Coming soon.
Bucket and Zipgrow tower system
Basic one Zipgrow tower and 5 gallon bucket stand.
Could be used for a goldfish or simply hydroponics or just as a way to have one tower inside to make harvesting your herbs and salad right in the kitchen possible.
This tiny little system could be an Aquaponics system or a Hydroponics system. It only takes about 2 square feet of floor space and can grow between 8 and 18 plants (depending on your spacing.)
It consists of a hanging 5′ Zipgrow tower A stand with a base for the 5 gallon bucket to sit on (having water in the 5 gallon bucket is important to keep the stand from being knocked over too easily.) A 5 gallon bucket a pump and the plumbing to feed from the pump up to the top of the Zipgrow tower.
$150.00 plus shipping. I expect to have a few available this weekend for anyone interested please contact me to let me know.
This is not an aquaponics system to grow plate size fish in nor is a 5 gallon bucket going to keep the water cool enough sitting out in the sun on a 95 F day here in Florida but it is an option for a confined space apartment where you still wish to grow some herbs and can’t quite bring yourself to flush that goldfish that just won’t die on you. Or you could use it for straight hydroponics if you don’t want fish.
Anyway, if you want a tiny system but don’t want to build it yourself. The assembly on this is very simple. No tools required, well other than whatever you need to open the box.
How well would this work with pee-ponies? Also, if indoors,what plants or lighting would you reccomend?
LOL, I don’t know about Ponies but I’m sure it could be done as pee-ponics. You will need to do your own research into the safety and management of pee-ponics and some understanding of water chemistry and your source water (tap water) will be helpful to make sure you don’t run into deficiency problems with your plants but it isn’t all that hard. It won’t take very much pee to power such a small system. I would recommend doing a search of liquid gold. When I’ve done pee ponics I followed the recommendation of sealing the urine in a bottle for several weeks to allow the urea to convert to ammonia which will kill most of the likely pathogens naturally carried by healthy people. Then a small amount of the “hummonia” can be used to power a bio-ponic system. (200 ml per day was more than enough to power a barrel ponic size system so a single tower might only need between a healthy dibble to 50 ml per day.)
As to lighting, I don’t have too much experience there but they do make T5 light fixtures you can hang vertically so I expect a 4 foot fixture or two per tower will work for most of the smaller plants that grow well in the towers.
What plants to grow, well the smaller compact plants are easiest in the towers. Things like lettuce and herbs like basil and mint grow well. I know people who have grown strawberries in them. It isn’t that larger plants can’t grow in the towers but the smaller plants are far easier to manage.
Is that freekin basil? Holy Sh!%. My hydo basil has bark on it but that thing is a tree.
LOL, and that is after some really heavy pruning. Basil does really like Aquaponics and our warm season here in Florida. Not sure how long I’ll be able to keep the basil going as it gets cooler this season. I might need to bring one of the bucket tower set ups inside for the winter.
Ok I have done some research into shipping. To ship the entire thing in one package will cost over $50 to much of the continental US.
So I was thinking I would just remove the bucket and wood base from the package since I can fit the rest of it into a more reasonable package for shipping. But then I thought to see about packaging it in two boxes. That would make it just a little more reasonable and still allow a no tools assembly.
I will set this up with two options. One will cost extra in shipping to supply the entire kit in two boxes. The other will leave the slightly more DIY prone individuals to find their own bucket and object (piece of 2 x 12 board or something) to lag the stand to. Tools needed for the DIY version include a drill and bit to make pilot holes for the lags and a nut driver to install the lags
Would you tell me what water pump should be used for the 5 ga system and whether it needs to be running continuously?
Hay there, I have always run my tower system pumps continuously. I’ll have to ask some others to see if anyone else is running intermittent flow. I expect you might get away with a 15 on 15 off type cycle but if the timer got stuck in the off position the plants would be in bad shape pretty quickly on a hot day.
As to what size pump. I’ve been using the Eco Pro 264 gph pumps for the single tower bucket systems. The important thing to look for is a pump that can still deliver some flow at about 6 foot head. I believe the Eco Pro 264 has a max height of about 6.4 feet which makes it perfect to deliver flow to a single tower. I have just gotten some of these pumps in and will be having a sale on them for 19.95 each plus shipping.