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Gayla Trail:Urban gardener

Gayla Trail proves you don’t need a yard to be a gardener. Despite living in downtown Toronto Gayla has helped bring her community together with a community garden plot, and a thriving rooftop garden. Gaylas new book “You Grow Girl: The Groundbreaking Guide to Gardening.”

Now a strong urban gardening advocate, Gayla recommends container gardening, something more realistic for people in urban areas or in apartments. “If you have any outdoor space, you can pretty much do anything. Even if you didn’t have outdoor space, but have a sunny indoor spot, you can grow lettuce greens.” The benefit to growing indoors is you can “move the containers wherever the light is.

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Aquaculture to be powered by renewable energy.

A team of engineers and university leaders in New York is working towards a soil-less, climate-controlled, multi-level greenhouse, that produces fish and vegetables, in addition to its own heat and electricity. This type of farm would seem no more out of place downtown than a bank would be.
Engineering firm O’Brien & Gere, of DeWitt, Morrisville State College and the State University College of Environmental Science and Forestry are working hard to make this farm a reality.

Hydroponics is nothing new, growing plants without soil has been taking place for hundreds of years. Aquaponics, attaching a fish tank to the hydroponics system, to feed the plants, and filter the water, is nothing new either. So why all the commotion about this new system?

The trick to this proposed system is a small biomass power plant attached to the system. Heat and electricity from the power plant can be used to heat the fish tanks, and cool the greenhouse air in the summer. This would help with one of the biggest drawbacks to an aquaponics system; power consumption. Another benefit to this is the CO2 produced by the power plant can be used to enhance the plant growth and grow algae in tanks in the green house. The algae could be used as fish food or as fuel for the power plant.

For some this idea seems to too good to be true “They said it looked like a Rube Goldberg machine,” said Terry Brown, chairman and chief executive officer of O’Brien & Gere.

If the power consumption issue can be addressed aquaponics may be the new way to go. It allows food to be grown closer to their destination, letting the produce be harvested closer to its sale date.
Once a smaller test system has been setup and proven successful, the group seeks an investor for approcimately 1.5 million dollars to get a full sized system operational. “We’re very confident at O’Brien & Gere, with our engineering capabilities, that we can engineer this,” Brown said. “If Morrisville and ESF can provide the biological side of this integration, we’ll hit a home run.”

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New test developed to check for organics

Researchers in Sydney, Australia, have found an inexpensive method to test if a plant was grown organically or not. Organically grown food must use animal manure as its fertilizer, with no additional synthetic fertilizers. As vegetables grow they take up nitrogen from the fertilizer. Scientists analyze this nitrogen, and can determine its origins.

Nitrogen isotopes from animal manure and synthetic fertilizers have very different signature, and using this signature, it can be determined if the plant was grown organically or not. Clients submit a sample of the suspect produce, and can usually expect to receive an answer in about 10 days. This method can also determine if the plant was grown hydroponically or in soil.
Other methods can determine if the plants were grown in a green house that used fossil fuels

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Want to know where the sunlight is?

Two women in East Grand Rapids, Michigan have created a tool for gardeners to tell what areas in their yard receive the most sunlight. Kerry VerMeulen got the idea for a device that measures sunlight and kept quiet about it for some time. After her friend Cynthia VanRenterghem mentioned she wanted to bring a new product to market the two knew they had a found a new business partnership.

Plumstone LLC. Their new company, has begun marketing their new product the Sunstick. It’s a bright red and green plastic flower that gardeners place around their yard to determine how much sunlight that area receives. You place the SunStick in the ground in the morning, and a chemical reaction occurs in a sticker on the SunStick changing its colour.

This way gardeners will know what areas of their yard get appropriate light for the plants they are trying to grow. Next year the pair at Plumstone plan to release an indoor version called SunStick home.
For more information on the SunStick visit www.gosunstick.com

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Hydroponic farming comes to Lockwood.

Hydroponics is growing around. In Lockwood, Pennsylvania, Mary Vinson’s Hydroponics farm can be seen from a distance, as white and green stacks. “Hydro-berry Farm” is comprised of hundreds of stacks of 5 “hydro-stackers” which have four growing spots each.

Mary ordered the stackers after seeing them in a magazine, and took a class to learn more about the method of growing hydroponically. She decided to change her ¼ acre farm over to hydroponics when she realized the benefits. The amount of crops she has planted hydroponically would need to be on about 2 acres if she was to plant them in the ground. It would take nearly 20 times the water to grow them too. She is hoping to double the growing area if things go well.

for more information on hydro-berry farms, visit their website www.hydro-berry.com

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Hydroponics goes organic

WEBWIRE – Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Aurora, Colorado, June 24, 2008 – Today it’s tomatoes, last year it was spinach. The safety of our produce is an issue and the idea of starting a home garden is becoming more and more attractive.

A small garden can be a bit of work but it has its rewards. There are a lot of ways to go about it. Prepare a small patch in your garden, put some containers on your porch, or even set up a small hydroponics garden. It’s amazing how much food a small garden can produce to feed you and your family.

Organic is foremost in people’s mind. On a small scale, growing organically isn’t too hard. You want to use organic nutrients and as few pesticides as possible and those should be organic.

Botanicareâ„¢, a leading provider of nutrients, has just come out with a line of certified organic nutrients called Organicareâ„¢. Now you can easily have an organic garden and the products are made to use not only with soil but hydroponics, also. The ingredients are eco-friendly and people-friendly, and with the full line of applications, your plants will get the nutrition they need for the ultimate harvest and taste.

Dan Hartsough of The Big Tomato (www.thebigtomato.com) in Aurora, Colorado thinks Organicare will be a big boon to hydroponic gardening, both for the home gardener and the commercial growers. “The U.S. is way behind the rest of the world in hydroponics. Now greenhouse growers who grow hydroponically can have the best of both worlds and grow organically with OMRI Certified organic nutrients. This is great for our customers who will enjoy increased yields and overall better quality produce while being organic”

More and more, people are looking into hydroponics, especially for fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Plants that do well grown in water—actually a nutrient-rich solution—include strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, beans, lettuce and basil.

Vertical gardens used to combat “sick building syndrome”

An article over at the Sydney Morning Herald talks about how “greenwalls” are becoming more and more popular down under. Quantas’s first class lounge at Sydney International Airport is home to several living walls, covering more than 280 square feet and over 8400 plants. The flowers and ferns covering the walls give a natural look to what could otherwise be a fairly cold and sterile environment.

People are beginning to realize that these vertical gardens not only look nice, but make a noticeable difference to air quality. In some cases improved air quality has improved worker productivity as much as 12% while reducing absenteeism, and turn-over rates.

As environmental scientist, B.C. Wolverton explains “If man is to move into closed environments, on Earth or in space,” he wrote, “he must take along nature’s life-support system.” Plants.

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“Locavores” want more!

There is a recent trend of people only eating produce from their area. While many climates won’t support certain plants, hydroponics is now changing the way people shop for food. Smaller hydroponics farms are popping up all over the place, allowing people to get fresh local produce no matter where they live.

People are choosing this hydroponic produce because it is usually pesticide and herbicide free, and since it was fed a perfect diet of nutrients is usually better tasting, and higher in nutrition. Home chef’s can now have a wider selection of fresh fruit and veggies at their disposal.

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Positive Sustainability: sustainable sustenance

We all may want our cars, our homes, our computers and our jobs, but there is one thing we can all agree we need: food. Unfortunately, in the world today, food is highly problematic — from a global perspective, it’s expensive, it’s unfairly distributed and its production is an environmental disaster. Statistics detailing the extent of food’s many problems are easy to find, but so far, solutions to this global plight have proven elusive.

There does not yet exist a simple, out-of-the-box solution to the food crisis. For the future, however, both a class at Columbia University and a small non-profit in Kansas are working on two fundamentally divergent solutions that could change the face of cultivation forever: vertical farming and Natural Systems Agriculture.

By the end of this year, more than half of the world’s population will live in cities. Advocates of vertical farming propose that food production should follow this demographic transition into the urban environment, with the food of the future grown not in fields, but in skyscrapers. While the idea might sound at first a tad ludicrous, Dr. Dickson Despommier and his students in Columbia’s Medical Ecology class are convinced of its potential.

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At Epcot, hydroponics and Mickey Mouse pumpkins

As part of Road Trip 2008 through the South, CNET News.com reporter Daniel Terdiman stopped at Epcot Center in Orlando, Fla.

One of the lesser-known secrets of the theme park is its “Behind the Seeds” tour, an hour-long walking tour of the site’s sustainable greenhouses and fish farming operations. The purpose behind the project–which was the very first attraction at Epcot–is partly to provide fresh produce and fish to Epcot’s many restaurants. But as Tiffany Sterrett, the biotech intern who led the tour explained, “It’s also for demonstrating things that could be done (in agriculture), and what could be used in cities and warehouses.”

Essentially, she continued, the idea is to showcase how to grow great food in places where there is poor soil or no soil. The vegetables and fruit growing in the greenhouses, in fact, aren’t planted in soil at all, but use entirely hydroponic methods. Here, a tomato plant hangs down from a rotating rack, its roots having just emerged from a system in which the roots are sprayed with a nutrient mix as the plant glides along the track.

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