Sunday, January 18, 2015

Vertical farm and compost update

This week, the tower farm is continuing to grow. I had to add about half a gallon of water to top of, the green onions are growing like crazy in the bottom of the tower. the rest keeps growing at its rate, except the parsley that is kind of stagnant.
On the nutrient side, I have just brewed some compost tea using 2 cups and 1/4 of worm compost in 1 quart of water, and nitrite and nitrate still read below the detection level in the compost tea , however, in the system, the level of nitrate is increasing. I did add 4 mL of ammonia last week, and again this week, but I think next week I will not add any, and see what happens. I recall that during December, I was adding 1 mL everyday of ammonia and it didn't seem to increase nitrates at all, I am starting to think that the compost tea brings some nitrogen in the system, but not in the form of ammonia, nitrite or nitrate, but that the system processes it into nitrate. Also, there is a little pick of nitrite.

For the compost, I now have a bucket set up for the school project, I have added a bag of 8 quarts of storebought compost to the bucket. The bucket was filled with paper and a bit of food scraps, and for the last 3 weeks, I have added the solids from the compost tea. I added storebought compost so there is enough finished compost for the class project when it starts. When I digged though to make a separation with compost on one side and "composting in progress" on the other side, there was quite a few worms in the bucket. I also added for good measure a couple of large handfull of partially composted material from my wormcrate - which contains adult worms and probably cocoons, and mixed it with the storebought compost. Of course i hydrated it as it was fairly dry out of the bag. My worm crate produced some more finished compost and it was incredibly fluffy and non sticky this time around,


No comments:

Post a Comment