Ah, never mind. Only 2-3 days from blooms to little beans!

2009-05-09: Wow! Harvestable beans by tomorrow, 44 days. Packet claims 60 days. Not going to count harvest - they're my daughter's to eat.

(Edit : had wrong 2nd picture. Can see yellow sticky trap Beth suggested - major decrease in gnats between that and the neem-oil based spray on the soil! Never spray that stuff on leaves again, though...)

Are your soil-based beans coming along any better, Jessi? I thought you had flowers a while back?

One of the warnings I've always heard about beans, is to be careful planting them when it's too wet, because the seeds'll rot. They may just not be a good fit for hydroponics.

These grew surprisingly fast, though. Maybe the soil inoculant really did the trick.

I love my growboxes! And they're cheaper than Earthboxes (fertilizer included). And make more use of rainfall - handy in Orlando. But Earthboxes have wheels. Depends on what your yard is like, whether that's a good idea.

Some of the big heavy-hitter plants need 6+ hours of sun a day, like tomatoes and cukes and zukes. (I thought peppers as well, but they seem less demanding, even if they'd do better with 6+ hours of sun a day.) You might want to consult with a garden center, about the right time of year to put tomatoes out in Orlando, or a special heat-thriving variety. They love heat, but apparently there's such a thing as too much. (Those temperatures make only brief visits to shoreline Connecticut. ) If you can't muster up 6+ hours of sun, I'm sure you could still find things to grow.

Whether due to not using inoculant, insect pests, too much fertilizer, or what, my pole beans got huge in the growbox but failed to produce beans. No luck with bush beans, either. Not using the growboxes for beans anymore.

Good provider hubby!

Yeah, putting in a growbox is a bit challenging physically. The 40 quarts of potting mix is the worst of it, provided you can use a hose to fill the reservoir. Takes 4 gallons! But, it rains a lot in Orlando, so could probably rely on rainwater most of the time. And it's possible to use small bags of potting mix and just add a little per day until it's full, or hire a local kid's back for an hour, and that should be that for at least a year. A greens crop in the couple months preceding tomato season is easy. There's a tomato cage superstructure you can buy for the growbox to cut the hassle of supporting them. A cheap chair by the box would make tending more pleasant - the box is the height of a low coffee table. Starting in February, no overlap with hurricane season. Tomatoes may need pollinating. Don't really need pruning, except to persuade them to put all their effort into ripening what they've got towards the end of the season.

The bugs and slugs and fungi can be truly irritating.

I would love  fiber optic light pipes, bringing a controlled spot of sunlight inside from a collector outside, to grow things in... These exist already, in prototype and other very expensive forms. Need a consumer model.

Sorry to hear that, Judith. That must be very frustrating.

I found this discussion on slashdot that includes a number of bring-the-sun-in technologies. I think Sunlight Direct (and another used for cooking) were the ones that got me interested on TV. But they clearly need to get the tech more affordable. For our purposes, a couple points...

1. We're lighting plants, not trying to replace room-lighting-on-flick-of-switch. Their whole diffuser alt-electric luminaire cost-complexity is irrelevant excess.

2. I'm not the only one who thinks the GPS tracking cost-complexity of the collector, could be simplified.

In other words, I think we actually have a cheaper application than they're trying to solve.