This week met with some disaster and some progress. I'll start with the bad news, and some friendly advice.
We've discovered a rather critical weakness in the do it yourself aeroponic system. The system has spray-heads that are threaded into place. Normally, these spray-heads are directed at the roots of the plant. However, we've made an unfortunate discovery recently. Under constant pressure, one of our sprayers eventually rotated a wee bit. This rotation caused the spray to sneak through a gap in the lid of our Sortera (the body of the DIY unit is an Ikea Sortera). This was no fun at all, as it put about two gallons on water onto our bamboo floors. Don't run your hydroponics on hardwood floors unless you're brave or stupid. I'm a little of both.
Our disaster did lead to a discovery though... A plastic washing machine tub (bought at Home Depot) is an almost perfect fit. Take a look at the trays underneath our two experimental eggplants:
The trays provide a level of safety that I now feel is critical. We've always used large black rubber-backed commercial rugs; but they have an admittedly limited capacity. The new trays are a great way to go. They've slightly larger than we need, but they're a commodity item purchased from Home Depot. Thankfully, the entire light stand fits inside them pretty easily.
Disaster behind us, we've got some tasty news to discuss. Our eggplant in the original DIY aeroponic system has just given us it's first eggplant. It's spectacular. It's absolutely perfect. In fact, I liked it so much that I decided to turn it into a white-matted stock photo. I thought it was the perfect specimen; so I spent about an hour on the following photo:
Sadly, perfection has it's price. It has departed this world, after such a short career. Here's the last known photo of our beautiful eggplant:
Silliness aside, this plant is a great succeess. I'm very happy with the flavor of the eggplant, and I'm looking forward to the other ones (which are still babies). The House and Garden nutrients did a great job, and it ended up with a very smooth and mellow taste. I'm really pleased, as some other nutrient solutions have given eggplants a bitter taste during previous trials. I've been rather lax in my attention to the "food" eggplant, but the results are still great. I'm going to start using House & Garden more frequently in the future, as it's very effective. My greatest praise for House & Garden is the pH stability. I'm not sure how they do it, but I barely ever touch the pH in the solution. Truthfully, I don't even measure it very often anymore, it's so stable.