A First Look at the Vertical Horizon Hydroponics Tower

Hi there everybody, welcome back. Now you may or may not know but I love myself some hydroponics. This is something that I did not make. All the rest of the things that you've seen in previous videos are things that I've made just off the top of my head. We've got vertical systems, horizontal systems, ebb and flow systems, all sorts of things. But this particular system is almost exactly like the one I've had in my mind. For, like, retail purposes. Basically, to make something like this and sell it. Now, a few days ago, I found somebody who obviously had the same vision and has carried it out. And that's awesome because I don't have to now. Because it would have taken me absolutely ages. And it cost me a lot of money to make something like this that was retail ready and could be sold at a decent price. Now, this is a one metre tower. More or less a one metre tower from Vertical Horizons Hydroponics. I'll put the link to them in the video description. And I'll also put a link to where you can buy one of these towers in there as well. This one is in the colour called Pistachio, which is like an off-green colour. There's also a grey one and there's also a white one available. and shock horror they're all the same price. I was expecting the white one to be the cheapest all the rest to be more expensive because trying to source coloured pipe is extremely difficult. Now because my memory is absolutely awful I'll just read you some of the information verbatim that Rupert has sent me about this tower before we get into it and have a look at the nuts and bolts and exactly how it works. Company and product aims to create the first truly affordable hydroponic systems that are beautiful, efficient and high performing. These aspects are important to bring together to create a system that everyone can feel good about in their gardens and in their homes. That way we bring more people into self-sufficiency, which is massive, and hydroponics. The product is aimed at keen gardeners and would-be gardeners that might not have the time, space, knowledge, DIY skills or money to otherwise get into growing their own food. So that's his company's aims or, you know, mission statement, if you like. That all seems exceptionally sensible because... You know, unless you've been living under a rock, you will realise that world events have been manipulated and brought in to create a food shortage, which will get worse next year. We're currently eating a lot of last year's crops. This year, especially in the UK and in the West, Canada, America, farmers are being paid to retire. They're being paid to produce no food. There's so many food production and food distribution plants mysteriously burning down, having planes flown into them, just magically exploding. So the whole system is under attack. This is a way of fighting back. I'll stop ranting now. This is more information from Rupert. Water usage. Water is becoming a key issue. We want people to save water and save money whilst increasing their yields. Now there's further information about Rupert's motivation for making this and it basically is about saving water and providing people with the ability to be more self-sufficient in what they eat. I'll put that in the video description because I haven't formatted it into something that I can read. It's in a big block of text and I have problems reading big blocks of text. I'll just quickly blast through some of the construction notes before I bring the camera in. Basically it comes with everything you need to get started and it's supported with instructions, tips and support through the website which is linked to in the video description. It's available in three colors which I previously mentioned, optional hessian skirt that just helps protect it from the sun so if you've got it outside like I have on a south facing patio the water is not going to heat up too much. and that's important when it's outside or it's in like a hot conservatory or something because the warmer the water is the less oxygen it holds and it needs to be quite an oxygenated environment for this to do well. Construction of the pipe and everything in it is phthalate free and bpa free with food safe reservoir and feeder pipe. That's important because you don't want to be growing stuff that's full of micro plastics. The pump only consumes one watt of power which is Absolutely nothing, and considering it's pumping up to here, and it's delivering any amount water to supply the plants, one watt of power is just absolutely nothing. I've looked online for like 10 years, looking for a pump that would pump to that height and only consume, you know, one or two watts, and the nearest I've found is like five or six watts, so Rupert did very well finding that. This extreme low power gives the option for using a power source such as batteries, power banks, solar or mains power. Mains power phone charger supply is included. And that's basically like a little plug that goes into your socket and it has a USB outlet on the bottom for your pump. Net baskets, these little rubbery pucks that go in them which are going to be replaced by foam pucks. The pebble media. which is your standard hydroponics expanded clay grown media and starter nutrients are all included and if you're wondering how to start the seedlings off before you put them in here we've got a little propagator really everything is included apart from the seeds but you know at the end of the day it's up to you to choose what you grow in this I will be planting it up with lettuce because I know lettuce does really well in this system and it's going to give me a quick result to be able to judge this and bring you the updated video in a couple of weeks. Now since receiving this, Rupert has produced a laminated sheet with full instructions and QR codes on which takes you to specific parts of the website or further information that will also be included in the kit. And because it's roughly a metre tall, it's easily big enough to fit into those little greenhouses, the little plasticky things that you can pick up in any supermarket or any DIY store. So really there's no excuse for not growing leafy veg all through the winter, even in the UK. And just in case you can't bring the video description up or the pinned comment, the website is vhhydro and I'll put that along the bottom now. Okay so to fill it up you can either take the top off the bucket and fill it up that way or you can take your bottom basket out and just fill it up with a watering can and you'll be able to hear when it's more or less full. That's perfect, I can actually see the water level down there. Then we'll lash a few nutrients in. The clay balls I was on about before. It's also known as light tag or you know, horticultural something or other. They're useful if you've got quite small seedlings. If you've got bigger plants, These pucks are probably a better idea because they've actually got a split in them, there we are, and you just put your plant in here, it pokes through the hole in the middle, and then you just push it into here. That enables this to be totally filled with roots. Right, so the pump's on, it's exceptionally quiet, and I'll show you why it's quiet by removing the cap. Now I've put this foam on just to stop any splashes coming out over the edge, and there we've got a little sprinkler nozzle, and as you can see that's pumping a lot of water. Any amount enough, the newer models of these will actually be a little bit taller just to prevent any splashes coming out, so they won't come with the foam. That's our cap that goes on. That enables the whole system to breathe, you know. You want a lot of oxygen in the system. And if we just pan down a little bit, look in there, you should be able to see all the drips coming down the inside. And it really does cover every single pot on the inside with water because you've got that sprinkler up there. So you get a good coverage of water moving all the way down. Now, I don't have any pre-prepared seedlings. However, I do have a few small-ish lettuce plants that I've got in other systems. I'll take those out, wash the roots off, and I shall stick them in here. Okay, so this is a little experimental solar. hydroponic system that I set up a few weeks ago. You'll probably find the video for it in my Thousand Yard Stare YouTube channel. We're just going to take some of these lettuce out of here, plant them in our new system. Okay there's some lettuce and planting this thing up is just as simple as putting the plant into that little puck like so, piling all the roots into the mesh basket And squashing the top of the puck into the top of the basket, like that, so it stays secure. And you just put that in, repeat, and then you've got a tower full of plants that in no time at all you're going to be able to harvest. You can feel that these plants are a little bit dry and that's because that environment that they're growing in down there is pretty harsh compared to this growing environment. With this one, although you can obviously set the pump to come on whenever you want, I'm going to have it running all the time because I know that lettuce do really well in constantly flowing conditions. and the health of these plants should really improve you know in a matter of days with them being in this tower. Now that hessian skirt on the bottom of there serves two purposes keeps the sun off so it helps to regulate the temperature in the water reservoir which is your bucket but it also helps to stop slugs climbing up it as well because they really don't like climbing up that sort of material however if you want to go without the hessian And you want to stop slugs climbing up, you can put what's called slug tape, which is a copper tape around it. You just stick that on around the bucket, and that stops the slugs climbing up. It's really that easy, and if a largely uneducated fat lad from up north can do it, so can you. There's no excuse for not growing your own food. And this is probably one of the easiest ways to do it because it eliminates 90% of the pests that you would find in a normal garden. I don't even bother trying to grow a leafy veg like this in my vegetable gardens because they just get pounded by anything that eats them. Slugs, snails, they also attract a lot of muck as well because when it rains it hammers down on top of the soil, crap bounces up, it ends up just covering the plants you don't get that problem with this in fact you don't get a hell of a lot of problems with this i can literally just leave that and walk away come back two or three weeks time and harvest it it's that simple and just a very quick update on my ebb and flow These ones are doing really well. They're certainly doing better than that solar powered effort that I've made in my hen run. Basically the water sits in the reservoir, fills up, automatically drains, fills up and drains, fills, drains. ebb and flow system. I did explain that in another video. This is just to show you how well that's doing. In fact some of this is doing so well you can even see the roots coming through the sides of these big one litre pots. They're absolutely blasting their way in. I could probably start harvesting those now and they've only been in maybe two or three weeks. So we'll just go with what we've got on here now. I do have some seedlings coming up, which I am growing in the let pot desktop hydroponics unit, which was showed in a previous video. I'll just put a picture up of how they're doing after four days of being in there. Pretty good. When they get to this sort of size, I'll take them out. And I'll put them in here. That'll give me some successional planting because these ones here will be ready first. And the extra seedlings that I put in over the next week or two will be, you know, the next ones that I eat. So these ones will all be eaten in a month. Next ones will all be eaten in two or three months. And there was one more thing I'm gonna show you. This doesn't come with the kit, but it's something that I just had. And when I saw this, I thought, oh my God, this is so perfect for indoor growing. Let me explain. Now this may in fact be an optional extra somewhere down the line from Vertical Horizons website, but this is just something that I bought from Amazon, I think. Again, I'll put the link to it in the video description. It's basically four LED lights, which produce like a sunlight sort of frequency. It's got a really strong clip, and if you remove a couple of these little supports, you can fit that on there, so it gets a really secure fix on there. And then here, you've got the means to switch it on and increase and decrease the light intensity. and also it's got a timer on there as well so if you set it to come on seven o'clock in the morning it would go off at seven o'clock at night if you had it on the 12 hour and it's also got an eight hour and a four hour timer that would give you the option of growing lettuce in even the darkest of cupboards and you're probably not going to appreciate the amount of light that's given off by those but if i show you a picture of this in the dark you'll be able to get a better idea Now obviously, mine is going outside. I don't need these lights. That was just something I thought I would mention in case people only watched this video and didn't watch any of the update videos about how it's doing. So I hope a lot of people watching this video will go out and check out the website in the video description, which is VH Hydro. I'm exceptionally impressed with this, and I always love it when I have an idea, it gets put on the back burner, I make sketches and all sorts of things, but then I find out that somebody else has done it, and... He absolutely has done it. This is yeah it's exactly how I would make such a system and the fact that he's managed to get a pump that is one watt is absolutely phenomenal because that's that's like a holy grail. Now this system is going to be launched very soon there is a show in Worcestershire At Malvern, which is the Malvern Royal Horticultural Society show. It's a massive show. It attracts visitors and exhibitors from all over the country and indeed all over the UK. That's going on from the 23rd until the 26th of September. Hopefully I got that date right because I'm remembering that from the top of my head. Yeah, 23rd till the 26th of September, I'll again put the details to it in the video description. Rupert from Vertical Horizons will be there, showing off these systems, so if you're anywhere near there, in those dates, please call in, have a look, tell them I sent you, and buy some of these from them. Thanks for watching. I'll do updates on this and my other hydroponic systems and gardening adventures, mostly on the Thousand Yard Stair YouTube channel. Thanks for watching. See you next time.