This year my family and I went to the 2012 Maker Faire, and MAN was it awesome. One thing I was surprised to see was an urban homesteading section that had all kinds of cool booths which were exhibiting everything from DIY seedbombs, to how to grow your own mushrooms or make honey with your own bee hive. Cool, right?
The coolest exhibit however, was Vertical Theory’s vertical plant tower they had running off 5 gallon buckets.
Vertical-Theory’s plant towers, running off 5 gallon buckets on a drip system using felt holders. -Maker Faire 2012
They essentially took a few yards of felt, tailored it as seen above into little pouches to hold some hydroton, and then strung them up on a stick above a 5 gallon bucket. In the bucket is a single pump which pumps water from the reservoir through a hose to the top of the tower, where it feeds into the first plant and subsequently waters all of the plants below it as gravity pulls it back down into the bucket. The water is recaptured at the bottom by a funnel which is jerry-rigged onto the top of the 5 gallon bucket’s lid. Genius. The only improvement I would make is to NOT USE CLEAR HOSES for the water. As we all know, bacteria LOVES light, so using a black hose would solve a lot of problems down the road with growth in that reservoir!
Here is a video of the system in action:
This system can be made yourself out of cheap parts (I mean felt can’t cost that much for a few yards worth), and holds 3 small plants in it. A constant drip of water circulates through them and back down into the bucket, meaning it relies mainly on gravity, and only requires a single pump. Too easy.
Mark my words, I will be building one of these in my backyard in the coming weeks. I just have to convince my wife to do a little “arts & crafts” work with the felt to get it set up like how they have it in this picture 
And as always, I will take photos and video of my project the entire time and post it here as a front-to-back tutorial with parts list, step-by-step instructions, and an itemized breakdown of what it cost. Stay tuned!
I’ve seen designs like this, but not exactly like THIS. Really want to build one of these now! Great find
Yah they really did a great job with it. I’ve never seen it quite like how they did it here, and I am wondering how hard it would be to make the felt holders they are using (or if there is a better material for the job). Only one way to find out!
I’m fiindng it hard I’m fiindng it hard to beat $1 shop bulbs 32 watt 4fter’s in my garden. I’m a mazed at how little lighting i’m actaully needing. how tall are you growing the tomatoes and what are you doing for lights on the side of them or are you just lighting from above. when i place my light meter in my plant cage i get 1250 lumens. thats 1 foot from every light. at the bulb is only 2500 to start with. and i ddi not think any thing was going to grow and its just like if i use a 400 hid? great vids
Be VERY careful when building the apparatus for pumping the water up. I followed the stock instructions from the windowfarm website and they were very complicated and left a lot of room for error. My system ultimately failed because of this.
It’s actually a cool and useful piece of information. I’m satisfied that you just shared this useful information with us. Please keep us informed like this. Thank you for sharing.
i like the design and presentation of the site.
great post. keep it up.
I did Bell Peppers I did Bell Peppers the same way and they were huge. I was concerned about the btotom leaves then but they did great. I know tomatoes are hungry for light. I’ll keep an on these to make sure they have enough light. Maybe add another fixture for the lower part of the plant if they get too big. They are about 2x as big now since I made the video. I’ll do a few follow up videos once they start to get flowers/then fruit.
rock on! i love this stuff.
haha. They are haha. They are little mteosnrs right now drinking about a gallon every day. About 1.5 feet tall and VERY bushy. They are flowering now too and need to pollinate them. They are roma tomatoes, I’m not sure how tall they’ll get. They were free seeds that came with an order I placed online for other seeds. So far there is plenty of light. I may hang my MH lights near them while I get my outdoor plants going.
isn’t that the “windowfarm” in a “new dress”, using felt instead of PET-bottles? OK, that alloaws for more room and flexibility with the plants, i guess…
everything else seems the same as the basic wf version… or am I missing something?