When I last left off in the Dog Kennel Greenhouse, I was reassembling the Double Barrel Hydroponic Garden due to the idea the other PVC pipes that were going to be used were not of the size to fit with the standard 6" Schedule 40 end caps that are available. It kind of worked out since I needed to find a place for the drain pipes that were used for the old DBHPG setup. After getting the assembly in place in the greenhouse, there were a couple things I had to dial in. One, the holes for the planter cups were a bit too small, originally used for some regular plastic cups, which don't really hold up to the sun in one season. I had some seedling planters that were a little more durable but they were wider than the drinking cups. A little work with the reciprocating saw and the holes were enlarged for the planter cups.
The other thing that had to be done was adding a coupling and a short piece of PVC pipe to the input pipe, which was installed at a cockeyed angle. With the extra PVC in place, I made the plumbing a little neater. With that, there's still a matter of the pump. In the meantime, there was the matter of cleaning up the garden some. I had already had to dismantle some old raised beds due to the wood tables degrading to the point of falling in. The cat litter buckets that were in them were stacked up for use in a future raised bed, with some extra buckets staged along with the old buckets for another raised bed to be when I get around to constructing it. I had some small pots that were used for some catnip and other herb plants that unfortunately didn't make it through the winter, with even the roots not surviving. I ended up reusing the dirt in some of these pots to fill up one of the ground raised beds which needed more dirt anyway. There were still two more raised beds that needed to be dismantled for the same reasons as the cat litter bucket beds. These two beds are half drum beds, good for use with growing potatoes. As with the other beds, these beds degraded to the point that they're falling in on themselves. Besides, the metal drums have a finite life and will eventually rust away enough to further fall apart. Point is, these units pretty much need to be fully dismantled and the drums scrapped, to be replaced with raised beds using either cat litter buckets or plastic drum halves. One of the buckets had been full of water for a good while, so it definitely would be degrading even on the metal. I first had to remove the dirt from the flooded bed. But I had a solution, put that dirt in the remaining cat litter bucket bed, which needed more dirt in its buckets. After filling the litter bucket bed, I continued emptying dirt into one of the sets of drum raised beds, which uses plastic drums. After emptying the flooded drum, I emptied the other one that was last used to hold several herbs. With both beds emptied of all dirt and water, I can dismantle the units, salvaging what I can like screws. The wood will be cut into small pieces for use as firewood while the drum halves will be staged with the outgoing scrap. At some point, I'll need to start carting in a lot of lumber so I can build up the raised beds for the litter buckets, as well as future hydroponic garden assemblies. I do have a couple hydroponic setups using more 6" PVC pipe that have to be accommodated as well. One of the assemblies uses two standard Schedule 40 pipes, which I can get caps for. The pipes are mounted on a couple of trellis frames, one over the other for a vertical setup. The other one uses the same weird PVC that does not accommodate the 6" caps I can get my hands on. Just as before, this might mean that I'll be replacing this pipe with the blue drain pipe that the Double Barrel HPG is made of, if I can't source the correct caps, or they tend to be too pricey to justify even trying to keep these pipes. There's another small vertical PVC pipe hydroponic garden assembly that I have to revamp to make it better just as well, using more durable PVC hookups between the pipes holding the planter cups. There will be more on the new raised beds and HPG's in the future as we get around actually building this stuff.
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