Donald Bowers

Mart Hale wrote:Using only comfrey leaves,   and composted wood chips and epson salt,  with no nutrient this Kratky grown tomato is impressive, tomatoes are on.      I have added more epson salt and I decided to move the plant under a leak in my aquaponics system,  I feel encouraged enough to do this again.


I have also found that on my rain barrel by accident a couple of seeds started growing out of the cover of my rain barrel with oak leaves.     I think I will be adding more oak leaves to this setup.

Also I may add air just to see the difference bubbled air to the plant makes.

I've been thinking about trying some of the JADAM fertilizers. The JLF liquid fertilizer is supposed to be best using comfrey, but can use grass or weeds. They say it has most of what your plants need in the garden. I just wonder if it would work for hydrponics, though I would try it outside first since JLF liquid fertilizer smells like manure. I want to try a kratky experiment using JLF liquid fertilizer, epsom salt and the egg shell and vinegar solution (1 part crushed and charred egg shells with 10 parts vinegar - takes about a week or two for the bubbles to stop).

I just started using JADAM in my soil garden this year. Not sure if I'm doing it right, but it's hard to tell anything since we've had quite a bit of drought this year and that's definitely having a negative effect on my plants.

I have been playing around with alum batteries for about 4 years. I have some in my my basement that are wired up to LED bulbs in my house. So when the power goes out, we still at least have lights. I use old vacuum cleaner wire, which works well for a 25 foot run of wire to a 5 watt led bulb.

In the future I hope to find a deal on a used fork lift battery to convert to alum and try to  run my freezer with. It can be a very cheap way to have some battery storage without it costing you an arm and a leg. As of now I have the cost of an alum battery to about $12 to $15. $10 of it is the money I would have got back from the core charge on the battery.

One of the things I've learned about alum batteries is that they don't hold the full amount that the lead acid battery you converted did. In fact, I now use 11.1 volt charge controllers instead of 12 volt ones. I've had a couple of alum batteries die prematurely (I'm pretty sure they should have lasted much longer). I believe the cause was that the 12 volt charge controllers were over charging them because they run continuously trying to raise the battery voltage to a place that these batteries cannot hold.

One of the things I'm thinking of doing if I ever try an old forklift battery is using an extra cell. A 24 volt system uses twelve 2 volt cells. I believe if you could use 13 cells instead of 12 you could use a regular 24 volt charge controller to charge the battery bank without worrying about over charging the cells. I believe this would be powerful enough to run a chest fridge or freezer, using a 24 volt inverter.