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Hydroponic/Soilless Cucumber Production in greenhouse – Part II

By geekgardener, on December 8th, 2011%

 

This article is a continuation of Part I of Hydroponic Cucumber production. The response to the previous article was amazing. Questions started pouring in in huge numbers. This shows how much interest people have in commercial hydroponics. I will try to keep these articles simple for a home gardener and at the same time, sticking to methodologies followed for a commercial production.

This last part dealt with seed starting, transplanting and training. This part will deal with crop management, irrigation, fertilization and harvest.

Seedless cucumber in Hydroponics Recap:
These plants are about 40 days from the date of sowing. They are sown in black polythene bags filled with coco peat media. Each bag contains about 12 liters of media in it. If it is mini cucumbers, there can be 2 in a bag but for bigger English cucumbers one per bag is recommended.The spacing of the plants are at 16-18 inches apart.
Cucumber plants trained vertically Pruning:
Regular pruning results in healthy, sturdy plants that yield continuously. The fruits will also be of uniformly large size. Too many branches can dilute the vigor and when then number fruits goes higher than the plant can handle, it automatically aborts the next set of flowers till the current ones are harvested.At the same time, care should be taken
It can be observed that there are flowers on all the nodes.

 
Young cucumbers forming Pollination:
English cucumbers are parthenocarpic. It means, there is no need for pollination for the fruit set. This feature makes it a wonderful candidate for greenhouse growing. The grower need not worry about brining in bumble bees for pollination. Also, all the flowers are female flowers. As many flowers there are, that many cucumbers you will get( Well, Technically!).In the picture to the left, you can see the tender cucumbers growing vigorously. It takes 10-14 days for a cucumber to mature. It grows very fast especially in the last few days of that duration. The weight ranges from 400-550grams per cucumber. This weight depends on the stage of picking.

 
Cucumbers close to maturity Maturity:
These cucumbers are approx 1 week old ( from the day of flowering). The ridges are a feature of the cucumber variety and they gradually become very shallow as the cucumber matures.The skin is very thin so care should be taken to immediately store them in a cool place or shrink wrap them. Otherwise, they can lose moisture too quickly and become soft and rubbery.

On the left, is cucumber 2 days short of harvest. More you leave on the plant, more nutrients are diverted to the old cucumbers and this might delay new ones getting formed at the top. Always maintain a balance with respect to number of fruits per plant. 6-7 fruits at any point in time is a good number. More than that, one might experience deficiencies of calcium due to the inability to support more fruits.  
Cucumbers Training Training:
The plants are allowed to reach the top overhead wire. Till it reaches that height, all the side shoots and branches are removed.Once it touches the overhead wire, the top is cut off and two branches are allowed to form. They are allowed to fall down from the top. Care should be taken such that the stem doesn’t break as it winds around the wire. The fruits are allowed to form on the laterals.These plants on the left have about few inches before their tops are cut off and are allowed to branch.
Closeup of cucumber yield Nutrients:
Most of the questions, I received were related to this one topic. Nutrient! Nutrient! Nutrient.
My idea was to write a dedicated post on Hydroponics Nutrients. Not just for Cucumber but for any crop. A subsection in a post will do no justice to the topic. So in this section I am just going to mention the ppm values used and deal with this topic in detail the next post.  

Macro Nutrients

Nitrogen(NO3):190
Nitrogen(NH4):20
Phosphorous:50
Potassium:380
Calcium:190
Magnesium:50

Micronutrients:

Fe:0.8, Mn:0.5,Zn:0.3,B:0.5, Cu:0.05, Mo:0.05
Another shot of cucumber Nutrients Continued:
It is important to remember that the nutrient is only part of the equation. There is no one single nutrient for any crop. Plants tolerate a range of nutrients. It is the growers responsibility to read the plant and if necessary modify the nutrient to suit the environment. Regularly “read” the plant for deficiencies, toxicity, insect attack. If you find certain the plant is too vegetative( lush leaves, less/no fruits), then take certain measures to steer it into generative mode. There are lots of methods one can use to steer the plant towards vegetative or generative. Temperature, Irrigation duration/frequency, Electrical Conductivity(EC) are some of them.So one formula doesn’t suit all. It needs to be tailored to the area. In the coming posts, I will explain in detail about How to make hydroponic nutrients and how to modify it to suit the plants need. Also on how to “read” your plant.
Harvested english cucumber This is 1st Harvest. Each cucumber weighed 500-550 grams. We were very excited that we didn’t even eat these cucumber for couple of days.It was like ..in the song from “Damadamm” no touching no touching.. only seeing only seeing”). Most of them averaged and 14-15 inches but some of them dared 17inch mark. This was from one plant that was first to yield. It was also the one that had saw-dust mixed in along with cocopeat as a trial. I was impressed :D .
2nd Harvest of seedless long english cucumber 2nd Harvest was huge. I picked about 20 cucumbers and what I liked about this crop was the uniformity. Every plant had almost same number of cucumbers on them and was quite a view in my greenhouse. One thing to remember with english cucumbers is that they have a very thin skin. If not stored properly, they lose water very quickly leading to a soft rubbery fruit. They remain crunchy for a long time if stored properly. The fruit is so juicy and crunchy without the seeds coming your way.
Cucumber_Yield 3rd Harvest and again I got 20 cucumbers. At this point, we were loaded with cucumbers in our house and I already started selling this to my colleagues at work. Who doesn’t love vegetables delivered to their cubicles.. Parallely I had beefsteak tomatoes growing and their yield was pretty good as well. It was tomato and cucumber month. I had so much surplus that I approached nearby Vegetable supermarket and the push cart guys. To my surprise both of them agreed in a jiffy. The best part was I got to set the price and they were ready for it. They also said that they will take lettuce and other exotics I grew. So far, I have harvested around ~40 kg. The crop had its share of insects. I will handle insects and diseases to watch out for in cucumber production in my next post which is Part III.

 

Hope you all enjoyed this part of the Hydroponic cucumber production series.

Link to Part I :

 

See you in my next post. Until then Happy gardening

GG

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Growing Tomatoes in Growbags – Hydroponic way

By geekgardener, on April 18th, 2010%

Whenever I see a commercial greenhouse or farm, I always get this feeling..”why can’t we grow plants like they do?”. The moment this thought comes in, you start paying attention to details. You try to do everything the right way and see if you can perfect the art.

My goal (more like a wish) right from the beginning is always to reduce the gap between commercial and home gardening in terms of  yield.  In some cases I was able to come little closer but in some I failed. 

In this post, I will write about growing tomatoes in grow bags. Grow bags are lay flat bags filled with potting mix. Unlike containers, they don’t provide depth but they give enough room for the roots to explore. In this experiment I used grow bags made of coco peat. They don’t contain any nutrient in it and hence its our duty to provide all the nutrients the plants need.

It all starts from the seed. This time, I had some seeds of tomato from IndoAmerican seeds. A variety called INDAM Naveen. I have already grown this variety and was impressed with the productivity.

The seeds were sown thickly in a small  pot and once they showed a true leaf, they were moved into a Pro tray.

Two weeks later they looked like this.

6/2/2010

 MyGarden 1012

 

Now this is a typical grow bag. Its ~3 feet long and contains compressed cocopeat slab in it.  Its ideal for growing 3-4 plants per bag.

MyGarden 1256

 

In my case, I wanted to grow 3 tomato plants in this and hence made markings like below. Cut the bag on the lines made so that when you open the flips, you get a square hole cut out.

MyGarden 1257 

 

Next is to run water through it. Easiest is to use a pipe/hose tube. Let it soak and as it soaks, it expands as well. You can see the grow bag growing. Give it some time. Once its done, you will have fully expanded grow bag thats ready to take plants in.

Once expanded, these grow bags will look like this below. To transplant, I took juice boxes cut them into three and used them to hold the plant when they are small. Kinda made it look like Rockwool cubes ;) .

Now comes the drainage part. Carefully make a slit 0.5-1 inch above the bottom surface of the grow bag at 2 or 3 places on the sides. As it is covered on most of the sides water loss through medium is very less. The seedlings that were in the pro tray were transplanted 3 per bag.

17/2/2010

MyGarden 1060 

You can also see that I have lined the bench with black polythene sheet. This is to collect all the drainage water at one place. There is a slope provided to the bench, so all the drainage flow to the lowest point, where the reservoir is kept

Alright, Now comes the interesting part. How do we water this thing?. Though it can be hand watered ( which I did for first couple of weeks), it can become very difficult as the opening is very small and needs lot of patience to water it. So obviously the next step was to install a drip system and automate it. Thats lot stuff mentioned in a single line right?. we will munch bite at a a time.

So here it is after 10 days time. The stake wires tied out nice and you can also see the spaghetti drip wires. These wires deliver the nutrient water to the plants.

28/2/2010

MyGarden 1081

Dripping in action.

MyGarden 1139 

Another shot of the tomatoes on 11/3/2010

MyGarden 1089

Tomatoes already started to form.

MyGarden 1090

 

Setting up Automated Drip System:

Now comes the interesting part. Setting up the automated drip system.  In Grow bag systems the nutrient is generally not recycled. But I didnt have the bandwidth to waste the nutrients. So I thought I would re use the drainage as well.

Things necessary for a automated drip system are :

  • A submersible pump.
  • Programmable timer
  • Reservoir
  • Drip tubes(Usually 12mm)
  • Spaghetti tubes
  • Tee joints & End caps.

 

Submersible Pump:

This pumps are available in SJP Road in Bangalore( Road parallel to SP Road).This is from a company called Tullu. Costs about INR400-500 and there are cheaper chinese counterpart for INR 200 or so. It pumps water at about 400-500 litres per hour to height of 4 feet. It varies with pump to pump. Needs 240 V AC to operate.

MyGarden 1274 

Programmable Timer:
It took really long time to get this piece of hardware in Bangalore. Myself and my friend Anil Hande were searching and searching. Finally found this in SP Road in a shop called OM Electronics. It costs about INR 650 and you can program 8 schedules per day. It comes as a bare bone timer and we need to do some more work before it gets usable.

MyGarden 1284

 

Like I said, the timer has just leads for connections and is not very user friendly.  Below is the my version of the completed timer box. I got some help from Anil to get the wiring in place. You
can check out his version and more information on its wiring Anil’s Album

MyGarden 1271

I have programmed in such a way that it operates for 15 minutes every 3 hours.

 

Reservoir: Here is my reservoir. Ok ..Not very nice looking but then who cares as long it is cheap. Another peace I picked up from local plastic recycle shop. The drained water pours in via the black poly sheet. Next to it you can spot the drip tube connected to Pump going out of the reservoir.

MyGarden 1270

Here are some small accessories that you will need to setup a drip system.

They are called joints. On the top left, is simply joint, next is Tee joint and the one below is Tap joint. You can use them where ever you feel they are needed. There is also Elbow joint in case your drip tube needs to bend, I havent shown them in the pic. They cost INR 1 each. Available in SJP Road.

MyGarden 1276

This is called Spaghetti tube. This tube is used to take the nutrient from the main drip tube to all the plants. You have to connect this tube to the one that brings the nutrients from the reservoir. To connect this you need a small connector which is pictured below this pic.

MyGarden 1277

 

This connector is a small piece one side of which goes into the main 12mm drip tube and the other end goes into the spaghetti . Costs very cheap.

MyGarden 1200 

This small piece is nothing but a poker to make even sized holes for the connector to go into the main drip pipe.  Handle with care. Its very sharp.

MyGarden 1278

The pump pushes water from one side of the tube, the other side has to be closed to that the dripping happens on all the spaghettis connected to it. Use an endcap like below. You can either use an end cap or use a tap joint and simply close it ;) .

MyGarden 1281

OR

MyGarden 1282

 

This is how it looks when the whole thing is in place, alive and pumping!

MyGarden 1142

 

The tomatoes are growing like crazy and they have already hit the roof. I am pictured below to just show how short I am  ;) .

MyGarden 1269

Also, If you are interested in using grow bags to grow plants. Let me know using the comments. I am ordering them in Bulk from an exporter in Tamilnadu. If you need some I can include it along with my order. People from other states, Let me know if you need more info regarding the seller.

Ok That’s a long post. I think it justifies the long gap between the posts.  Just as I am finishing this post, it started raining outside. Let me go get some cool breeze!.

Ciao

gg

121 comments   article, containers, drip irrigation, gardening, greenhouse, hydroponics, medium, vegetables   , , , , , , , , , , ,  
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