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Old 05-04-2010, 05:50 AM
GpsFrontier GpsFrontier is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Lake Havasu AZ.
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I would use the largest baskets that I could. The Spacing of the plants would need to be adequate for the full size plants that you are wanting to grow. They will both need top support in that kind of setup, because they wont have enough root support. I built this one to grow peas, it's only one 4 inch tube, but can easily be expanded to as many tubes as you want. With adequate spacing for the plants (and top support) the same design should be fine. It can be used as either a "flood and drain", or NFT type system. Each 4 inch tube when filled held about 5 gallons of water to flood. Ten tubes would be a minimum of 50 gallons to flood, plus a minimum amount of water left in the reservoir to keep the pump from running dry. You would probably need at least a 100 gallon reservoir to run it as a flood and drain system for 4 inch tubing. Not sure how many gallons would be needed to keep it from running dry with 6 inch tubing. Especially as that many plants drink up water daily.

I was adding 2 gallons of replacement water daily to the one tube. Ten tubes would be around 20 gallons daily, and it wasn't even hot. Running it as an NFT may be a better choice as the plants get bigger, they will still need to drink the water, but it wont take as much water to flood the system. But as the plants drink the water. The left over nutrients will become concentrated, causing nutrient problems. So you will still want to maintain the same water level you started with daily, as well as pH. Even so, if there is not enough nutrient solution for all the plants (I call it "buffer water"), you may wind up with a diluted nutrient solution and nutrient problems.
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Last edited by GpsFrontier; 05-04-2010 at 06:01 AM.
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