We have been thinking about different ways to grow fruits and vegetables. Beside planting them in the dirt and were very interested in hydroponics which uses water. There are many benefits to growing using a hydroponic system.  You can literally grow anywhere you have space, a hydroponic system uses 20 time less water than if you had planted a traditional garden in the soil. The environment that the plants grow in is sterile because there are no pesticides. You use 20 percent less space for growing and there are so many more beneficial reasons to use hydroponics. The best thing, I believe is that we can reuse the water by recycling it thru the system allowing us to conserve water.

Recycle and Reuse

With all this information we decided to build our very first system. Now, we can let you know that we are big on recycling and reusing anything that we can get our hands on. Our first step was to find a place that we were wanting to use for our first setup. Once we figured that out it was time to see what we could come up with as a design for the system.  Awhile back we tore down a deck to make room for a strawberry patch that didn’t work out to. Anyway, we started digging thru a pile of treated lumber to figure out what we had for the structure that would hold the PVC pipes.

Building the System

Once we had that figured out, we built the frame and it ended up being 4 feet wide and 4 feet tall and about 14 inches deep with a slight angle between the bottom and the top. We figured that we wanted 4 rows with 6 spots in each row totaling 24 places to have vegetables growing.

Now it was time for the PVC pipes. We used 2 inch pipe and we drilled 1 ¾” diameter. holes to hold the 2” net pots. After we had the holes drilled and the pipes all deburred and cleaned out it was time to glue the end caps on. Before we did that though we drilled and tapped a ½” NPT hole in each end cap. Because we were going to use a plastic fitting and some hose to connect each row of PVC pipe. We had some plumbers tape left over, from when we built our chicken coop, that we used to hold the pipe to the frame.

Success

Now that everything was assembled it was time to hook the pump up that would circulate the water and do some testing. We had a 5-gallon bucket that we were going to use as a water reservoir. So, after filling the bucket up and hooking the pump up it was the moment of truth. After plugging the pump in the water started to flow up to the top pipe and then back and forth thru all the pipes and then returning to the bucket. SUCCESS everything was running like it should and with no leaks. After everything was said and done we spent less than $50 on the whole thing.

We have written about the first planting in our hydroponic system that you can read about by clicking here.

Onto the next system.