He was talking bubbles, no one ever figured out what the fuck he was saying… I hit their head quarters for their biggest church, based nearby in PA… they quickly got lost in their own explanations.
Now get back to planting trees Dirty Girty.
Will do, fuckhead.
Plant some weed trees.
I wish it was legal in my state, as a law abiding non-citizen. I have had beautiful hydroponic tomatoplants in my basement.
Post a picture Phoneutria. Let’s take a look at you. 
Can you tell I’ve been lifting weights?
Tease.
I had at a point 18 different types of hot peppers growing in the basement. Turns out it’s quite an expensive hobby. It is my ambition for the not so immediate future to develop some sort of business out of making ridiculously spicy vegetables.
Your doing it wrong, phon.
Head to the store, and buy a long, clear plastic tube… the kind they use over large fluorescent bulbs for ceiling lights, usually 5 to 10 bucks a tube. Fill it with fertalizer, and tape a cheap hose to the end, and use a plastic welder (under 30 bucks) on the end to waterproof it.
Every few inches, poke a hole in it big enough for a seed to be inserted. You can attach it to a wall, and angle it slightly towards the tube for water flow.
You can add as many as you want, under, and if the plants grow too tall and hit the tube below, twist tube slightly so they will grow outward.
Water the top of tube.
I can show you how to build a very cheap and effective solar panel cheap, how to hook it up to a battery, for free, off grid energy use.
I also have other hydroponic designs, and methods to avoid soil salinization and crop rotation, as well to reduce risk to a variety of paracites and increase crop yields, or conserve water loss in dry environments.
The method is easy to do, very high density, and affordable, and good for a urban environment.
I wonder how well solar panels would do powering my massive sodium bulbs through winter.
First off, you don’t need a thousand watt sodium lightbulb, or series. That is absurd, you could run a much larger series of more efficient light, increasing your yield. Your not trying to replicate the sun, but match the plants needs.
Secondly, under orthodox standards, with a fixed rooftop… 52 degrees to 57 is for chicago. Many people have them in the winter, they collect energy but for a handful of days. However… there is little orthodox about me… I can build without the need for a rigid frame, make them curved, portable, with a stable stationary battery supply with abnormal depth. All relatively cheap.
I grew reasonably good peppers with a couple of T5 fixtures, but the size of the plants and the yield is nowhere near the results I get with the sodium lights.
Besides, if I have enough sun outside to power grow lights, doesn’t it make more sense to take the plants outside, and spend my building time on a greenhouse sort of thing to keep them warm?
If you want to.commercialize it, yes… head out to indiana and start a farm. However, the start up will be expensive. Yet, even a couple small acres will produce over 100,000 bucks of product.
Just the larger yields will require direct plumbing, and someone to always hand around, because water pipes burst, crack heads still batteries and equipment, etc. I’ve seen lilly pad farms make it… just stupid what some people grow.
I would recommend slapping up some pictures of your hydroponics… nothing personal, just your operation… and provide measurements of space. That is if you truely are thinking of turning it commercial.
My best results over just 3 years of experimenting were actually not the hydroponic ones. The peppers I grew in 7gal smartpots with my own soil mix were the best. I got a freaking half bushel of fatalii off a single shrub, almost the same from a bhut shrub. I’d be inclined to go that route, soil and sodium.
I’d be selling them in farmers markets if this city wasn’t so ridiculously bureaucratic. I have enough peppers to obliterate the bottoms of the entire Chicago population. Don’t know what to do with them anymore. Running out of places to stored bags of dried peppers and bottles of sauce. That’s why I’m only growing a couple of favorites this year.
I’m still thinking about the whole business thing. Don’t know how big I want to get or how much I want to put into it. It has been just a pretty successful hobby so far.
I’ll see if I can dig up some pics. My files are a mess.
I don’t know if the chain “Eat in Park” is in Chicago, I’m not planning on heading out there till Jan for used book shopping (love the lake effect blizzards, and few competitors for the train or bookstores)… they will oftentimes buy exotic local produce.
If these are brazilian seeds, then high end Brazilian Restaurants will buy them. The most expensive restaurant in San Francisco, for example, if a brazilian buffet, charging a hundred dollars for dinner, not including the wine. It is a three day journey from chicago to san francisco by train, in order to ship a box via train.
Realize you sit in the center of the midwest rail hub that links up to the rest of the US. If you were based in Hawaii, everything is sent to a LA warehouse… but small farms are still able to sell specialized prepared foods across north america.
My last garden was 3600 watts of hps and about 30 plants in 5 gallon bubble buckets.
Then there were 2 areas, 1 with t5s, and another with a 400 watt metal halide and I’d use those for keeping moms, rooting clones, and vegging bushes until they were large enough to go under the big lights.
Oh geeze… I would of thought a professional drug dealer could design a better setup.
You can literally buy waterproof led lights by the roll, and have them snake around plants, and then shelf them. Or buy the LED lights individually and hook them up in a circuit… super cheap. A single LED light takes like, 1.5 watts. Light is light, plant grows when it gets light. You effect its metabolism and health by the color of light, temperature, and symbiotic balances of microorganisms in the soil. A single grade a solar cell, which can be bought for less than a buck (much less if you drive up to green bay), and could easily power an LED light.
What I really want to do is start a farm above the arctic circle, in Alaska. If you cover a building in water, and it freezes, the internal temperature isn’t going to drop below the freezing point of the light. My underlining theory is plants require only momentary spurts of lights in low metabolic environments, similar to the spurt you see in a copying machine… instead of a continuous stream.
If correct, it could lead to a dramatic drop in prices for northern populations, in the US, Canada, Russia, and the Scandinavian states, as well as open up the viability of supporting much larger populations that far north.
I’m also interested in alot of other things… but this gives you a hint of how I look at things.
What do you know about the setup really except the amount of light and plants?
You just love thinking I don’t know shit. But that’'s ok man. The setup is judged on it’s yield and efficiency. I think I did well in those 2 categories.
LEDs are complete shit for producing weight. Not to mention the fact that light is only light if you mean lumens are only lumens, and if you mean that plants don’t respond to variances in the spectrum of the light. LEDs can’t beat the spectrum of HPS for flowering plants, and to get the same lumens out of them, you have to run just about the same wattage that you would for HIDs anyway…so you either save electricity, or you grow more plants. There’s no free lunch when it comes to that shit and people have been trying to get around this forever. It wont work. You can shine your LEDs on a garden all day and sure, your plants will grow, but the same plants under HIDs will grow denser, and therefore more. And that’s what you want my friend. Compared to the cost of an oz of high grade weed, electricity is dirt cheap. I’ve seen guys spend 3 or 4 months trying to grow a plant under a CFL and sure…it grows. But at that level it’s just a novelty. Like, “Hey look guys I got a plant to grow in my dresser”. These guys get less than an ounce in the same time and same space that I can get 8 or 10 if I"m using a 400w HPS.