The Green Menace

This next section won’t surprise anybody whose had their own hydroponic systems before — and I’m kind of surprised I was not called out on this in the original reddit posts. In my lack of experience with plant and water life cycles, I opted to use an opaque-white bucket to store my recycled water placed in direct sunlight. As a result, this was a great method for creating an algae farm in a high-rise apartment.

A microscopic image of one of the components of algae (c/o Wikipedia)

For those like me who were not aware — algae is a pretty much guaranteed outcome of any water system that contains water and fertilizer in sunlight. Do you know that unmistakable “pond smell” you get whenever you get near a large body of water? That’s algae, and that’s exactly what my water bucket smelled like.

You might be thinking: “Now, what’s so bad about having algae in your water? I always see other plants in and around pond water in nature so it must be fine…” And I admit I had this feeling as well when I first noticed it. Unfortunately, the local environment of a full lake ecosystem is a lot more providing than a simple water bucket. In this system, the algae can negatively affect your plant in a multitude of ways:

Lowered dissolved oxygen concentration

Clogging of physical pump systems

Reduced available fertilizer for your main plant

May promote root-algae growth to form easier-than-normal

That’s not so good for a slow-growing Juniper bonsai tree, so let’s get rid of it!

After scrubbing/tossing the parts with algae residue, a simple purging of the system with bleach-water for a day or so (along with a few water-rinses) should do the trick. This can definitely become a pain once your water system’s complexity grows, so it’s important to mitigate this growth sooner than later. Changing the opaque-white container to a sun-blocking container will be the largest improvement — and you can black-over all the external tubes as well if you really want to be proactive. A final step would be to disconnect your system during a period of adding fertilizer, and simply watering like normal until you believe the majority of fertilizer has been used.