Strawberries Growing Indoors With Wicks

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For quite some time I have been struggling with growing hydroponic strawberries and decided to give up on it due to many failures. Instead I went with this idea of wicking them with cotton ropes, the water lasted on average 2-3 weeks until I had to refill. Although the cotton wicks decomposed due to the microlife and springtails in the soil. When some of the plants dried up their fruit tasted quite salty and had the texture of raw meat which was rather unpleasant (I do eat meat though). The springtails don't harm the plants themselves. The soil in the cups has some perlite and vermiculite in them. I have tried wicking before with regular plastic dishrags but they also turn into mush. The sponge however, worked greatly (I.e. the cotton wicks works good for a few weeks).

The sponge wicks I replaced the cotton with were just a common super absorbent PVA sponge (find them yourself!) cut into ribbons going 2-3cm into each pot.

The initial nutrient mix before filming were 4.8 grams Masterblend Tomato 4-18-38, 4.8 grams Calcium Nitrate and 2 grams Epsom salt per 9 liters water. Learning from experience, I made sure the wicks always had some water. The reservoir holds 8.4 liters water. The nutrients were for foliage growth

Later I switched to 4.2ml flora gro, 8.4ml flora micro and 12.6ml flora bloom in order to adapt the plants for fruiting after they flowered, whether or not this is necessary is up to you.

The grow light is my HLG quantum board 65 which is on 13-15 hours/day.
The plants occupy maybe 1/5 of the light.

The variety of strawberries were 5 "Bianca" and 1 "Framberry", the Bianca strawberries were marketed to be white but I assume the sold the wrong cultivar or the growing the growing conditions were wrong, All 5 started flowering within 3 days of each other. The Framberry did not flower and took most damage of the cotton wicks breaking off. The plants were left over from me not being able to plant them outside. I hope to do this again but with 6 different unusual cultivars such as "Maxim", "Pineberry", "Cherryberry", "Peach strawberry" and more. Currently I have 3 "Yellow wonder" alpines that I will redo this. (Video about growing from seed coming soon).

Music: In My Dreams by Esther Abrami