My fascination with wheatgrass continues...

I've recently gotten tired of not having any wheatgrass during the colder months of the year.  Partly out of curiosity, I decided to buy some hydroponics gear and give indoor wheatgrass a chance.

There's a store in nearby New Jersey called Tasty Harvest.  We visited them a few weeks ago doing some initial research.  They are a pretty good place.  It's a family-run shop.  They know their stuff. I realize that most of the hydroponics gear isn't intended for wheatgrass.  Ideally, I'd use a custom setup, but I'm not at that stage just yet.

The demo that they have set up in the store is a pretty good indication of what you can do indoors.  They're running a 1,000 watt high-pressure sodium bulb, and they're producing a metric crapload of results.

If you've seen the Epcot section of the Disney report, you'll remember the hydroponics and aeroponics.  Although I'm still considering building an NFT (nutrient flow tray) system for my wheatgrass, I decided to go with a commercially-made ebb-and-flow system for the first round.  An ebb-and-flow system is made to periodically flood, then recede (on a timer).

I picked the MegaGarden kit from Hydrofarm.  It's a much cleaner and more compact design than I could have built from existing materials.  It's got a growing area of about 2' x 2'.  I also picked up a small full-spectrum compact fluorescent light for the kit.  It's not particularly high-output, but that isn't much of a concern.  Wheatgrass is a shade plant, and doesn't need tons of light (like tomatoes or cucumbers).

The tray has a pattern of "tunnels" to allow the water to flow evenly throughout the tray before rising too dramatically. On the advice of the Tasty Harvest folks, we're using a fabric-style planting medium to retain the seeds in the tray.  I actually expected that we'd need some kind of formal containment, but that really isn't the case.  The water level is set to only about 1/8" of an inch, so seed movement really isn't a problem.  In the picture above, the blue fitting is where the water flows into the upper dray during a "flood stage".

Thus far, we've had pretty good results.  It's hard to judge though.  I've just found out that I've been using a sub-optimal seed; and I'm waiting on a new batch of seed to arrive.

Here's a picture of the whole setup at the moment:

You may notice that I built the light stand using some 1" PVC piping.  I didn't want to do anything permanent or expensive until I was more sure of my plans.  The stand was built from a single 10' section of PVC and some fittings.  Total cost of stand: ~$8.

The pump is controlled by a simple timer.  I'm manually switching the light for the time-being.  I'm not sure my long-term plans just yet.