program where you could grow things in a water solution. And so basically we call it the cracky system, although it's been around for a real long time. Actually, probably the Gardens of Babylon they thought was also watered that way. Um but anyway, so he actually made um eight four by eight foot kind of container that he put solution in it, he put water in it, and then he put um hydroponic fertilizer in it, put a raft on the top, um kind of like styrofoam, and made holes in it, and then he put net cups. Now, net cups, and you'll you'll be using these all the time in hydroponics, are just look like regular uh plastic cups with uh slices in it so that the roots can go through the bottom. And you put the soil in there, and that's where you plant your plant, and then you drop the cup into the hydroponic solution. So that's how he first grew lettuces there, and um that's how it started, and then eventually he wrote papers on it, and now it's there are a lot of hydroponic programs now at the university level, and even uh Michigan State University has a hydroponic program that's in their they use the produce from their in their student union. So it's getting to be um much more widely acceptable. Even since I started, if you look up hydroponics online now, you'll be able to see uh tons more information out there that they couldn't uh had never been able to do before. So um that's the history of hydroponics, and so eventually more and more people got on YouTube and now we're the nice thing about hydroponics that I found there is no one way to do it. You can do it inside, you can do it outside. There are and I have tried a lot of stuff since 2017 also, and some worked and some didn't work, so we can talk about that.

SPEAKER_00 9:01

Yeah, that's gonna occur with everyone who's listening and maybe interested in getting into this project, things that do work and things that don't work. There's always a uh plus and minuses and there's do's and don'ts, and there's learning by experience too. Yeah. Uh you want to talk about uh maybe before people actually learn the process, explain to them what some of the upsides and the some some of the downsides might be to help. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

Well, first of all, there are there's like I said, there's more than one way to do it, and Dr. Krakkey actually had four different ways of doing it. When we talk to everyone about um hydroponics, we usually introduce everyone to the easiest way to do it. And because we are working with home gardeners and we want to make this the cheapest way that they can do it at home, um, we always start out with the water system. And what that is, and I'll just explain what you need to have. Instead of going out and buying a tower or grow lights, um, you don't need to do that. Um, it's much easier. We live in California, we have sunshine all year round, and we can grow hydroponically all year round, also. So what we recommend is to get a five-gallon container. Now it has to be food safe, and I wanted to start growing some of my vegetables, particularly tomato plants, and so I uh looked around for five-gallon containers, and yes, I went to the big box stores, but they were selling them for ten dollars, and I thought, no, I do five tomatoes. I'm not spending fifty dollars for little for five-gallon containers. What I found, and what everybody can actually get access to, is every restaurant gets five-gallon containers of all their spices and their sauces and their relishes and pickles and onions and all that kind of food. Um and they use them up and they throw them away, unless they're in like they have a recycling program. But even frostings at the bakery are in five-gallon containers. And so what I always recommend is to go to a mom and pop, not like a you know, a big chain, and talk to the manager and say, you know, I I'm trying to grow some food and wonder if you have any five-gallon containers you want to get rid of. Um, because usually they just throw them away in the trash and they have to pay to have that taken away. So um, and they have a lot of it. So you'll get all kinds of answers. Sometimes they'll say no. Um, my bakery said come at five in the morning, we throw them in the dumpster and you can get them. Or they'll say, Well, okay, it's a dollar, or sometimes I had one uh person say at at this restaurant, here, come back here. I have uh, how many do you want? Um, and can you come and get more? Because they go through so many of them. So that is a really good source to get that. So if you are someone that is on low income and um I was a college student myself and I was eating a lot of ramen, um now I found out that you know you can grow these on your deck in your apartment if you aren't living in the dorm, or if you uh live in a house or an apartment or condo, this is a perfect way to do it. And so we use a five-gallon container, it has a to make sure you get the top, and then what you're gonna do is you're gonna drill a three-inch hole in it and put in the net cup I was talking about. So that's the plastic container with the holes in it. And now you can buy those online at the big A store that delivers next day, but you can also get them at your local hydroponic store. Now, this is gonna be they don't advertise, and so you might not think there is one around, but there is. So just go to Google and say hydroponic store near me, and then we'll show you where your hydroponic store. I found out there was one in the next city over in San Juan Capistrano from me, and so you there are they are all over, and you can go in there and buy one at a time.

SPEAKER_00 13:05

I'll bet people are thinking, you know, I know what hydroponics stores uh um sell to, right? Uh-huh. And uh I'm talking about um well, pot growers, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah so they know how to do it, and if you just want things that you want to eat rather than smoke, you can get your you can get your um hydropolyponics information from them too.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

And they're very knowledgeable and um the the nice thing is n because if you could do the store online starts with a you have to buy fifty of 'em in a package and so you don't want to do that. That's too many.

SPEAKER_00 13:48

Yeah. Get together with a neighbor who wants to do the same thing. Of course then you're gonna want to sh share your your beh harvest yourself to them to keep them out of it. Um now uh you got the Kratke system and oh also you since you mentioned the um uh the containers that you can get from any food service uh uh area. Has the has the popularity of that ha uh increased the the or decreased the availability of doing that or just you can go anywhere?

SPEAKER_01 14:17

No, it's actually it's what happened was, I mean, when I started, I got mine um I went on Facebook Marketplace and uh there was a guy whose parents owned it in an outburger. And I'm sure he said to his dad, Dad, I think I can make some money selling these. And so he was selling them to me for two dollars apiece, which is great. And so s other people caught on. If you go to Facebook Marketplace, if you don't want to go and talk to somebody, you can find a lot of people that are selling them. Just make sure, and they're usually two dollars, which is a great price. Um, so a lot of people are uh from all over now are selling them there. And so you can get them. If you don't want to go out, you can just you know go there and and get as many as you want. I mean, there are people that have hundreds of them. The thing that you need to be sure of is people are selling five gallon containers, but maybe they had plaster in them, or maybe they had pool chemicals in them. You don't want those, they have to be food grade, so make sure you ask them, was there food in these? And then typically they'll say yes, because so many restaurants use them. There are tons of them. So when I started eight years ago, no, you couldn't hardly get any. Now they're all over. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

Anybody's gonna try to make a buck out of um something that's getting very popular and very easy. Um curious about the uh cleanliness of the buckets that you end up retrieving from uh say a dumpster or something. What do what do you do to get them hydroponic ready?

SPEAKER_01 15:56

Okay, so usually what I do because they're they had food in them, most of the time they don't um clean them before you get them. They'll um so what I do when I get them home, I usually fill them up with water, put a little bit of dish soap in them, and about a tablespoon of bleach. And then I let them sit for a while, stir them up, and then I rinse them all out. So that if there's any bacteria in there left over from, say, the food that might have been left in there, then that's all cleared out. Um the thing that you need to worry about the most with hydroponics is um algae growth. And so by cleaning those all out, you're gonna help eliminate that problem. You clean the lid too, right? Yes, clean the lid too. Um this is gonna be a closed system. I get asked a lot, well, do you get mosquitoes? Because you got standing water there, and no, you don't, because it's to totally closed. Um mosquitoes can't get in there to lay their eggs. So it's yeah, so it's uh clean. Um to talk about the algae, especially in the five gallons, but also you can grow in nut jars, which I get at the big box store. They don't they you don't it doesn't have to be a nut jar, but one of them that's uh the size of the nut jars, like you can still get the chocolate covered almonds in them and you can get jelly beans and all kinds of stuff in there. And you just throw them away, or I use them for um my nuts and bolts in the garage. But um you can use those to grow lettuce. Now that is the easiest way, and we usually when we do kits at our talks, we usually um start everyone in a a nut jar. And so what you get is the nut jar, you get um, and you have your lid, and then a three-inch net pot, the ones with the slices in it, so the roots can go through. And that's basically the container. And so when I do my lettuces, I usually instead of starting them from seed, which you can do, you can do them under grow lights if you want to, or um, I usually buy the six-pack because um I want to get assorted lettuces, and so I usually do six containers, and now I can have red lettuces and all curly lettuces and bib lettuce, and they're all in the same container, and it only comes to like fifty cents a plant. So to for me to put them in the um nut jar and into the net cup cup in the first place, is um I pull them out of the dirt, and then I put I just have a bowl of water and I take them by the stem and swish them to try to get as much soil out of it as I can. Now you're never gonna get it all out. So you just take that, and then the other thing that you can use, or there's actually two things you can use. One is rock wool. You also can get that at the hydroponic stores. You can also get it on the Big A on in online, and um and what that is is spun rock. I don't know how they do it, but it is very absorbent, and you just sp split it in half and wrap it around your roots. Now that will hold your solution on your roots before it starts growing into the jar, and that's what keeps it growing. So then you just take that with the rock wool and push it into your net cup, and then you put it into your nut jar. And the solution that we're using is actually water solution with hydroponic fertilizer. So you never want to use regular fertilizer with this, you always want to use hydroponic. And um what it is is we use master blend or and that's a generic term. You can find that at the Big A store. But if you go to the hydroponic store, you can ask them what they recommend. We use another one that uh is a generalized solution that has all the nutrients in it, and it that's probably gonna be the most expensive part of your hydroponic system. I think it was like thirty-five dollars or something like that, but the solution lasts uh I mean the fertilizer lasts over a whole year.

SPEAKER_00 20:08

And you and you said that you wanted to s actually say that no, you're not growing in water.

SPEAKER_01 20:13

Just don't say you were growing in water. You're growing in what? In solution. So it's going to be in fertilized solution. Okay. So um that what you'll what I do and what I learned very quickly because I was doing them in the nut jars, that I take my five gallon container and designate that as my solution mixer-upper container. So I put five gallons in there, and then I put in my um fertilizer, and then I have five gallons of fertilizer, so I can use that for my nut jars and fill those all up. Um so when I'm making when I'm doing lettuces, spinaches, any of my herbs, those all will grow in those nut jars. It's a small container. The great thing about that is you can put it out on your deck. You can put it out on your picnic table in the backyard if you just have that. If you don't have much room, you can actually grow all of those things. The great part about that is when you put the solution in, you're going to put it in about a quarter inch up into the roots, but don't cover them all. Because you've heard of plants that have drowned. Well, the reason they drowned is because they need oxygen, and we don't think about that, but there is oxygen in the soil, but obviously if we're putting them in a water solution, there isn't any oxygen in there. So what happens is as the roots start to grow down, oxygen roots start to grow in the container, and that's how they get their oxygen. Do not fill it back up. You don't have to water this again. That's the great part about this, is you like kids can do this so easily because once they put that solution in, you wait thirty days and you've got a whole big bunch of lettuces.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

Uh since you mentioned uh uh filling a uh a r a um dedicated container. Five gallon container with solution. How long just on average, what that how much would that solution last? How long would it last?

SPEAKER_01 22:08

Well the lettuce solution, once you put it in there, um, that one's gonna be thirty days because lettuce grows in thirty days. It will be fully available for you to do it. And a lot of times I will do a two-week cycle, especially in the summer. But you can grow it right now, is put your lettuce out, and two weeks later I plant another group of six lettuces, and then two weeks later the other one is ready. I pull all that, put it in my crisper, and start another group.

SPEAKER_00 22:36

I e a lot of people don't know this, but lettuce and all those leafy greens, it's the time to plant it. They are cruel season crops. You you don't have to wait till spring, you don't have to wait till summer to actually put that stuff to um uh to your garden. Have them ready for you. Oh salads all winter. Um go ahead. Uh keep going with the um the idea of the five-gallon can and the or the nut nut jar and the um construction of it.

SPEAKER_01 23:04

Yeah, so the n the nut jar is just uh, you know, you make sure you clean it, and then you're gonna take a three-inch hole saw, so you just put it on your drill, they sell them at the hardware stores, and you'll be using it over and over again if you do hydroponics. Um and then what you do is you put the lid upside down on a piece of wood that's scrap wood, and then you drill a three-inch hole into that with the hole saw. Now, you then you just screw it onto your container and put that's where you put your net cup in. Also, it works the same for the five-gallon container. So for your smaller things like all your herbs and your lettuces and spinach, you can put them in the nut jar and just put it anywhere you want. Now, I also grow, and this time of year I'm just gonna tell you the things that I'm growing right now, um cabbage, carrots, lettuce, spinach, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, tomatoes, and radishes, and yes, you can grow tomatoes in the winter time. As a as a matter of fact, you can get them, they actually have the winter tomatoes in stock at your local nursery. Nice.

SPEAKER_00 24:12

I yeah. Everyone says you get your tomatoes or all the tomatoes you could ever eat during the summer because it's nice and warm when they like it. And now we find out that they can grow 'em during the winter too. And I actually I believe um that if you look for a tomato vi variety that has some sort of cold location in it in the name, like Manitoba, you'd think that that might grow in the winter better.

SPEAKER_01 24:40

And there's a glacier too.

SPEAKER_00 24:42

So yeah, that that's it that's your clue. Um we've got a few more minutes before our break. Well quickly tell me about some of the some of the systems that are a little more involved that people might be looking at online and maybe consider that that as well. But you talk about the simple system. Now, what are some of the more involved system really quick?

SPEAKER_01 25:01

Okay, well, as we go on, it'll get more and more involved, but I have now um so the second system, and we are gonna have advanced classes in hydroponics on that, and um you can also you can uh check with uh the fairgrounds because we work with them a lot. We usually do f about four talks a year there, and we've been just talking about the water system, but um we're I am moving all my stuff to the wicking system, and the wicking system involves non-soil soil. Um I'll just tell you a quick story. I wanted to grow carrots, and trying to grow carrots in um solution, you can imagine, the roots grew really well, including roots that grew outside of the carrots. So they were hairy when I picked them up. They did fine, but they were hairy, and I went, I don't think I want to eat those. So I thought, oh shoot, I'm not gonna be able to do that. And so the wicking system involves non-soil, and I'll we'll talk about that after the break on just what that involves. So now I'm able to grow beets and radishes and um my carrots. Um, actually grew them from seed this year, and and had great crops with those. So the wicking system would be the next one we're gonna talk about, and that's actually going to we'll be having more advanced classes on that. And we are going to have classes at the Farm and Food Lab, which we'll talk about if you're interested in having us come and talk about uh hydroponics. Maybe you have a garden club or a group of people that's interested in it. You can um look us up online on UC Master Gardeners Orange County and just scroll down to the Speakers Bureau. And we actually have um a speaker a group of on from our team that talks about um hydroponics in any group that wants to have us come and it's free. So you just need to look at that. If you have questions about finding out more about hydroponics, you can also go to our Master Gardener program and go to the question uh section. Like if you have questions, even if you have questions for um plant issues where you're not sure um what's going on, what kind of insect is bothering my plant, you can send an email there. So we have a lot of free information for the general public, and that's a good place to get a hold of us also.

SPEAKER_00 27:34

Hydroponics for the home and apartment gardener with Sally Richards, our steadfast master gardener here, hydroponics expert and uh hobbyist, and uh we used to be here in the studio giving you the radio program. So I welcome her back. Sally, we ready to get back into the topic?

SPEAKER_01 27:55

Yeah. Um so after uh we do the water-based one, and actually what I do in my five-gallon containers with that is I grow my long-term plants, ones that are gonna have roots that are gonna be a lot bigger than say my lettuces. So that's where I grow my tomatoes. And at this time of year, you can grow your cabbages, you can grow broccoli, Brussels sprouts, um, those all are long season plants, and they need a bigger space space to grow. So when you're putting your plants in there, you rinse the roots just like we did before for the nut jars, and you put them in your net cup, and then you fill your five-gallon container up into the bottom of the roots so that the roots are t that are in the net cup are touching the water. They have to touch the water because they're gonna are the water solution because that's they're gonna start growing down into it as time goes on. When you're using a five-gallon container, and I do that for my summer and my winter gardens, you have to, because it's long term, it's going to start to pull the water out of it, and it's the the solution is gonna go down in it. So you're gonna have to replace some of that solution. And so when you do replace the solution with more solution, um you only fill it halfway up. Because you have those air roots now that are growing in that open air space as the solution goes down, the air roots grow. And those are your oxygen roots.

SPEAKER_00 29:25

Uh really quick. The idea of replacing, is it a replacing of the solution or replenishing?

SPEAKER_01 29:32

It's replenishing. You're just gonna replenish. You can put more solution in there. You don't actually what we do is we just when the when you finish growing your tomatoes, um, then we empty the whole container and we start all over again. And sometimes we'll take that solution and just put it in our regular garden because they do have the same nutrients and fertilizers that your regular garden needs, so you don't want to put it down the drain. It's actually good stuff. And um so that that's one of ways that you can um use your solution when you're all done with it.

SPEAKER_00 30:06

That's uh the idea about putting it down the drain is also uh e ecologically unfavorable. Yeah. Yeah. And uh you have to if you ever like imagine your fertilizer running off into the gutter, and that that's a big problem too, is it's so sort of along the same wavelength as um dumping the solution in the g in the drain or it down the gut gutter. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:30

Okay, so um the next uh more advanced system that we oh well let me just tell you a couple of things about the wicking, the cup of not only do I do tomatoes, but I'll give you a story about my cucumbers because those are mining. And your tomatoes also have to be supported. Now I'm lucky because I have a hoop house which is just galvanized metal, but it's seven feet tall and it's twelve feet wide. So um I'm able to hang things up. So if you're living in an apartment and you have another apartment above you, and your HOA or whatever your group says it's okay for you to grow stuff on your on your deck. That might be tricky. Um you actually can hang nylon line down and attach your tomatoes or your cucumbers, whatever your vine is at the top, to it. And I don't recommend you using cotton string. It's going to rot and then it will break. Nylon is what you want, not fishing line, but if you go to the store you'll find string that'll that'll be made out of nylon. That's what you want to use. The same thickness as regular n um cotton cord, um, so not the thick stuff. And then they have actual clamps, or you can use twist ties also um to tie them around your string to hold it up. And what I had, um, my tomatoes, I do that all the time because they branch and they get very big. My tomatoes grew seven feet tall. Um, I just want to say a quick thing about tomatoes. There are two different types of tomatoes, and everybody goes, no, they're not. Yes, there are. There are two different types of tomatoes, not not varieties. Um, there are determinants, and the way you can always remember, a determinant means the height has been determined. It's only going to grow so high, fruit and die. That's what it does. And for the canning industry, it's wonderful. Um, but and so it only grows like three or four feet high, which is great. The indeterminate, and this is what's mostly in the stores at your nurseries, and it will say right on that white tag that's in there, indeterminate, means we don't know how high that's gonna grow. It's just gonna continue to grow and grow and grow as long as there's sun and nutrients there. And mine did grow through seven feet through the top of my greenhouse. So if you do not want that to happen, then I recommend getting determinants, which you can find right now. I've got some growing now, and then you just put in like however many you want, one or two maybe, and then um two or three weeks later, put in another determinant, and then that way you can increase the growing season for your tomatoes, they aren't going to get really, really tall. Now, I did the same thing with my cucumbers, except that this one I used to pump. Now, if you want to do this, the the cheap way to do this is to get downspout, and you can cut downspout. Now, for those of you that don't know what downspout is, if you remember gutters on your house, there's um a uh spout that goes or to can I don't know what to call it a container. It's it's uh just the thing that goes from the gutter into your um system that gets rid of the water from your gutter. That's called the downspout. Now they usually come eight feet at the big box stores, and you can cut those smaller if you want to. And what you do is put it down horizontally, and then you drill three-inch holes about 12 inches apart. So that's where you're going to put your net cups. So I put my cucumbers in that, and I lay it horizontally on a slant, and I have um I try to get one of those big 25-gallon containers, um, and that's got all of my hydroponic solution in it. And then I get an aquarium pump, which those are pretty cheap. You can get, you don't have to get a real expensive one, it doesn't have to be powerful, and uh an irrigation tube, and then I put the tube in the pump, and the pump goes in the in the hydroponic solution, and the tube goes to the other end of the downspout, and the gravity makes that run all that solution run down that and the roots are exposed to all of that. So I I did English uh cucum or Persian cucumbers are my favorite. I'm curious.

SPEAKER_00 34:50

We went from cratkey, which is like a nut cup in the containers, uh your nut cup, nut nut jar jar, yeah, or your five-gallon containers, and now you're talking about pumps and and systems that move water and so forth.

SPEAKER_01 35:05

Yep. And so the other two are static. So you can put your tomatoes in in them. You don't have to have any pumps or anything in it. You just put the tomato in there, it will grow. You refill it halfway when it's probably a month or two in for the tomatoes for sure, and that's how you grow in that system. Um, this is one that still is a water system, but it's just a little more involved. It has the pump. And my cucumbers, I put in a lot of those plants, and the vines grew like crazy. They're the English or the Persian cucumbers don't have to be fertilized by insects, so you actually get the wind to fertilize them, and there are a couple other varieties out there that are the same. Um, but if you're doing it outside, the bees will come and they'll fertilize them. You will get tons of cucumbers. I can just guarantee you every day. I was I had to make pickles. I had too many. Um, so that is another cracky system, and that one they call it NFT. Um, and that just means you're using a pump to pump water down through the roots. So they're getting a continuous supply of fertilizer, and they love it, and they grow really fast. Another one I want to talk about is the wicking system, and that's the one where I am transferring now into most of my plants because I want to do my root crops, and also I'm doing I'm doing a test this year on tomatoes compared to the um wicking compared to the cracky system with the water. Um so the way this works, and it's pretty easy, instead of just using one five-gallon container, you use two, and you put one inside of the other. The bottom space between those two is where your fertilizer solution is gonna be. That's where your water section of the of the system is gonna be. What you're gonna do with the top one is you're gonna drill a hole in the bottom of that container. So you're gonna make that three-inch hole, you're gonna put the net cup in just like you normally do, but you're gonna fill that net cup up with non-soil. And I'll tell you what I use. Non-soil means that it you don't go out and buy potting soil and put it in there because you it won't be able to whip. So, what you want to use, and I'm gonna talk about not like one cup of this, it's one part of uh spagnum moss, Canadian spagnum moss, and you can get that at your nurseries. You look at it, don't get peat moss, it's not the same. This has acid in it. We need acid because we are watering with alkaline water.

SPEAKER_00 37:46

Spag I was gonna say, sphagnum moss is what you what we used to do when we lined wire baskets and let them drain. Yeah. So that's it's that stringy stuff.

SPEAKER_01 37:56

Yeah, but it also absorbs, it's very absorbent. So you're gonna use that and then you're going to use one part of core. You've seen it advertised, it comes in bricks, and it's actually coconut shell that they finally figured out what they can do with it. They actually pulverize it now, so it's um it actually is a very absorbent thing. So it's one part sphagnum moss, one part cocoa core, and half a part of perlite, and that's where your oxygen roots can grow. And you just mix that up, and so I have a tumbler, so I just my instead of compost, I just tumble mine. But you can mix it up just in um a dishpan and then fill up um your net cup and put it in the bottom, and then you fill that whole container up to the top, and in the second container on the top, you make a three-quarter inch hole and you put in a PVC pipe, and that is your fill tube. And so when you're gonna put your solution in, you just fill it with a funnel through the tube, it goes down to the bottom, and because you have your net cup in that solution, it's going to absorb and start wicking as the name implies. It's gonna wick all the way up to your roots and is gonna give you a continuous supply of fertilized solution. Um, on the bottom one, you're also going to put a hole near where the two come together, but still in your solution, and put in a quarter-inch tube like you can get for aquariums. That is your that's how you know if you're running out of solution. This is the easiest and least amount of work that you have to do on any um of the processes.

SPEAKER_00 39:46

So I understand you have a you were going to go to the farm and food lab in Irvine, the Great Park, and transition that system there that the public has maybe seen already. You're gonna change it to the wicking system, yeah?

SPEAKER_01 40:00

Yes, we actually talked with Heather over there and she's on the hydroponic team, and she wanted to put the cracky system in, and we did, and actually she won an award for at the fair this year for growing um vegetables. I think it was uh pepper this year, green pepper in the hydroponic program. But it's out in the direct sun, and so um she was losing a lot of solution because it was evaporating very quickly. This the the plants were just sucking it up, and um she was trying to keep on top of it. So we are now switching to the wicking system, and that way we will be able to test it every day to see if there is water in there. We just the tube that comes out the bottom, all we do is when we fill it up, we just fold it back and put a clothespin on it, and then when we want to check it, we just pull the clothespin off. If no solution comes out, then we know we need to refill it. But because it's in so much of the wicking uh medium, it doesn't evaporate like it does with the water. So we are switching over, and we will be having classes over at the Farm and Food Lab this year also.

SPEAKER_00 41:04

And I know you've got an exciting venue coming up. You want to tell us a little bit about that down in San Clemente?

SPEAKER_01 41:10

Oh finally, we live in our um South County, and um so for some of you that are getting you it doesn't we don't reach this radio station down to San Clemente. But down in San Clemente, we are partnering with Bella Cleena Golf Course, and they have um they had a hydroponic system uh uh running there, and the guy went out of business and they want someone to come out there. We are going to be able to develop an open to the public for free venue for um native plants, composting, um, teaching opportunities down there, and I'm gonna be putting in, and this is probably going to be early next year, uh a four by ten foot deck. And on that deck, we are going to put a hydroponic garden to show you how much food you can grow on that deck um in a year, because you don't have to have a lot of space to do that, and so we're looking and we'll be having classes out there too. So we're getting really excited about that. Um, we're gonna be showing you all different kinds of um plants that you can grow. Uh we're growing collars right now in my garden anyway, and other people too, but that's that's gonna be a really exciting venue.

SPEAKER_00 42:21

I yeah, I get that I get that excitement from you every time I talk to you about hydroponics because it's right near you. You are the best group to be able to help lead that that venture. A thought came to me earlier when you were talking about uh tomatoes. Everyone thinks that you need a tomato cage to hold tomatoes. How do you suggest we when when you're doing it hydroponically, how do you manage tomato growth?

SPEAKER_01 42:46

So because I'm calling it a vine because basically it works like a vine, just like cucumbers, and that's why we use the nylon cord. We hang so you can hang it up from the top, that's what I do, and they actually have rollers that you can get that the commercial uh people use, and I know you can get them on the Big A store online again, and they have nylon on them with a stopper on it. So when you pull it down to your plant all the way down, then it locks in place. And then they have tomato clips, which also you can get online, and then you just wrap it around your vine and it attaches to that nylon so that it it won't so it will hold that. And a lot of times if you want, you can just grow your tomatoes in a long run or just straight up and just pinch off those, or if you don't, you're gonna get it's gonna look like a tree because the branches uh are gonna come out like a tree and you're it's gonna fruit on those too. And so um I usually have about four or five of those nylon ones coming down per plant because there are so many um branches that come out.

SPEAKER_00 43:51

I always w worry about um people who don't know uh that much about tomato gardening is that they'll pick those little short small tomato cages and think that's what they need for an indeterminate tomato. As yes she said a tomato will keep growing and that's where the vining uh system that she's talking about will come in handy. Also just as a side note about containing or or um holding up a tomato plant, I I've used the kind of the trellis system this year where it kind of kind of grows flat the the branches will grow through it, but it's being held on kind of like a wall of reinforcement material with small like uh two by four openings between the wires and that that suspended like three tomatoes side by side. I had to figure out which which tomato went to which plant but uh it worked very very well not the tomato cages that you I've got those stacked up in my backyard rusting to heck. Oh so uh we've got about three minutes left I'm going to just um wonder about maybe some of the things that you might worry about in a t any any garden situation like what kind of things can actually bother the plants in a hydroponic system.

SPEAKER_01 45:11

Well it's outside so just the same things that attack if you uh plants that grow in the ground also attack uh hydroponics um one of the things that you need to do with hydroponics that you don't have to do in the ground especially if you're using the nut jars is you do need to paint them so I paint the ones outside um turn them upside down paint the outside of the containers that stops algae from growing inside when you're using the five gallon containers they already are white and they usually don't have a problem with that you so you'd want to keep the algae down. But we also have insects like um we have uh hornworms for tomatoes and they're um so the the best way to you to do is pick them off and if you don't want to pick them off well if you want to be able to find them it's always hard to find them. They're very they hide but you can always tell there's these little droppings of little brown balls on your tomato plants and you know you got them. Any any c any worm will drop it. And then it it hecks your uh cabbages too. You see holes in it and you wonder what the heck happened and that's um so you need to get the that done. So but if you take a black light and go out at night we were talking about that earlier. Yeah you can s you can turn it on and your hornworms are gonna fluores and you can pick it up.

SPEAKER_00 46:30

Okay, that's sounds great to end up on a kind of a s squishy situation. Scene in your head like to thank you for listening and tuning in and uh learning about hydroponics with Sally Richards on in the garden with UC Master Gardeners.