I have since removed all my plants except the two peppers. The herbs and collards were past their prime and the eggplant never set fruit. I did have luck in getting one of the the pepper plants to set fruit by using a small paintbrush to pollinate the flowers. The second plant was pruned back.

Today I changed the light cycle over to 12/12. The eggplant is starting to grow flowers so I’m hoping this will induce fruiting.

More pictures!

Changed the water today. Mixed the new solution to full strength.

The garden has been moved to a new spot and I picked up a new reservoir that holds ten more gallons and is much more sturdy.

I topped the basil plant so it would start growing out instead of just up. You can see how this made the plant split, and once it grows out a bit more, I’ll top each of the two main stems in order to make it branch out again.

The cucumber plant is starting to grow flowers!

While this mystery plant has been growing extremely slowly compared to the others, it has been making some noticible progress lately.

The two pepper plants are doing great. It’s really obvious that they are doing much better than they would have under the old lighting system.

I swapped out the two flood lights for a 4’, four bulb, T5 fixture. It throws twice the lumens and provides much better overall coverage on the table. This should greatly reduce dark spots and stretching.

The fixture is hanging from ratcheting pulleys, which allow me to raise and lower the lights very easily.

Everything is growing pretty well. I planted two more cubes with pepper seeds from Hawaii today. Also, I ran out of expanded clay pellets so I started filling up the pots with perlite instead.

Most of the plants are starting to grow their secondary set of leaves so hopefully I can start identifying some of them soon.

After flooding the table and observing how the frame held everything, I noticed that the table was sagging some in the middle. This was causing the table to not drain as effectively, so I decided to build a support bar into the middle. Here are some pictures of the final product.

Yesterday, I added some nutrients to the water. I’m using the Flora Grow nutrient system, which consists of three parts, Gro, Bloom, and Micro. I added 4 tsp of each to the reservoir.

The cucumber plant has shot up pretty quickly. It’s already about an an inch and a half tall. Since it was doing so well, I moved it to its own pot.

Not sure what these are, but they’re also growing pretty quickly.

I didn’t label my plants so I actually have no idea what’s what yet. Two cubes have just barely began to sprout. I stacked their pots on top of other pots in order to get them closer to the light. The lights are on 18 hours a day. I also added some foil to the lights to act as reflectors until I come up with a more permanant solution.