After the fact, here is a photo build log of step one; Building an a-frame hydroponics tree. Most of the knowledge in building this comes from here and here. It is a shame that the second site has had all the pages removed. This person did so much good work. Regardless, the cached version of his instructions, the ones I followed, are here. You might as well print that and follow it. I pretty much did what he did…

This project took a weekend to build and was less than $200 in total… to this point. The biggest key was to buy everything you need beforehand as some of the items have to be sourced online.

Once finished, the a-frame looked pretty good… at night. I kid you not; there is not a straight line in sight. Regardless, wood is cheap, building the structure took zero skills and was fun.

The following morning, the first step was to attach these J-hooks to hand the PVC pipes from. So far, so good.

With Sushi helping me, I moved onto setting up and making holes in the pipes. In hindsight, drilling these holes was the worst step of them all.

Regardless of my amazing handiwork, this was such a chore…

92 holes! Miserable hours… I am not doing another one of these until my kids can be trusted with a power drill.

Here you can appreciate all the glory of my work… Just add water!

And here are all the holes after cleanup.

The next step was setting up the return pipes to the water reservoir. This part was actually fun. The down-pipes are only held in place by the rubber seals. I was able to ‘slip’ them up or down later to adjust the water level for each pipe. The general idea is to have the bottom of each plant ‘touching’ the water.

Here you can see a later picture where I am checking the water level of the horizontal pipes. Success!

On the other end of the frame, water is carried to the top of the frame via clear hoses (bad idea, future post imminent). Water is finally diverted to each pipe via 1/4 inch sprinkler tubing out of 2 manifolds. Your local garden store has all these things for you. Cheap too!

Fully assembled in all its initial glory.

Lastly, here is the return water pipe to the reservoir before water embarks upstream again! You can see a leftover pool pump form those above ground summer pools you get at Walmart.

Thanks for reading. More later…