After building my own pump driven Flood and Drain hydro setup for my winter garden a few years back, I decided to try a the packaged hydro kits I heard mentioned on an episode of The Survival Podcast. I found it on Amazon (affiliate link - https://amzn.to/47lVzWF on sale at about $20 off right now) and put it all together with ease.

After completing that, I realized I did NOT want to do my first test start with 100 of anything, so I disconnected the lower two layers, covered the excess holes to prevent evaporation and algae growth and plumbed it to a bucket.

Only problem I found with that is that the last pipe didn’t fill as high as the first two, with water barely touching the bottom of the cups on that pipe. I expect that was because the exit is to a drop off, rather than to a small pipe leading to the next large pipe, so the water didn’t get ‘backed up’ before being able to exit.

That was easily overcome in my case since I had all the other pieces from the bottom sets, I just added a L piece at the top so I could tilt up and down to adjust the level of water in the last pipe. Since I’d already put an L into the bottom of the drain, I was still able to aim it into the right spot on the bucket.

I got everything started yesterday, and so far no leaks or problems. The pump is TINY but seems to do the job well. It has its own timer system, wherein you can set it to run for 5, 15 or 30 minutes and then be off time for 30, 60 or 120 minutes.

So I’m starting with lettuce, and should be able to grow all the lettuce I eat (two salads a day for the wife and I) and likely can get much more than that with relative ease, then we can expand out and see what else we can get to grow in it. Seems like there’s a lot of potential…