u/jaykrown

This is an inventory of what I've achieved over the last couple months. I started with the first DWC kale about three months ago, which has been producing for over 2 months now, 5 lacinato kale plants and 1 genovese basil growing prolifically. I started growing microgreens with no soil which has been decently successful with several challenges, primarily anaerobic rot and mold requiring me to learn to use hydrogen peroxide and doing water swap at the key stage between soak and germination before light phase, carefully managing water level. I set up my 2nd DWC which is purely tropaeolum of three different varieties, 2 empress of India, 1 Alaska mix, 1 Jewel mix. Most recently I just built the v2 microgreens shelving you can see has the tall speckled peas at the top, and the old v1 is now a great 6 shelves for storage on the left. The 10 gallon storage tote with water pump has been a great way to experiment on a small scale, I'm pretty sure I could scale this and produce a huge amount of greens with very little maintenance in a couple months. I like the idea of keeping things modular and separate.

This leaf was extremely yellow and is now being fed and turning slightly green again, pretty cool to see.

I solved three issues with the previous setup. One was not enough space for two trays on each shelf slightly overlapped on the previous shelf, solved by having a slightly wider shelf. Two was a single light in the center causing bending during growth, solved by putting two on each shelf. Three was light bleed beneath the trays which was confusing the sprouts at early germination stage, many were going down towards the light bleeding from underneath, solved with mylar.

Downsides is I only have 4 shelves now instead of 5 previously for a total of 8 trays at a time which I think is perfectly fine because I'm not yet at the point of scaling. Also, the shelf takes up slightly more horizontal space because it's larger. The shelving unit has a fixed position for each shelf because of holes in the poles where each piece fits to hold each shelf. So ideally I could fit another shelf in it and lower the amout of space.

This shelf was only $33 so I'm willing to trade that off. The entire upgrade I estimate to be about $75. The trays I'm using now are slightly bigger as well so it was necessary, they didn't fit on the previous shelf at all so it's nearly worthless for this purpose, but I will use the old shelf for storage.

Lacinato kale, speckled pea and daikon radish microgreen salad.

These speckled pea microgreens are the crispiest I've eaten, compared to green peas, I think I like these more. They're more stalky, but the stalk is crunchy so crisp and the flavor is so good.

I've been doing this for about a month now, and I think I've found the process that's extremely lean while maximizing yield in my current setup. This has been awesome, because I'm about to construct the "v2" in the next week which I'll share with details.