The air conditioner is finally turned off for the season so its time to get serious with the indoor gadens again. I never shut down completely this summer but I did do some major renovations to the grow room. Some might look at what we had last winter and what we have now as going backwards but to us its much more user friendly and accomodates what we grow much better.
The first thing to notice is the hydroton is gone! Washing those darn rocks was the one part of the process that was a major PITA! All systems for now are RDWC. There's a couple of root crops i want to try again and I'm thinking they will do better in hydroton than they did with RDWC.
The HID lighting, gone! 3 of the 4 systems are T5 and the other one is a mogul based CFL at 125Watts. The CFL will be replaced with a T5 system sometime soon as it just does not have the coverage needed for a 2x2 tray. Acutally the 600 is the one thats gone, I kept the 400, maybe, some day I'll bring it back out.
The grow tents, gone! These really are gone. Sold the set on Ebay along with a bunch of other hydro stuff I didn't need or didn't use. Grow tents are fine and dandy devices for running light (timed light) sensitive plants or when your running major wattage but for T5's there really isn't a benefit.
Did I metion I'm not a vegetarian? Took the cash from the hydro equipment and bought this:
[img]https://i784.photobucket.com/albums/yy130/hydroguy/Smoker/0724111702-00.jpg[/img]
It's an offset wood fired meat smoker. Just did a church dinner the other weekend for 100 folks. Smoked chicken in the big chamber, smoked baked beans in the small chamber (above the firebox) and of course I made a salad from the hydro lettuce. Done a few salads before and the folks just can't get over the taste of fresh lettuce. Growing enough to feed a 100 people is another story but will get to that.
Let me go get some pictures of the grow room:
hydroguy