gardening part 2 - hydroponics

Since space is limited and I mostly garden on a pool deck, ie no dirt, I've been looking into urban solutions. It feels like so long ago that I can't remember what exactly sparked my interest in hydroponics, even though I've actually been at it less than a year! So far, I've kept it very simple with bubbler systems (aka bubbleponics, deep water culture) though I've done a ton of research into other methods like NFT, ebb and flow and so on.

Since I can never do anything halfway it seems, I jumped into this and in short time ended up with three rubbermaid totes and 5 five gallon buckets.

My first attempt, starting with a simple Rubbermaid tote. Two lines in with aeration tubes from the pet store:

 Next is the lid with holes cut out to fit net pots in:

The black cups are the net pots. The little cubes are rockwool for seed starting. I have since experimented with different ways to start seeds and nothing works a whole lot better than another.

Then fill the rest of the cup with hydroton:

All my guys together at about 6 weeks:

I got impressive growth at the very beginning and they shot ahead of my soil plants. Then a mysterious brown slime attacked all of my plants and for nearly a month, they didn't grow, they wilted and were generally traumatized.

Those should be healthy white roots. Not pictures are the huge globs of nasty brown stuff floating in the water. I googled and searched for solutions, trying constant changings, spraying the roots, hydrogen peroxide, beneficial bacteria and fungus and then finally came up with a last ditch effort to stop feeding the slime. I cleaned everything out and put the plants in plain water, no nutrients, no nothing. Within two days, the slime was completely gone forever and the plants rebounded immediately. All that work and the solution was the simplest, of course!

The Rubbermaid totes (and idea I got off youtube) ended up being way too crowded. I won't use those again except for maybe lettuce. The buckets work great and I ended up with tomatoes and peppers that did vastly better than my soil ones overall and are still producing now: