System kit has shipped from Colorado!

Hello PC team and supporters,

Our system has shipped and should arrive Friday! We've also received an assembly and operations manual which I have added to the sidebar as a PDF. Take a look when you have a spare moment.

Here's a short video from Sylvia and Alan Bernstein showcasing our future system!

SweetWater Organics!

The Weissman family took a father's day tour of Sweetwater organics in Milwaukee, WI today...and it was AMAZING.  Some guys formerly involved at Growing Power took over an old industrial space in Bay View that, in it's former life, made the cable for the Golden Gate Bridge! Now the space is host to Lettuce, chard, sprouts, spinach, talapia and perch, as well as an educational outreach organization, and multi-use arts space.

Currently, their indoor system grows mostly lettuce planted in a really great looking system of floating foam panels (called a floating raft system) with holes cut in. Looks a lot cheaper than using a full bed of growing medium. Mark suggested having a good 18-24" of water depth below the rafts. The lettuce is planted in a small plug of shredded bark, and grows in about 40-45 days. The fish come from a local research facility (I think associated with UWM freshwater sciences program) so they get the little guys for free, and sell to high-end restaurants in the city. At their little store the perch was selling for $18/lb...

A lot of their current costs seem to be going towards artificial lighting (mostly high pressure sodium), so they are also building an outdoor system with greenhouses for the plants, and a very well insulated shed for the fish. In this system the water is gravity fed from the fish tanks to the plant beds (through a screen drum filter to pull out solids for compost), and then the filtered water heads to a sump tank under the fishery.

Issues presented:

Summer: lettuce likes it cool - need to find ways to keep greenhouse cool.

Winter: Need to keep water warm enough. DIY solar hot water?!

Pesticides: they use Ladybugs!

Our awesome tour guide, Mark, is actually a water specialist by training, and would be happy to talk to us in more detail. Also, one of the founders of Sweet Water is a local roofer by trade who did my parent's house back in the day. He also went to Wash U (ABD in Philosophy!) and may be up for discussing 'stuff'. I will get in touch.

In the mean time, check out my pics:

Urban farms are economically viable!

"A new report [PDF] from the environmental nonprofit Global Green USAargues that even a modest plot of land could potentially become a job creator and profit maker.

Using Youngstown, Ohio, as its testing ground, the report assesses the feasibility of turning vacant residential land into a working farm. The analysis suggests that at least three to 10 acres of contiguous space would be needed to create a viable commercial farm. Working with the city, they identified a collection of 31 vacant plots totaling 5.5 acres in the city's Oak Hill neighborhood, all of which have been donated to the city's land bank."

Full article here.