Newbie to this forum and to hydroponics

[GpsFrontier]

Hello khawn,

My question is about strawberries. I bought 4 plants that I plan to place in my tower. My understanding is that it is best to water them every 15 minutes and off 15 minutes.

I'm assuming your tower is a low pressure aeroponic system. 15 on/off is a typical setting for low pressure aeroponics. That's a good place to start. You just need to keep the roots wet, if your plants begin to wilt reduce the time between watering. But you probably wouldn't want to go more than 15 min between watering. When determining a water cycle all you really have to do is watch your plants, they will tell you. If they begin to wilt and the roots are dry, you need to water more frequently.

During the night hours turn to water on a couple of times just to keep the roots wet. Does that seem to be the correct method of doing stawberries, or am I on the wrong track?

Yes. Plants consume most of the water they use while they are conducting photosynthesis (daytime/light). But you still don't want them to become dry during dark hours either.

[khawn]

Thanks for the quick response. At times I am almost sorry that I built the tower because I have trouble with it leaking at the top. The cap just isn't fitting right. I made some adjustments to it today and it's doing better. For some reason I seem to be losing some water from the tank. I think a lot of it was coming from the top. Evaporation of the water will probably be a problem for me here in Florida, with the heat and all.

Ken

[GpsFrontier]

Hello Ken,
You would be surprised how much water the plants actually drink.

[khawn]

I am also growing pumpkins in my DWC units. They are really thirsty. I'm not sure how much nutrients to give them. I'm just using about 6 tablespoons of Maxigro every 10 days or so. Already have some tiny pumpkins starting to develop.
It is another story with these strawberries. I only have a few in the tower right now and the water is going somewhere. This morning I did some tweeking on it, so I hope it will now use less water.

Ken

[GpsFrontier]

Hello khawn,
The General hydroponics directions call for using 2 tsp per gallon of water for a full strength nutrient solution. You don't want to just keep adding nutrients to your water. When the water level drops from the plants drinking the water, you want to replace it with fresh plain water (not nutrients). Otherwise your nutrient concentrations will be out of balance. Your total water volume is important too. I wrote this article to help explain the relationship between water volume and nutrient concentrations. What size reservoir do I need

[khawn]

Thanks a lot. My stawberries are doing pretty well. They are in my tower hydroponic system. They are being watered 15 minutes on and 15 minutes off, except for the night time hours when I water them for 15 minutes at midnight and 15 minutes at 3 A.M. It seems to be working O.K.

thanks
Ken