Cleaning a Rise Garden

After using our Rise Family Garden for 3 months, it was time for the first full cleaning! The method Rise recommends goes something like this:

• Have only 1 “blue bar” of water in the water tank. Basically this means to have just enough water in the tank for the pump to be running, but that’s all.
• Remove all the plants and plant trays.
• Turn off the pump and let the water flow from the trays until it stops. Then take a rag and start pushing the water and stuff in the trays down the drain tube to get the first tray clean.
• Since I have a 2nd tray, I would do the above step again, cleaning the bottom tray and pushing the water into the water bucket below. Then take out the water bucket and empty it. It will now have 2 trays of water added to it so it will be heavy!

That is the method Rise outlines to get the garden clean. We decided we wanted to try a different way using a pump with a filter to clean out the trays. This method requires:

• A self-priming pump. This is important! There is not a lot of water in the trays so a pump that doesn’t self-prime probably won’t have enough water to work here (like the fish tank cleaner I show in the video). The pump we use is a Household Electric Wine Transfer Pump -110V Food Grade. We used the filter that came with the pump and the Household Hose Filters- Double-Layers.
• Our pump also has a power regulator which makes it easy to control how fast the pump works.

Overall I think our pump method worked well. Are there things I will do different next time? Yes. But it did work well to clean the growing trays out and was easy to use.

You can watch the video to see the results.