Chilies 2020: Plan B

My original plan was to move into full hydroponic gardening setup in our greenhouse early this year. However, during the Easter weekend, we got again a “takatalvi” (a cold spell with snowfall) in Tampere, and the greenhouse will stay closed for a long time, still. Thus, a Plan B.

I had both twelve chili saplings of different varieties, and twelve small “self-watering” plant pots – these are Orthex Eden 12 cm models, meaning that they have only 0.3 L water reservoir, and 0.8 L for the hydroponic substrate (or soil). I had also a 45 L bag of Gold Label HydroCoco 60/40 substrate in my stash, so I proceeded to make a “passive hydroponics” setup using what I got. I washed the pots (they had spent the winter outdoors), then buried the rockwool cubes (with saplings sticking out) into the substrate in each self-watering pot. The nutritient mix is again based on Canna Coco A+B.

I multi-purposed a Bosch workbench from our garage as the growing table, and positioned the Nelson Garden LED growing lights hanging close above the plants.

This system should make do for some time now. The only downside is that small water reservoir in all of those 12 pots. I have no idea how fast the small saplings will drink that amount, so it might be that soon I will be mixing nutritients and filling in 12 pots every day or so. Let’ see: the maximum amount of liquid these pots can take is under 12 L, so if I will prepare a large 10 L bucket of the nutritient solution per each “serving”, this should be pretty straightforward. Canna, the nutritient manufacturer, instructs to use 19 ml of A solution and 19 ml of B solution per 10 L of water in the starting & rooting phase, and then add the dosage into 23 ml + 23 ml, when the plants have entered the early vegetative, growth phase. When we’ll have a bit larger plants (2-4 weeks-old saplings), the recommended nutritient amounts are 27 ml + 27 ml, per 10 L water.

Let’s hope for warm weathers to return, too!