Day 30 Roots

Day 27

Added small cut black plastic garbage bag to help block the light from the root systems

Why Sweet Potatoes?

Well why not?
"...Nutrition
Sweet potato is high in carbohydrates and vitamin A and can produce more edible energy per hectare per day than wheat, rice or cassava. It has an abundance of uses ranging from consumption of fresh roots or leaves to processing into animal feed, starch, flour, candy, and alcohol..."
(taken from International Potato Center at http://www.cipotato.org/sweetpotato/)

Plus lets not forget that Sweet Potatoes are delicious!

Day 24 - Surviving

I've been gone for about 5 days and came back to some better roots and some new leaves, yay! some of the roots are now touching the water which kinda goes against my aeroponic pride. This Hydroponic/Aeroponic combo is working well for getting the roots to come out. I will go back to the pure Aeroponic setup once all the plants are better rooted.

Day 17

This closed system technique is the way to go for cloning cuttings. The root systems are growing fast now. I am going to be away for 6 days and really wonder what I am going to come back to!

Day 16

So the plants have been in the Intensive Care Unit for 48 hours. Roots are starting to come out of everywhere.

Day 15

Plants in intensive care unit 24 hours

Day 13

Day 10

The day 7 plants in the glass look so much better than the plants in the system. This system is not working. I've switched out the plants from the glass to the system and the plants that were in the system are now in the glass while I think about a solution to fix this.

Day 14 Intensive care unit

Fogger Clean

Fogger after 1-week teflon disks get a little yellowish from the nutrient water combo

Ghetto home made fogger float - I use this same float and fogger in the other system too.

Fogger just starting

Fogger off- floating on the water/nutrient solution



Fogger after 1 min running


side view of intensive care unit




I decided things were going bad enough with the plants to create an intensive care unit. I think that my experimental prototype system is not very good at cloning plants but may be good at growing plants with good root systems. This intensive care unit is a closed system. No fan blowing fog into a grow chamber. The water, nutrients, fogger and plant roots are all in the same, smaller, chamber. The fogger bubbles the water and sort of splashes little droplets all over the chamber, as well the fog seems more dense. The plants have been in this intensive care unit for 24 hours and the plants seem to be responding.