 Well, Master Gardeners, I'm really privileged to introduce our next speaker today. We have Tom Michaels from the University of Minnesota. He's a full professor there that specializes in breeding on dry beans and then also salad greens. He also happens to be one of my favorite individuals. I still remember the first time that I met Tom Michaels. So I happened to be attending the University of Minnesota and he had just been hired. He came to my class to speak and he seemed like a mild-mannered individual until he got in front of the classroom and then you could see his passion for teaching. He really has that passion for teaching and we've all benefited from that. So today he's going to share his new passion which is hydroponic salad tables and I'm sure you're going to enjoy this as much as I have enjoyed learning from Tom. Take it away. Thanks Esther. You're far too kind but I hope some of that passion comes through today because the hydroponic salad table is a lot of fun. Well, thanks folks for coming to this presentation on the hydroponic salad table. As Esther said, I'm Tom Michaels and I'm a professor here at the University. The cameraman is Mr. Colin Jones, who's a master's student here at the University in the Applied Plant Sciences program and we even have three people in the live studio audience. Thanks folks for coming and giving me some moral support. So my goal today is to show you the hydroponic salad table, to show you the components that we put together and also how we manage the system in order to grow a nice crop of salad greens. My goal is that by the end of this session you'll be so excited about it that you'll want to grow a crop of salad greens your own using this system to harvest a salad day right through September and October. So we only have 45 minutes today. I'm only going to be able to hit the highlights and show you some of the main parts of the table but I understand that you have a copy of my manual at the conference and so I recommend that if you're interested in this that you take one of those manuals because it has all the detail you need to grow your own hydroponic salad tables. If you don't have a copy of it there you can download a PDF of that manual at my website and the best way to find that website is to do a Google search on hydroponic salad table and below the ads anyway the first hit that you should get should be the link to that and you'll find the PDF of the manual there. So please get a hold of the manual so we can get past just the highlights. Well let me then introduce you to the hydroponic salad table. This is what it is. This is a salad table that is sized to provide one person a good sized salad a day over about six to eight weeks of harvest. Now the main components that I want to show you real briefly here are this one has an enclosure that's just made out of lumber from the lumber store it's actually optional and inside then we have a tote which is really just a rubber made rubber made style plastic storage tote and I'll show you that in detail also. You'll see at the top this white strip is a polystyrene lid it's just a foam insulation lid in which I've placed net pots that each grow one plant so I have 11 plants growing here that's how we're getting our salad a day and you can see the roots are nice and white and very healthy and that there's no soil on them. This is a system where the roots are bathed in a nutrient solution and there's no soil. So that's just kind of how the parts go. What I'm going to do is show you each of those parts individually and talk a little bit more about them but the idea behind the salad table and where this originally came from is that I wanted to develop a way that in somebody in an urban situation who has no access to a garden doesn't have soil available can in their high-rise apartment or condo grow salad greens a healthy set of salad greens on an outdoor balcony that's facing say south or west so it was originally planned as part of urban agriculture but I'm finding it's equally well used in suburban decks or even in rural areas so it's something that's found at home all over although it initially was an exercise for urban agriculture. So let me show you again some of these parts in a little more detail. So this is our tote it's a 10 gallon tote and that's the size that I recommend for you. It's roughly two feet long and 14 and a half to 15 inches wide and nine inches deep. This is an ideal size and so this is sized for one person if you have two people you want to grow for then it's just a matter of growing two of these a small family would be three. So that's how you multiply this to get the salad greens you need for the crowd that you're growing for. If you happen to use a different type of tote that has slightly different dimensions you need to take that in account if you're building an enclosure. I have plans for different enclosures in the website and in the manual. They all assume this size tote so if you change your tote and you want to use those enclosure dimensions you need to make those adjustments alright so in this tote then goes a nutrient solution so it's filled with water and I'll talk more about the nutrient in a minute but to that we add a hydroponic nutrient and then I've also already mentioned the lid this is a inch and a half thick expanded polystyrene foam lid it's used for insulation in walls for instance if you are renovating your basement or something like that so it's easily found at home improvement stores and then there are holes that are cut into it and into those holes we place what's called see if you can see it better that way a net pot so these net pots look like little yogurt containers with slits in the sides to let the roots come through as the plant grows and they fit very nicely into the hole and you can see that underneath it peeks out just a little bit to drop down into the nutrient solution so we've got the bin we've got the lid and we've got the net pot a fourth piece of equipment that's important is perlite and you're probably familiar with perlite as those white specks that you see in your potting medium it's an expanded volcanic rock so it's a natural product and we're going to use this to grow our seedlings in the net pots so that's pretty much it for what you need to really grow a hydroponic salad table except for the seed so let me talk about that briefly the basic salad green that I recommend for growing in the hydroponic salad table is lettuce and the type of lettuce that you want to use is something that's loose leaf so that you can cut the leaves off easily so loose leaf lettuce or romaine lettuce the reason for that is we're going to use a harvesting strategy called cut and come again that is we're going to cut off some leaves off the salad plant and then leave some in in a week's time or so we'll come back and harvest some more after they've grown so we extend our harvest for several weeks that way rather than doing it all in once head lettuces are the other alternative and they'll grow okay in this system it's just that we don't want to harvest the whole head at once and then discard the plant let's extend our harvest over several weeks so lettuce I like to make maybe two-thirds to three-quarters of the plants that I grow in the table because there's such a great basis for a salad but there are a lot of brassica greens that grow great in this system too so just as an example I have kale here collard greens grow really well a lot of the Asian greens go well grow well pack Troy's really wonderful so there are a lot of different brassicas you can grow oh you can grow nasturtiums in here too so if you're a fan of nasturtium flowers having as a garnish on your salad or for their color that that and their spicy taste you can grow nasturtiums as well another brassica that grows well especially if you like that spicy taste is mustard or watercress grows well here so if you like a little bit more spike to your salad then these work well and the last one I'm going to show you although there are others you can grow is Swiss chard Swiss chart I love in the table because of the petioles that have the various bright colors it really brightens up the table but also because I happen to like the fresh the taste of the fresh leaves has kind of a dusty flavor that I think is really nice when blended with lettuce and the other reason that I like Swiss chard is it has a flavor a flavor similar to spinach the problem is we can't grow spinach on this table spinach really doesn't like to have its roots down in the nutrient solution and it doesn't grow very well so in a way growing growing Swiss chard is my substitute for being able to grow spinach now one of the things that I want to mention especially because your master gardeners is that this project lends itself to doing things cooperatively that is getting three or four people among your master gardener friends who might want to try this project the reason is that you can buy these articles in bulk and really save a lot of money so for instance this polystyrene foam the cheapest way to purchase this is as a four foot by eight foot sheet that will make 12 of these lids you're not going to need 12 you might need three if you're say going to try to do salad greens for a small family but if you can go together and and collectively spend ten dollars on a big sheet of this polystyrene you can divide it up among you and save some money over trying to just buy a whole sheet by yourself and having it sit in your garage also net pots net pots you can buy them individually but they're quite expensive that way instead you can buy a pack of a hundred for eighteen dollars or so maybe maybe a little less online and share them among your friends and the other one that's easy to share is buying nutrient this nutrient is one kilo two point two pounds costs maybe 12 to 15 dollars but it's enough to grow at least 15 tables so again you can divide it up among friends so I want to just point out this is a project that we can do where we share the costs and and share the materials and make a cheaper that way all right so Colin I'm going to move around here we're going to talk a little bit about planting all right so you want to start plants about four weeks before you expect to do your first harvest so if I can get you to try this this year you might want to have your first harvest around Labor Day so that means come back four weeks or right around the beginning of August end of July you'll want to start your seedlings now I grow I'm going to recommend that you grow about 10 plants if you grow one of these modules one of these salad tables so that means you'll need at least 10 nut net pots for even one of these modules you're going to grow so here's what we do with them so here's our net pot our pearlite moisten the pearlite before you work with it because as you probably know it's very dusty and it'll make you choke you simply fill the net pot and tap it a little bit but you don't need to really scrunch it in and so there's our net pot full of pearlite I'm going to grab some seeds what have I got here mustard green seeds now when I normally when I normally do planting out in the garden I'm going to take a pinch of lettuce or whatever it is and run it along the furrow and we don't want to do that in this system we want to only plant three seeds per pot so let's take a look down here the reason we want to do three seeds per pot is we're going to thin the plants to just one if we plant a whole bunch of seeds in here we're going to when we thin out the ones we don't want we're going to disturb the plant we want to keep so instead let's just grow three and make three little holes there somewhere between three eighths and a half inch deep not very deep at all I'm planting three seeds covering it up I'm going to put a stake in there that has the name on it because I don't know about you but about two seconds after I planted I forget whether it was lettuce or whether it was mustard and now I'm ready to go now I mentioned that I'm going to recommend you grow ten plants per one of these storage totes but one of the things you can do is plant 12 because if you have some older seed that's maybe turns out to be a dud and doesn't germinate if you grow 12 pots you'll probably have ten that are okay you can also do some transplanting and I'll show that later but you might for ten plant 12 now also if you have seed that you find might be a couple of years old and you're not quite sure of the germination just up the number that you grow instead of three you can put two more holes on the front and back and plant five and then when it comes time to thin you'll be able to choose your best plant and keep that all right so that's planting the next keep it there calling some to come up with the capillary bed so the next thing I want to show you is what we're going to what I recommend you put the net pots in in order to germinate the seeds and what we use is just a flat this is a half greenhouse flat it's got no perforations in it so it's going to hold water into it I add perlite so this is just a perlite bed and then I add water to it to create what I call a bog but not a swamp so swamp has water sitting on top a bog has water just below the surface so if you can see I don't know if you can see that that's pretty hard but as I just go down a half an inch that's water there so I've got a bog not a swamp I'm gonna go down just that quarter to half an inch and place my net pot in it so what's happening now we've got water down in the in the perlite it's going to be whipped up perlite's great at wicking water it's going to be whipped up into the net pot it's going to provide just the right amount of moisture for those seedlings to germinate and it's not going to be too much moisture which you know is one of the big problems with trying to germinate seed drowning the seed so here we go we've got a capillary bed we've got our net pots we've got it planted and at this point I'm just going to cover it I'll have my 10 or 12 net pots in there cover it with some sort of a clear plastic dome or a piece of plastic just until the seeds germinate to keep the moisture high I'm going to place this in a in diffuse light not in direct sunlight I normally do it inside near a window you don't want to do it in the dark because some lettuce actually needs light to germinate so with the dome put it in subdued light off we go a week later now you're calling you're going to be looking to your right side here a week later on the right side you'll see seedlings that I have germinated that I planted a week ago I'm looking for my tweezer there it is I planted a week ago and so you can see the stage they'll be in about a week they've germinated I've taken the domes off and you can see if you look carefully 1 2 3 1 2 3 I've got three seedlings coming up I have to tell you I cheated a bit before the webinar I went through and picked out one or two extras that spilled because I'm not perfect in just planting three seeds but nevertheless you get the idea that they're nicely spaced so what's a good one for me to take can you see that when they're calling so I've got three plants here at this stage they're very easy to just pull up by the roots so I'm pulling out a plant pulling out another plant I might dig around the base a little bit to get them to come out a little easier there we go so I've now thinned after one week I've ended to one plant per there's one two exceptions really if you're going to switch chart leave two plants because they don't quite grow as well in this system as they do in a garden they don't get as big so if you grow two plants in this net pot it works out perfectly so I'll just show you again an example now of taking two out what I want to do is take out a lettuce plant well let me take this mustard plant for instance just as an example now with this mustard plant when I brought it out I still have a nice root system attached to it I haven't damaged it too much if you for instance have some pots that are that were blanks that were duds nothing came up at this stage you can transplant these seedlings into those dud pots and they'll grow great without any damage so you can either grow 12 pots in order to get 10 or grow 10 and be ready to do some transplanting into the pots where you didn't get good germination all right so now we have we have our seedlings grown we've gotten gotten them thinned to one plant we just let them grow now for another week and I'll come back and look at these in a moment but we're going to spend two weeks then letting the plants grow and so we have a little bit of time while we're letting the seedlings grow so what do you do during that time I recommend that you use that to for instance build an enclosure like I showed you earlier or to find a table or bench on which you're going to put this salad table system now I have two criteria that I want you to try to match when you're either making a enclosure or finding a table or bench to put it on and that is it needs to be strong enough to hold 80 pounds because you're putting 10 gallons of water into this tote and that's going to be 80 pounds so it has to be sturdy the other thing that you're going to need to do is to be able to have a table or a place on your tote where you can make it absolutely dead level so let me show you an example and by the way I should say about enclosures I think I said this earlier I have plans for enclosures that hold one or two or three totes in the manual so if you'd like to build some you can take a look at those designs or it's easy enough to design your own now sometimes you don't care about having an enclosure you just want to grow the tote naked leave the tote naked like this especially if you have a number of totes building enclosures becomes time a time-consuming so you can just put it on a table but you need to get it level so I just pull out my trusty level and this is telling me that I've got a high side over here and a low side over here so I take some wooden shims and just shim it underneath until I get that bubble level it's not quite level yet so I'll put another shim underneath and there we go it's nice and level this way and I know from having done this before we started that it's going to be level this way so get out your level and and use it on your totes the reason you need to do that is because we're going to end up filling this tote all the way up to the rim with a nutrient solution and remember how the net pod peaked out the bottom of that expanded polystyrene lid we want the bottom of the net pot to be down into that nutrient solution ever so little bit but it needs to touch and if we have our bin kind of a kilter and we have up to the rim on this side it's going to be below the rim maybe a quarter inch a half inch on the other side and that's going to leave your net pot high and dry the roots will be out of the water it's going to dry up and die so we absolutely need to have to start we need to have this bin dead level it's not quite as important later but that's fine it needs to be level when you start another tip if you don't have a bar level like this but you have a smartphone you can get some really tricked and free apps for your smartphone that allow you to determine level so all you need is a straight board put your smartphone on and it'll tell you how to get a level okay so I might as well tell you this at this stage if you're going to use the tote with an enclosure that holds the sides in just fine but if you use the tote naked and fill it with this nutrient solution it's going to bulge out until it can actually get beyond the edges of the lid which is more unsightly than really a problem but nevertheless the thing that I do when I'm growing a tote naked like this is I get a wire that's about the diameter of a close hanger wire and I measure it to be the width of the tote plus two inches and then I will on one end take one inch and bend it down at a right angle on the other end bend it down at a right angle so now I've got hooks at both ends and this bail then goes over the tote and holds it against those forces of the nutrient solution that are pushing it out so it's just a little tip in order to be able to use this naked like that like that so let's talk about the nutrient solution because that's what what's next once we get this in place and we know it's level and it's been two weeks and we're ready to transplant our seedlings which I'll show you in a moment then it's time to start adding the nutrient solution the first thing I'll do is just fill this up halfway with water get some weight in it I'll check the level again make sure it's level when it's only half full it's only 40 pounds it's easier to put the shims in if you wait to get it level when it's 80 pounds it's really hard to move so but do your leveling first so now we've got this half full of water it's time for me to add my nutrient solution so I got a couple things to say about nutrient solution the first is you really need to use a nutrient solution that's specifically for hydroponics and that's because of the form of nitrogen that's in the nutrient solution hydroponic nutrient solutions have their nitrogen in the form of nitrate the types of there are other types of fertilizers such as the soluble fertilizers that you might put into your watering can to water pots or even put on your garden miracle grow type of products those if you take a look at them have their nitrogen from urea and it's in the form of ammonium and that really can't be used in hydroponics it can even kill the plants if you use a strictly ammonium type of nutrient solution so don't use miracle grow type products you need to purchase something with high amounts of nitrate and it'll say right on the back if you look at the nutrient and look at the analysis this one first for instance says 85 percent nitrate 15 percent ammonium that's great that's that's a really nice ratio now you can't find us everywhere if you go to one of your home improvement centers or something like that and look for soluble fertilizers I've tried this and I've never found any where I am so you either have to find it at a hydroponic shop or if you don't have one near you look online this one that is made by general hydroponics it's called maxi grow you can purchase this at Amazon for somewhere between 12 and 14 dollars plus shipping so it's a reasonable price as I mentioned before you can split it several ways among friends and grow up to 15 different salad tables so in any case I've made my pitch about use hydroponic nutrient okay now we've got this half full of water because it's a 10% nitrogen solution I know that I need to add 45 grams of that nutrient to this water in order to get it to the point of 120 parts per million nitrogen now if you're interested in the rate of nitrogen you can go up to 150 parts per nitrogen maybe down to a hundred but I like to go 120 I've got a lot more about that and different measurements in the hydroponic salad table manual so I won't go into that much more deeply here but suffice it to say I'll end up taking 45 grams which is equal to two and a half tablespoons of this nutrient put it into the bin stir it around usually keep a paint stir stick around to get it dissolved it dissolves rather quickly and then I'm going to add water up to within about an inch of the rim at this point not all the way up because when you first start out doing this it's a really good idea to check the pH pH as you know is going to be acidity or alkalinity you're used to doing that with soil but it becomes really important with hydroponics because it it can determine whether or not the nutrients can be taken up by the plant roots so we want to have a pH of between five point five and six point five now the water in St. Paul anyway is up around pH eight and this type of a nutrient is going to be buffered and it's going to when I added it's going to drop the pH down probably in the neighborhood of six and a half something like that but it's still worth checking to make sure you're in the five five to six five range so the way you do that is through a pH control kit and this also is made by general hydroponics also available online also something you can share with friends it happens to be your cost roughly in the neighborhood of 15 to 18 dollars this alone is probably seven or eight dollars but it's a great idea to be able to do some testing so the way it works is you dip out some of your nutrient solution that you have added up to within about an inch of the rim this is just a tap water and that I grabbed into it I'm going to add three drops you don't have to be exact it could be less or more give it a shake and you can see that it's turned color and I match that color to colors on here and you can see that my what do you say that is Colin that's somewhere between eight and a half don't you think somewhere between green and blue so this is tap water and as I'm mentioning the tap water in St. Paul comes out a little bit alkaline so if I if that were my nutrient solution I'd know I need to add some acid so this kit comes with pH up with it which is a base and this one which will use more as pH down which is your acid you can add some acid to this and I do it slow just start with maybe a tablespoon and first see how much it changes you want to sneak down on getting your nutrient solution down into that five and a half to six and a half range once you get in that range don't try to be exact just get it there and then you're fine it will be relatively stable alright so that's pH actually what you'll find is you won't need to worry about pH once you get a feel for it and have done this several times because you know your tap water and you know your nutrient and all works out fine okay then so we've got our nutrient ready to go we need to talk about our styrofoam so here's our rigid styrofoam it's cut this one's cut two feet by 16 inches and I've got on it I don't know if you can see that you see my 11 dots I've got eight on each side and three in the middle that's where I'm going to put my holes now I mentioned I want you to grow 10 so why do I have 11 it's because I have one of these dots in the middle that I'm going to cut out but I'm going to keep the core of it and use it as a stopper and that's how I'm going to be able to check my nutrient solution with a dipstick I'll show you what I mean now you can cut out the holes for the net pots with a knife or if you have a two-inch hole saw that you want to attach to your drill that works great too but it's kind of messy it makes a lot of little balls of styrofoam my favorite way of doing it believe it or not is this six ounce tomato paste can which is a small can and you can see I've cut out the bottom and the top and I've sharpened one edge and believe it or not this cuts perfectly you can see the net pot fits in it just great so when I cut the hole I know the net pots going to sit in there perfectly so I'm going to center this over the hole give a few twists and as easy as that I've got I feel like I'm doing a sham well commercial right so as easy as that I've got my nice hole I pop out the core and now I've got my little porthole through which I can check the nutrient solution all the other holes are going to have plants in it if you want to stack this completely full of plants sure you can use that for for another plant and just lift the lid when you want to check the nutrient that's fine too or you can put in a complete row of four in here and grow 12 plants but I like the idea of growing 10 I think it uses the nutrient solution well okay so now we've got you can imagine we've got our bin with our holes in it it's time to transplant seedlings so you'll remember the other half of this capillary bed has seedlings that have grown for roughly now two weeks and this happens to be a Swiss chard the roots probably will have grown down into the nutrient solution into the perlite slightly so I dig them out well you can see there's a little bit of root there I love chart because if it has red petioles it often has red stems and so knock off just a little bit of this the perlite without damaging the roots and down it goes into the lid and I should have mentioned after we do the pH adjustment you want to bring the nutrient solution right up to the rim I'll tell you whether you've got it low or not right up to the rim we've got our nutrient solution so when we put our transplants in there you can see that the net pot peeks out a little bit we've got our roots there and down it goes it's touching the nutrient solution so this seedling now has access to water and nutrients just fine so again use a use a spoon to pull these out because that way you're not going to be damaging any roots normally I like these to have a little bit more root hopefully when you grow them for two weeks especially if you get them outside a bit the last two three days harden them off before you two week period you'll have a little bit more fluffy root coming out when you do your transplanting all right so I've got a couple more minutes let me show you how to manage this system this is a table that's been growing it's an okay spot Colin I'll show you get a close this has been growing for about excuse me for about six weeks now maybe five weeks it's overgrown a little bit I was holding it so I could use it for for this particular harvest you'll see it's got a nice mix of plants we've got different colors of lettuces we've got some kale we've we've got somewhere in your oak here's our mustard they're starting to look like they're wilting a bit because I don't have them in the nutrient solution that's what what it's looking like underneath looking real nice roots what I want to show you is harvest so we're going to do a cut and come again harvest here's the important thing I want you to leave when you harvest three or four leaves so that they can grow and you can harvest them next time so with this particular plant I'm going to take the oldest leaves first and all I'm doing is cutting them with a scissor or with a knife I'm cutting the oldest ones just following them up and I'm leaving now so these are for eating and I'm leaving here in this case for I've got this thumb-sized one I've got a slightly larger leaf here's my third leaf I could possibly take this one off but I'm going to leave it because I have some other things I want to harvest and that's what my harvest is now I can come back in a week's time or maybe even sooner and start and these will all have grown to be as big as these guys are and I can take another four or five leaf harvest off it so that's what I mean by cut and come again same sort of thing with the with the kale I'm going to cut it down in this case take three nice leaves for for my salad I'm starting to wilt a bit and I'm leaving four leaves here's my little thumb-sized one an emerging leaf nearly full size and a full-sized leaf I can come back in half a week or a week and be able to get more salad greens from it so that's how you do harvest little at a time take the harvest that you need you can take about a once this thing gets rolling about an ounce at a time you can start harvesting four weeks after you plant your seed two weeks after you transplant and you won't take this big of harvest it'll be smaller once you get to the fifth week after planting your plants will be this big and you'll be off and running I want to leave you with one one last idea and that is how to manage this besides the harvest and I'm going to have to draw so calm if I can get over to the board here I'm gonna have to reach because of my cable imagine that this is our tote this is our 10 gallon tote and on top of that tote we have our polystyrene lid and in that lid we have our net pots and we have some salad greens plants growing off them okay now we start out with the nutrient solution when they're at first seedlings we start out with the nutrient solution right up to the rim right so that the net pots that are extended down a little bit into the nutrient solution can wick up that moisture for those emerging roots now the roots are going to grow like crazy you think the top grows fast the roots are going to grow fast too and they're going to grow down into this nutrient solution just fine and over time because those plants are transpiring the nutrient solution is going to start being used up so let's imagine that these plants that I just showed you would have used up nutrients so that it's down maybe two two and a half inches and that is forming what I call an air gap this air gap is really important to maintain this space between the bottom of the lid and the top of the nutrient solution should continue to be there because that's how the plant roots take in oxygen for respiration to produce energy for growth and how they exhaust carbon dioxide they can't do it through their roots into the nutrient solution because the new the water can't hold that much co2 and oxygen but instead these roots that are dangling in the air gap differentiate to take in air and also to exhaust co2 so we've got to maintain this eventually what'll happen is that this nutrient solution drops down about halfway it could even go down further it can go down maybe three quarters and you're still okay the roots will be down in it it'll be exchanging gases in the air gap once it gets down around halfway or three quarters down now is when you want to add nutrient solution and make sure that the solution stays somewhere between one half and one quarter full so the air gap is always half of the bin to three quarters of the bin you need the air gap so don't ever when you fill up with nutrient solution try to take it up to the rim again what you'll see is your plants will actually wilt and if you leave it long enough they'll die so you want to maintain the air gap just as a parting thought we had a big rain here last night and my my salad tables that I have in home filled up with water so they had a nice air gap like this but it got filled up by rain just by dribbling through where those holes and so I'm going to go home tonight and I'm going to bail out that water to reestablish the air gap because again if that air gap gets filled up the plants can't respire and the roots will die so that's just something to watch for when you grow this mind your air gap make sure you have one don't ever fill it up back all the way and if it rains check and reestablish the air gaps of the plants continue to grow okay so that's my presentation so far I hope you have some questions and I also hope that you're interested in getting some seedlings started beginning of August so you can start a salad table around the first round Labor Day so thanks so much okay Tom we do have some questions here in Fargo good yes I'm Rhonda Miller and I'm really interested in in doing your salad table at the beginning said that the solution would be all the way to the top of the container but then later on you told us about the importance of air to get oxygen for the roots so when you're originally put the styrofoam with the containers and the seed containers on the tub what level was the water at so this year on initially it is completely full when you first put the transplanted seedlings so this will be roughly two weeks after you planted seed we've got our seedlings with just a few rudimentary roots I don't have strong roots coming out yet poking out the bottom this gets filled all the way to the top and I neglected to tell you that stop step after I got so excited about pH and all that so you fill it all the way up to the rim so now when you do the transplanting put all initially put all your plants in there it's full to the rim that way the bottom of the net pot touches the nutrient solution and the perlite will wick up the nutrients to the roots okay okay thank you because we have another question does the Rugal work in there it does yes it does a Rugal is am I right that's another brassica type plant and so it it forms a nice rosette it's not tall when I've grown it it's been a nice rosette and the only it's not even a problem you will see that the leaves are closer together the internodes are so short on a Rugal that you have to get in there carefully with your knife or your scissor to cut it grows great so does endive for Zay that's a great that's a in the lettuce family and that grows really well too have you tried growing it indoors under lights yes I have and I always do every winter grow indoors even in this classroom I have have it now the trick is light you need to have a good amount of light a window is not enough a regular workshop a shop light isn't enough what I recommend people do is get three LED shop lights and so there I'm a member at Costco so I've seen them there but you can also pick them up at Home Depot or other home improvement areas but LED shop lights that have two strips of LEDs in them they normally look just like little tubes but inside them are strips of LEDs and they're kind of narrow and if I put three side-by-side I can grow two of these bins end-to-end it'll be four foot so you have three of these four foot shop lights and that'll be enough light to be able to grow the saligrades you need to get them low but that'll work great so those shop lights run somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 each and so for $60 sounds like a lot but for $60 you're set to go for growing inside for for quite a while I have one more question is it possible to get scum on top of the solution or is that not a problem like it is with rain barrels right I haven't had that problem and the same concern I've had with mosquitoes for instance do I need to use BT or something like that to keep mosquitoes down I'm happy to say that this this lid keeps it very dark in the solution so I don't get built up of any scum or algae the the nutrient solution stays really clear doesn't smell or anything like that and I've never seen any mosquitoes in it however I do watch for that just just in case if you use a different type of bin that's for instance translucent or clear and I've seen people do that it will scum up with algae pretty quickly but if you use an opaque bin either these blue ones or gray ones or something like that then it works quite well and then we have one final question you had mentioned that rain had filtered into your system did you have to adjust the concentration of your nutrients good question if I've just noticed that it add a little bit I don't worry about it anymore I just bail it out so I have the air gap that I'd like and and I call it a day I don't worry that I've dropped my concentration however if you have a big rain so you have a three inch downpour or something like that and it goes from having half a half a tote a nice big air gap to suddenly having none it's completely full then I'd worry that you know I've probably diluted that a lot and what I might do at that stage is completely empty it out and start over and what I mean by starting over is if I know I had a three inch air gap before that rain I would dump this out on some of my other plants I wouldn't waste it because it's good nutrient but then I'd make about five gallons of nutrient maybe seven gallons of nutrient add the correct amount of nutrient to it fill it up and then I know it's perfect again so it depends on how much dilution my first answer then is I wouldn't be too concerned about it if it's just a little bit but if it's a lot probably the easiest thing is to start over the tendency is to want to just let's just add a little nutrient and that's going to be okay too but but you might consider starting from scratch and just making new nutrient because the nutrients not that terribly expensive well Tom we have run out of time but my master gardeners have thoroughly enjoyed this presentation thank you so much and thank you and have a great weekend Tom very good thank you all thanks for