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Big update, growing hydroponic strawberries

A project log for GrowInBox

A box that fits in a room, in which plants can be grown.

domenDomen 07/23/2015 at 19:210 Comments

Finally, this is it. I'm writing the new project log.
I had a really lazy week after my vacation so I procrastinated all the time and didn't write any logs. I did however start growing a strawberry hydroponically.

I've written a lot about it here before, but my computer crashed and since the hackaday editor doesn't have auto save, I lost all that. I really don't have the nerve to rewrite it all so I will just write a short summary.


I've transplanted a strawberry I have bought in a store to hydroponics (deep water culture). I am having some problems though.


Because I was havng problems I added more water and change the lights to 9 10W warm and cold white LEDs instead of about 22W full spectrum. I don't know what's causing the problems so I thought it's better so stick to white LEDs. I've done a lot of things wrong growing this, like light stressing the plant since I don't control how many hours of light the strawberry gets, I don't check the pH ... I'm missing a lot of tools to grow this the right way and have ordered some, but I really don't want to write about it again.

I still had problems 3 days later so I plucked the dead leaves.


You can see a bit of algae on the bucket. I've just checked and the bucket shouldn't be transperent ... Like I said, it would probably be better to just burn this whole hydroponic system and start with a new, black bucket and so on, but I don't currently have the funds for that (not even for pH strips since they would cost like 10€ here, so I ordered 160 pH strips from Ebay for like 1€) ...

I should probably change the solution in the bucket since it's has algae in it, but that would be no use, if the bucket will still let light through.

I will also start working on my ESP Greenhouse monitor and ESP Data logger projects to learn more about the ESP8266 platform.

I would like to end this post with an inspiring quote:

“When we give up on our dreams, we die while still alive.”
Robin Sharma

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