Over the weekend I prepared a new setup for the Butternut Squash that was recovering from nitrogen burn. I intend to train the squash to climb a trellis inside the grow area, which presents an interesting problem. As it happens, squash plants have rather brittle stems which means that I would be risking snapping the stem each time I changed out the plant's reservoir. To address this problem, I decided to build an Ebb-and-Flood system for the squash plant.
The first thing you might notice that the leaves have taken on a more healthy dark green color after being flushed. There is some permanent discoloration at the outside edges of the affected leaves, but the plant is much happier now. The small leaf at the center of the base of the plant is still in terrible condition and has stopped growing and gone necrotic, so I removed it after I took this photo. You can see the newest leaf (at the top of the plant) is reaching for the trellis that I made by tying jute twine between the supports of my growing area.
Now, the nice thing about an Ebb-and-Flood system is that the plant's container never has to be moved. Instead the plant lives in a bucket of growing medium [the white bucket in this photo] and a separate bucket is used to contain the nutrient solution [the orange bucket in this photo]. Several times a day, nutrient solution is pumped from the reservoir into the plant's container, filling the container from the bottom. This is called the 'flood' cycle. After about 15 minutes, the pump stops and the nutrient solution drains from the plant's container back to the nutrient reservoir. This, of course, is called the 'ebb' cycle. These alternating cycles supply the plants roots with exposure to nutrient solution and then to plenty of oxygen.
I apologize that this update was a bit rushed, but time was short today. Later I'll post an update with the details of how I built this very basic (and cheap!) ebb-and-flood contraption.
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