Inside Urban Green

We're All Waiting!

It seems like only yesterday that I was standing in a u-pick tomato field in Homestead, FL (south of Miami) talking to a farmer about the drastic change in the quality of his tomatoes. It wasn’t yesterday. It was somewhere around 1973.

Essentially what he said was "We now need to grow to ship rather than for you to pick”.

That was the beginning of thick wall tomatoes that could just as well have a Goodyear Tire brand. Tomatoes as durable as hockey pucks became the order of the day. As a result, how many people under 40 know what a real tomato tastes like?

We can wait for the change promised in this article but a better solution for many of us is to grow our own "real tomatoes" in portable, productive sub-irrigated planters (SIPs).

It’s a really good idea no matter what happens with supermarket tomatoes. There's a lot of satisfaction in growing your own.

via www.sciencedaily.com

ScienceDaily (May 24, 2012) — There is nothing better than a ripe, red, homegrown tomato, and now researchers reporting online on May 24 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, have figured out just what it is that makes some of them so awfully good (and your average supermarket tomato so bland).

"We now know exactly what we need to do to fix the broken tomato," said Harry Klee of the University of Florida.

Tomato flavor depends on sugars, acids, and a host of less well-defined aroma volatiles (so named for the ease with which they vaporize, sending scent molecules into the air). Klee's team set out to define the chemicals that are most important to our fondness for one particular tomato or another. Read more...

Video » Check Out the Rain Gutter SIP System Facebook Page

Larry Hall Facebook page. We have liftoff!

Nashville Update » Sub-irrigated Rain Gutter Garden on a Boat Dock

A sub-irrigated rain gutter garden like this could be growing food in an urban yard, on a rooftop or balcony anywhere in the world. I'm looking forward to getting some hands-on experience with this system before the growing season is over.

via www.youtube.com

TEDx Montreal » Mohamed Hage of Lufa Farms

Mohamed Hage is a founder of Lufa Farms in Montreal. It appears at this time to be one of the North American rooftop hydroponics companies with staying power. I have a high regard for their marketing communications. It will be interesting to see if they not only expand in Montreal but also jump into the big pond here in New York City.

My belief is that the best thing you can have in business is good competition. Think of the expression "all boats rise on the incoming tide". New York has an "incoming tide" of hydroponics growers with BrightFarms and Gotham Greens.

They could all be market makers for hydroponically grown fresh local food. It's going to be fun to watch this market grow and mature not just in New York but also across the U.S. and Canada.

via www.youtube.com

Mohamed Hage, an agriculture and technology enthusiast, is the founding president of Lufa Farms, a company that designs, builds and operates rooftop agricultural greenhouses. It was to provide fresh, local and responsible vegetables to montréalais consumers that he created the first commercial rooftop greenhouse in the world in the winter of 2011. Mohamed Hage supervises all of Lufa Farms' daily activities, but is particularly interested in research, planning, construction and operation of the greenhouse environment.

His present goal is to help this new agricultural model be progressively integrated into rooftops across major cities.

 

Why Doesn't the USDA Teach Consumers About Sub-irrigation?

via www.youtube.com

See the water flowing onto the plant bench (1 minute mark in the video)? See the plant pots sitting in water? This is an environmentally sound form of greenhouse sub-irrigation called ebb and flow. Since the water is recycled, there is no water run-off. Sub-irrigation is used in greenhouse growing all over the world. 

If sub-irrigation is a professional method of watering potted plants, why isn't the USDA teaching it to consumers through the land-grant university Extension Program? All we hear is the steady drone of the drain hole mantra and nothing about modern methods like sub-irrigation.

Antiquated drain-hole based top watering wastes water, time and ultimately the plants. It is clearly an environmentally unsound practice propagandized by the USDA, a taxpayer supported institution.

Why is there no uproar about this? Why do houseplant hobbyists and gardeners seem to behave like sheep?

Rainwater Harvesting and Sub-irrigation 2,500 Years Ago

An aerial view of the Ramat Rahel site, where the gardens were discovered.
CREDIT: Boaz Gross, Tel Aviv University

Finding Professor Green's sub-irrigated planter bench in the Cyclopedia of Horticulture established the fact that SIPs have been around for a long time. He made his planter in the 1890-91 period.

Compared to the 2500-year-old gardens at Ramat Rahel, that was just yesterday. Why then is our consumer horticultural education system still fixated on drain holes, sprinklers and other overhead irrigation systems that waste water when compared to sub-irrigation?

Add the fact that sub-irrigation increases yields and produces healthier plants and we have a mystery of the modern age of climate change, conservation and sustainability.

The garden relied on an advanced irrigation system, which collected rainwater and distributed it using artsy water installations, including pools, underground channels, tunnels and gutters.

These water installations ended up being the key to the team's new discovery; the researchers found grains of pollen that likely got trapped in plaster when the installations were renovated and the plaster still wet. The result was preserved pollen grains.

via www.livescience.com

An ancient royal garden has come back into bloom in a way, as scientists have reconstructed what it would've looked like some 2,500 years ago in the kingdom of the biblical Judah.

Their reconstruction, which relied on analyses of excavated pollen, reveals a paradise of exotic plants.

The luxurious garden had been discovered at Ramat Rahel, an archaeological site located high above the modern city of Jerusalem, about midway between the Old City of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. This site was inhabited since the last century of the Kingdom of Judah (seventh century B.C.) until the early Muslim reign in Palestine (10th century), a period that saw many wars and exchanges of power, with the garden evolving under each civilization.

Since excavators discovered the garden, they could only imagine its leafy, flowery inhabitants. That is until now. Read more...

A Tomato Grower Par Excellance

This is Hero Member dbank (screen name) on the EarthBox forum standing next to one of her "tomato trees". It may look like a Photoshopped pic but it's real.

Not only does she share information about her giant tomato plants she explains in detail how to stake them with her "pea fence" system using lots of photos. Read on.

via forum.earthbox.com

A Fenced-in Sub-irrigated Rain Gutter Garden

Reader Sherri Sachs in Chicago posted a link to her rain gutter SIP system concealed in a wood facade. She made the interior planters from recycled kitty litter buckets. Their square shape optimizes the space.

We will surely see many more ways to conceal the Larry Hall sub-irrigation system that uses recyled containers, rain gutters and simple float valves to create auto-irrigated SIP gardens. I'm looking forward to getting some hands-on experience with this system. It will happen soon.

Decorating a Sub-irrigated Rain Gutter Garden

Here is a smaller, decorated version of the Larry Hall sub-irrigated rain gutter system.

There is no doubt in my mind that Larry's basic system is going to morph into many more versions. The basic system is just waiting to be exploited. It will be interesting to see the evolution as more and more growers work with it. It may well become a manufactured system available at retail.

via www.youtube.com

World-Class Grower Martin Weijters Joins BrightFarms

Martin Weijters will join Jennifer Nelkin of Gotham Greens in a small but growing group of academically trained and experienced controlled environment agriculture (CEA) professionals here in the Big Apple. He will be BrightFarms new Vice President of Agriculture.

Netherlands education and Houwelings work experience for Martin and University of Arizona graduate program in CEA plus the Science Barge and Gotham Greens for Jennifer are high-level credentials. It looks to me that New York is finally on the move towards urban agriculture modernity. I believe it will have a ripple affect in the home gardening and consumer market.

It is not well known in lay circles how prestigious the job title "grower" is in the greenhouse growing industry. A grower is the equivalent of a factory manager in industry. If you want to succeed in this business, you had better have a top-notch grower. You cannot find better than those from the Netherlands. It is a horticultural Mecca.

It looks to me that BrightFarms has made a very big step in convincing Martin Weijters to leave sunny California. I know all about that having lived there for 32 years.

via www.prnewswire.com

NEW YORK, April 20, 2012 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- It was announced today that Martin Weijters, Senior Grower at Houweling's Tomatoes, is joining BrightFarms, Inc. as Vice President of Agriculture. BrightFarms finances, builds, and operates hydroponic greenhouses at supermarkets.

As of May 1, 2012, Weijters will oversee BrightFarms' current and future greenhouses. Weijters was immediately drawn to BrightFarms' innovative business model and bold vision for sustainable agriculture. By building greenhouses at supermarkets and distribution centers, BrightFarms reduces the costs—financial and environmental—associated with trucking produce across the country.

In 1996, Weijters immigrated to the United States from the Netherlands, where he studied and practiced horticulture and greenhouse management. For the past 16 years, Weijters has served as Senior Grower of Houweling's Tomatoes, a world renown and environmentally friendly greenhouse tomato grower with facilities in California and British Columbia. Weijters manages Houweling's 125 acre California facility and has been central to building the company's reputation as an industry leader in quality, quantity, and sustainability. Read more...