Sure! Sorry for the copious text incoming; I love talking about this stuff, so thanks for asking! <3

My goal is to produce enough fresh food to mostly sustain myself (I’ll need to buy rice and flour and stuff but fresh produce will be covered anyway, and that’s what’s expensive), and enough surplus to preserve (tomato sauces, canned and dried foods, and the like) and/or sell cheap to friends and family, most of whom aren’t well off so I’m trying to be a cheap support for everyone who needs it. I’m disabled so holding down a regular job is a bit of a challenge that I’ve never been successful with, and with how everything in the world is going, it’s the most stable thing I could come up with for all of us to benefit. If I end up with enough surplus, I’ll probably start selling to strangers for a higher markup via farmers markets, but the goal isn’t money, it’s stability. As long as I can bring in a few hundred a month, I am stable enough, and I have a half dozen chickens and a dozen quail, so that helps the financial side of things until everything else takes off.

It’s going to be taking over my entire basement, which is probably about 600sqft, maybe less cuz there’s a crawl space in the front half… idk. My house is 140 years old (bought cheap on foreclosure over a decade back and now can’t move because everything is -so expensive-), and the foundation leaks in a way I can’t fix without dropping tens of thousands (built into limestone), which isn’t remotely in my budget. So rather than fight the water infiltration, I’ve decided to embrace it. Tile the floor with a slope to the sum pump drain so that if I spill water from the hydro, no big deal. The ceiling is low and there’s pipes and ducts running under it so the space isn’t particularly useful anyway other than storage.

The hydro itself is mostly deep water culture (DWC); 5 gallon buckets with single larger plants and an air pump to agitate the nutrient water. Mostly tomatoes and peppers in the DWC at the moment. I’ll be adding some 55gallon aquariums I got free for aquaponics (beans and leaf greens on top, probably arrowhead tubers inside) and to raise guppies (to feed turtle, and dry for cats and chickens to snack on). I use LED lights for the whole thing both to reduce heat and to save electric, though most of them aren’t set up yet since the room is being renovated. It’s a mix of specialty lights made for growing and just standard LED bulbs I got from the hardware store for $2.50/ea (both work fine, don’t need fancy; I’ve done hydro for years with standard LED bulbs). I only bought the specialty lights for the small profile - they are 4-foot strip lights for the short plant shelves and seedling station, as well as some compact fixtures I am presently using in the grow tent because there’s not enough headroom for full bulbs in a ballast.

I’m also playing around with soil-less media (coco coir and puffed clay balls in this case), mostly herbs so far, but also some strawberries and lentils and stuff, just to see what they do. My ultra-compact root crop bucket test is also being done with coir, and so far the radishes I’m growing look great! (If that plan works well enough I’ll be posting instructions probs on slrpnk, but it’s still in testing for another month or so). After radishes I’m going to test various other single-root crops (turnips, beets, carrots, etc). I already know onions work because that’s where I got the idea; the test is sort of to see if leaves cause shading problems, and what the ideal density/configuration is if yes.

So far I have 5 varieties of tomatoes that should start flowering soon, 4 kinds of beans some of which are already producing, a pea plant, (haven’t fully committed to those cuz I have nowhere to put them yet, but I want pea pods, so I have one plant in my kitchen window), red and green lentils, mung beans whatever those are, 3 kinds of sweet peppers, 3 kinds of mild spicy peppers (friend grows reapers and ghost and all the hot stuff so I’m not going to), two types of mushrooms growing in shredded cardboard (shiitake was just a curiosity test but it seems to be growing fine alongside the blue oysters, so win!), two kinds of strawberry (one is an ever-bearing, neither are growing well), some chocolate mint, the radish bucket, and potatoes in a tote. I have about $200 worth of various seeds that I’ll be adding as other things get established, and as I figure out the best way to grow them. It seems to work better for me to start just a few new plants at a time, wait for them to be enveloped into my routine and put into their forever setup, and then move on to new ones after a week or two.

I would love to try growing some melons or squash, but those have to be hand pollinated and the last time I tried they did not do well, so we’ll see.

I also have a worm compost that I’ve set up recently that I plan to use for compost tea to fertilize all the coir-grown plants (and maybe replace the powder nutrients if possible down the line). I’m trying to be as no-waste-no-purchase as possible (the chickens are very helpful with that!!).