Dwc 84: Fill & Download for Free

In short, a whole bunch!Assuming that each family member eats 600 g of vegetables per day (this is equivalent to 2–3 cups for each adult), this means your target output is 3 kg per day, 21 kg per week and 84 kg per month. This is the easy part of the calculation; now let’s get to the hard part!Using containers or buckets as a unit is not ideal, since a container could hold as little as 1 plant or as much as 100 plants, depending on size. To make things more complex, different vegetable types (leafy, fruiting, root) behave differently in each hydroponic system type, which means that you could grow 100 heads of lettuce in a huge, but shallow, DWC (deep water culture) tray, but you couldn’t effectively grow potatoes, carrots, cucumbers, or tomatoes in this system type. So, let’s use number of plants as our unit and let’s first focus only on leafy vegetables.Assuming that leafy vegetables make up one third of your vegetable intake, you would need to grow 1 kg of leafy vegetables per day for 5 adults, which means 7 kg of leafy vegetables per week. Assuming that each head of lettuce is about 200 g, this means you are looking to harvest 35 heads of lettuce. The weeks to harvest for lettuce is about 8 weeks for a full size head, and because you have to progressively start 35 heads each week so that you have an uninterrupted supply of lettuce that is ready to harvest each week, this means you need a system that can accommodate at least 280 lettuce plants (less by about 40% if you start seeds from cells and transfer 3 week old seedlings to a mature plant system later). Assuming that each plant occupies a 15 cm square foot print, the system would occupy about 6.5 square meters.Believe it or not, but this is still just the easy part of the calculation! Calculating the productive yield of fruiting vegetables is far more difficult because it’s hard to estimate how much a single plant will yield and the number of bumper crops that you might get. Using a very rough calculation, let’s assume that each person requires 4 mature fruiting plants and that each person gets 8 fruiting plant varieties. This means that each person requires 32 fruiting plants, so all 5 family members will require 160 plants. In terms of time, it will take 4–5 months starting from seed to see the first harvest. Assuming that each fruiting plant occupies one quarter of a square meter, the systems for growing fruiting plants will occupy about 40 square meters plus an additional 15 square meters to allow for walking space.I won’t go into root vegetables since I don’t have much experience growing them in hydroponics, and would advise against it since they don’t really benefit from the advantages of hydroponics the way that leafy and fruiting vegetables do.In summary, you would need to grow 280 leafy vegetables and 160 fruiting vegetable plants, occupying a grand total of about 60 square meters, in order to feed 5 adults, and you won’t reach full output capacity until the 4th or 5th month.