Inside Urban Green International

The Indoor Desert Garden is Now Growing on the East Coast

My indoor plant lab including the desert garden, coffee tree plantation and Ficus bonsai tree forest is now located on the east coast.

To get here they had to endure more than nine days inside a U-Haul truck while crossing the country. They lived in total darkness without water other than the moisture in the soil they had leaving San Diego. Thanks to their sub-irrigated planters (SIPs) there was no need for water stops or other maintenance along the way.

For older folks reading this post these words of John Swayze might come to mind…”It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.” Newscaster Swayze was the TV spokesperson for Timex watches a long time ago.

Just as in the commercial the plants in my plant lab took a licking inside the darkness of the truck but they're still ticking. It was a wild ride particularly through the spectacular mountains of Utah and Colorado. I soon learned how to be a low-gear trucker. The beginning sections of I-70 were an otherworldly experience at times when I was often the only truck or car within eyesight.

Out of my view the plants bounced around during the wild ride over one mountain after another. It was only after unloading that I saw the chaos from the journey. Fortunately, little permanent damage was done.

In some respects this arduous trip reminded me of old WW2 movies about the legendary Burma Road and Flying Tigers that I watched as a kid.

This was definitely not a ride for the faint of heart. I am lucky to be alive and sure that someone up there was watching over me. Maybe that someone was in the passenger seat next to me. Who knows?

This is just a hint of what I discovered after slitting the shrink wrap. I didn't have the heart to photograph the cactus chaos. I had other things on my mind.

Although all of the plants were shrink-wrapped within the light garden shelves some of them became airborne. Many of the small cactus and succulents flew around inside their shrink-wrap cocoons. Some even flew out of their SIPs but fortunately couldn’t fly out of their shrink-wrapped space.

Many succulent leaves were lost but the plants are now in rehab after several days of plant triage.

These photos were taken at a U-Haul storage location on the East Coast. It is the temporary location of the lab until I find a new home for it. It was a most tedious job repotting, watering and locating all of the plants in sufficient light but it's now done. Thank god for that!  

 

Garden State Urban Farms Helping Again to Fight Obesity and Fresh Food Deserts

I am still a road warrior in a U-Haul pulling a car trailer but saw this very important article about more of Lorraine Gibbon's good work in Newark, NJ.

Her company, Garden State Urban Farms, is a shining example of a business exemplifying civic responsibility in lower income urban neighborhoods. We need a green legion of people like Lorraine and educator Stephen Ritz of the Green Bronx Machine to help solve our national nutrition and obesity problems. 

Lorraine is experienced in both conventional greenhouse hydroponics and EarthBox planters that employ a passive hydroponics technique.

It is a sure sign of the poor health of our horticultural education system that we are still calling sub-irrigated planters (SIPs) like EarthBoxes "self watering planters." That's bad but what is even worse is the cursory mention of them only as self-watering planters in gardening writer columns and on USDA sponsored extension program websites. Professional growers never use this misleading term.

America can do better! Join the green legion of forward-looking urban food growers at home or explore the field of tech-based food growing as a socially responsible career path.

Do not hesitate to contact me. I will be happy to assist you in any way I can by drawing on over 40 years of experience with simple plant growing technology such as SIPs.

I have a significant menu of business ideas to share. Tell me about your personal interests and goals. I will do my best to suggest compatible paths to them. I will be posting more about socially responsible green growing careers once I get settled in my new home.

Read more about my professional journey. Please forgive the length. It is in need of editing.

Bob Hyland

urbangreenscaper [AT] gmail [DOT] com

via www.njspotlight.com

A hydroponic garden -- which uses water rather than soil to deliver nutrients to plants -- should help wash away even more of Newark’s food desert

The health benefits of fresh vegetables are well known. The process of creating a garden where residents can join hands to teach one another how to raise crops provides countless additional social and economic advantages to the surrounding community. These gains become even more important in a neighborhood that has traditionally lacked access to healthy food, safe community spaces, and job opportunities.

Many parts of Newark are just such a food desert. The lack of resources in New Jersey’s largest city caused leaders at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center to start an urban garden and farm market, a project that has flourished over the past five years to become a key part of the hospital’s larger Wellness Program.

On Tuesday the hospital, a part of the RWJ/Barnabas Health network, is scheduled to host a grand opening of a hydroponic greenhouse, the latest addition to the program. The facility uses nutrient-infused water to grow plants, and follows a commercial aeroponic greenhouse, which uses just mist, that opened last spring in the Ironbound. Hospital officials said the Beth Greenhouse will double the output available through the existing garden, allow food production all year, and serve as a local base for horticultural and other job-training and employment efforts.

The project, which Barnabas said is the only one of its kind nationwide, will host programs for disabled residents, veterans, and former prisoners. It will also allow them to expand on work done at the current garden, which has led to cooking classes for hospital outpatients, and become a critical part of the community fabric, they said.

The greenhouse and garden projects are also part of a larger trend toward wellness in general. Government programs like Medicaid and Medicare and private health insurance companies are shifting toward payment models that reward doctors for their quality of care, instead of the quantity of visits or treatments they provide. And there has been a growing understanding in recent years of the need to also focus on keeping people healthy, instead of just treating them after they become sick.

“These kinds of things are really avant garde. People still come to the hospital when they are sick,” explained Barbara Mintz, the RWJ/Barnabas vice president who oversees community engagement and healthy-living efforts, like the Wellness Program. “Hospitals need to be a place of wellness. This is a real culture change.”

Mintz said this work is particularly important in a city like Newark, where many residents battle health issues like obesity and high blood pressure; these conditions can benefit from a diet full of fresh vegetables. According to a 2013 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, New Jersey scored – both state-wide and in low-income areas – two points below the national average on a 10-point scale designed to measure residents’ access to fresh, healthy food versus the availability of fast food restaurants and convenience stores in their communities.

 

An Update About the Indoor Desert Garden Growing in Sub-irrigated Planters (SIPs)

Click on the photo to enlarge. Then click again to zoom in.

This is an update about the indoor desert garden in my plant lab. The desert is about to move across country to the "right coast" for me. Note that the bottom shelf is the "coffee plantation."

This is a test garden in that I have not grown succulents and cacti indoors in sub-irrigated planters (SIPs) to this extent previously. We will all learn something together as I plan to post monthly updates. This is the first update since the installation back in early April.

Pop Quiz: Which plants are not really desert plants but are living here with their desert cousins? Hint. They are flowering in some of the photos.

All of these plants are the hottest plants in the gardening world right now. The country has gone succulent crazy. Me too. Every public school should have a light garden like this. It is the perfect companion for a Stephen Ritz school tower garden.

Incidentally, I am really liking these LED shop lights from Costco so far. They are amazingly light weight and easy to handle. They remind me of Star Wars. They're like Lightsabers for plants.

This album about the desert garden needs some serious editing (lots of redundancy) which may get done on the long drive. If not I will edit the photos when I arrive. This will be my third and last trip driving a U-Haul truck with the lab in back. It doesn't get any easier with repetition. 

Related articles

Six Month Update " A Sub-irrigated "Bubble SIP" Water Conservation Test Garden

Planting a Succulent Container Garden With Tradition...and Ignorance of Modernity

A "Master Gardener" Plant Sale at Balboa Park this Saturday

Garden State Urban Farms is in the News Again

It was great to see the smiling face of Lorraine Gibbons (2nd from the left), founder of Garden State Urban Farms (GSUF). I have been a big fan of hers ever since the founding of Brick City Urban Farms (the original name) in Newark. Good memories of visiting BCUF and then GSUF at the new hydroponic greenhouse in Orange, NJ came back when reading this article.

We need many more socially conscious entrepreneurs like Lorraine doing what she does in all inner cities across the country. She walks the walk.

Read a series of prior posts about BCUF now GSUF dating back to when Newark Mayor Cory Booker (now Senator) visited the farm back in 2008.

Jersey City has also launched its first Earth Box Farms, an initiative in which 125 Earth Boxes were donated by Garden State Urban Farms (GSUF). The Earth Boxes, or self-contained gardening systems, were distributed to the Maureen Collier Senior Center, the Jersey City Health and Human Services building and the Berry Gardens Public Housing complex. Earth Boxes make it possible to garden anywhere, including paved parking lots and patios.

GSUF collaborates with schools, nonprofit organizations and government groups to provide employment opportunities and educational programming, as well as low-cost, healthy food in urban areas throughout New Jersey. GSUF also provided training for the gardeners, along with the guidance of master gardeners from the Jersey City Parks Coalition.

via www.nj.com

More gardens will be sprouting up around Jersey City this spring thanks to a new initiative that will expand urban agriculture and also make healthier foods from farmers' markets more accessible.

Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop and the Department of Health and Human Services are joining up with the Partnership for a Healthier JC to increase resources for "Earth Box" gardens at several sites around the city and Adopt-A-Lot programs, which allows residents to transform unused city-owned lots into gardens by leasing out the site for a dollar. Read more...

Sub-irrigated Indoor Gardens for all Seasons, Climates, Locations and Ages

Many of you have seen this photo before. As of today there have been more than 76,000 views of it in this Flickr album.

I installed this sub-irrigation planter (SIP) garden (mostly succulents) on the property of a b&b hotel as compensation for temporary storage space for my plant lab back in 2014. Unfortunately the inn closed due to declining business that was evidently triggered by the great recession. It is now apartments.

The plants are still alive but now intermingled with traditional drain hole pots. The garden as it was is no longer intact. All of their planters should have been converted into SIPs. Sad story but life moves on.

The replacement garden is below. As you can see this version is an indoor light garden. It is housed on an Inter-Metro style rolling rack (aka wire rack) from Costco ($90 - 4'x6'x1.5', 6 shelves with casters for easy mobility, chrome). These racks are also available from other stores such as Lowe's Home Depot and The Container Store (usually without casters). The light is supplied by LED shop lights, also from Costco ( 2 per shelf). These lights appear to be an exclusive Costco item ($30-35).

This as a beta-test garden in my plant lab. We will see how the plants grow in this set-up. I am creating a Flickr album with many more close-up photos of individual planters. I will post the status monthly. Stay tuned.

Note the shelf below the "desert garden." It is a "coffee plantation" shown previously in this post. Click the photo for a much larger view.

The little coffee trees below the desert garden are growing like Topsy. I keep pruning the tops to create strong trunks. I will soon have more room to let them grow taller. The next light garden theme will be tropical rainforest plants including Tillandsias (air plants).

Another shelf in the desert garden. Click on the photo for a much larger view.

There will also be another version of the "desert garden" in the future. The plants will be growing in sub-irrigated tray planters instead of individual pots. The SIP trays will simulate a desert landscape with decorative sand over the top of the artificial planter mix substrate. It will allow much more room for creativity for those whose vision includes an Arabian fantasy. Shhh...don't tell anyone there is water just below the sand. It will be your little secret.

These theme gardens will offer a new way to supplement book learning of other subjects besides STEM based plant science in public schools (geography and environmental studies for example). My vision is that there be one or more of these light gardens in every school in the U.S. and abroad.

I will seek corporate sponsorship for this worthy project. Our horticultural education system is currently dominated by ideology and outdated gardening practices (drain holes for example). We need disruptive change if we expect to feed ourselves in the future.

Indoor light gardens should be available to all teachers and students every day the year round regardless of weather or climate. Since they are highly mobile with casters they can be rolled easily from classroom to classroom. Simply plug them in and the show is on.

These are examples of the planters used in this desert garden. The rectangular planter at the top was a clearance item from Rite-Aid. They are high fired ceramic. I have found a number of bargains in Rite-Aid at the end of the season. I bought several of these for just a few dollars.

The two water and oxygen reservoirs are made from recycled 5.3 oz Dannon Greek yogurt containers. Note the clear vinyl fill tube (3/4" o.d. - 5/8" i.d. allows for insertion of a plastic funnel with a 1/2" neck). You need just one. Water will flow across the bottom of the planter into the reservoir on the right.

The reservoir for the clay pot (.78 at Home Depot) is the little plastic grow container the cactus came in. All holes in these reservoirs were made with a wood burning pen. The drain hole in the little clay pot was plugged with Goop adhesive (my favorite). It is widely available in big box and hardware stores and on-line.

The high-fired, high-quality, ceramic planter on the right is from Ikea. They were just .49 each (note that they were less than the common clay pot). I bought a bunch of these planters. What a deal! And...there was no need to plug a drain hole in these cache pots.

This photo shows how the soil wicks work. They are partially filled for illustration purposes. The potting mix surrounding the water/oxygen reservoir acts as the wick (no cloth wick required). The plants roots grow down to (and into) the reservoir while the water moves up by capillary action. This "SIP action" is a very simple form of sub-irrigation with no need for power or oxygen pumps.

Related articles

A Sub-irrigated "Bubble SIP" Water Conservation Test Garden

African Violets in Bubble SIPs Growing Under LED Shop Lights

Moving From One SIP to Another

Falling Fronds in San Diego Instead of Falling Snow

The Centennial Walkway between the San Diego Zoo and Balboa Park. These folks managed to dodge the slow moving Frond Turtles. 

The urban greenscape in Balboa Park looked a bit different yesterday on my park walk. A winter storm blew through and left lots of palm fronds and debris in my path. I'm lucky that none hit me in the head and my power wasn't down like about 38,000 other San Diegans. 

Back east you rightly get snow pics for days after a blizzard like Jonas. As I well know from my days in Brooklyn the remnants of snow storms are no picnic to live with.

For example try crossing streets at corners mounded with snow and narrow paths filled with undrained slush when you aren't wearing boots. You need to be a very creative slush dodger or you will be walking on wet cold feet. 

Here we get palm fronds and you don't have to shovel them. Big deal eh? Storm today, sun tomorrow usually. I shot some pics to share. More of them are in an unedited Flickr album. 

To grow palms you need fruit and seeds. Watch your step! 

This is perhaps the most popular picture taking location in the park. It is the view from El Prado looking towards the Botanical Building. I could hardly believe what I saw. The flower beds became a frond dump evidently due to some freaky wind currents on El Prado. 

There will be no shortage of fallen fronds in the park if the forthcoming El Niño season is as strong as predicted. Note the guy wires between the palms. Fallen trees would be a lot worse than fallen fronds. 

Take a Florida Vacation and Learn Some Good Stuff About Hydroponics

If you are considering a career in the field of urban agriculture, there are three workshops scheduled by the University of Florida extension program to consider in the coming year. They all include topical hydroponics information. 

The first is on February 2, 2016 at the Mid-Florida Research & Education Center, Apopka (central Fl). More information.

Topics include:
Plant physiology and nutrient basics
Water quality and media selections
How to mix your own fertilizer
Understanding the role of pH in your water
Monitoring and adjusting nutrient solutions
Hands-on lab sessions
Equipment and meters

The second is a 2-day workshop on either March 14-15 or 18-19, 2016 at the Suwannee Valley Agricultural Extension Center (west of  Jacksonville). More information.

Topics include:
Structures for Protected Culture
Starting Transplants
Developing a Marketing Plan
Soilless Media Systems
Solution Systems (No Media)
Integrated Pest Management
Water and Nutrient Management
Traditional Crops
Specialty Crops

The third is a 1-day workshop for teachers on April 7, 2016. It is also at the Suwannee Valley Agricultural Extension Center. More information.

Topics include:
Welcome and Overview of Training
Florida Hydroponic Industry
Greenhouse and Shade Structures for Florida
Production Systems and Media
Seeding and Growing Transplants
Water and Nutrient Management
The Basics of Pest Management
Popular and Profitable Crops

Carrot Pot? Know Your Carrots.

Border agents discovered a pungent and pricey surprise inside a shipment of fresh produce from Mexico — 2,493 pounds of marijuana tucked inside fake carrots. The haul had an estimated street value of $499,000, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Photo U.S. CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION

With the current media obsession about the recapture of El Chapo, this was a rather amusing news bit from the editorial staff of Forbes of all people.

The steady advance of marijuana legalization and the concurrent mainstreaming of hydroponic growing will have a profound affect on our society.

Who knows whether all of this change will be to the good or bad? 

My guess is no one as we stumble forward.

p.s. I also found this story from The Globe and Mail most interesting. Hey, get your new and better tasting carrots!

And, speaking of the value of cash crops and taxes.

via www.forbes.com

“Once again, drug smuggling organizations have demonstrated their creativity in attempting to smuggle large quantities of narcotics across the U.S./Mexico border,” Port Director Efrain Solis Jr. said in a statement. “Our officers are always ready to meet those challenges and remain vigilant towards any type of illicit activities.”

The incident on Jan. 10 wasn’t the first time authorities at the Pharr/Anzalduas Port of Entry in Texas — about 230 miles south of San Antonio – have seen drugs tucked into decoy produce. In 2015, officials in the area confiscated $3,428,927 worth of marijuana in eight incidents. The weed was hidden among tomatoes, limes, coconuts, coriander, mango pulp and cucumbers.

While that’s a hefty amount of weed for one border area, the haul doesn’t come to close to the amount Coloradans spent on legal marijuana during the same year. In the first eight months of 2015, the state sold over $639 million worth of medical and recreational pot (not packaged in fruit and vegetables), according to the Colorado Department of Revenue.

Design Detail » The Simplest Form of Hydroponics for a Home Office

Photography by Quang Tran

via www.contemporist.com

Instead of having plain white shelving, when NatureArch Studio were designing this home office in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, they added an extra detail to the built-in bookshelves. Boxes in black, yellow and white, were included as a way to show off little sculptures, and also act as bookends.

I would be a happy camper to work in an office like this. Unfortunately, I'm a messy worker and it would not look like this for very long. If you're still alive there's always hope for change. We'll see when I get back to the East Coast in the spring. I will use these photos as motivation and inspiration.

Notice the glass bowl with the Pothos cuttings growing in it. This is the simplest form of hydroponics I know of and a great way to teach kids.

Your grandma (or your great-grandma) may have done the same thing using the kitchen windowsill. She just didn't have a name for it. Certainly not hydroponics. If there were clay pebbles in the bowl it would be called hydroculture.

I kept a row of clear hydro planters like this on the floor in front of light gardens in my Brooklyn plant lab. The planters were recycled UTZ pretzel containers (see photo below).

This is the most maintenance free form of houseplant growing that I know. "Stamp collector" type growers might be bored with Pothos and Spider Plants but they are very user friendly. Try others. What have you got to lose? 

Plants need light, water and oxygen. How do you supply oxygen to these cuttings? The simple answer is to let the water level lower to 1/3 to 1/2 the volume of the planter. Don't be diligent about adding watering to them. Topping them off too often will starve them of oxygen leading to their demise

I almost forgot nutrients. My practice is to always add some liquid fertilizer to the water when growing houseplants. This is basic hydroponics practice to create a "nutrient solution". I use Dyna-Gro Foliage-Pro 9-3-6 (1/4 tsp. to each 1/2 gallon plastic milk or juice container I use to store the solution).

When the plants need pruning (as soon as they reach the table top or floor), cut the vine ends or plantlets and stick them back into the planter. The plants will then keep increasing their fullness. There is always room for one more cutting.

Please overlook the grubby quality of the plants and surroundings in this photo. These plants had just traveled about 3,000 miles in a pitch-dark U-Haul truck. Then the plant lab was in temporary storage here in San Diego. What a mess.

All of the plants were extremely lush and healthy with very strong root systems before the move. I do not recall why I added decorative stones to the Spider Plant container. I never bothered to photograph them since they were somewhat of a catchall for cuttings that I hated to throw away.

I had to dump these plants because of a shortage of space here in San Diego but plan to do more experimentation with this method. It is such a simple way to add the design element of living plants as in the office project above. It is a virtually hassle free method of growing indoor plants.

 

Are You Ready for a Floating Urban Forest in Your City?

Just when you think you've seen it all, something like this floats by your eyes. Leave it to the Dutch.

It's a rendering above but they have product tested the concept and expect to have them installed in Rotterdam's harbor by the spring. I remember my mother telling me  a long time ago "Never judge an unfinished project." Maybe that's because she was Finnish. Stay tuned!

via www.contemporist.com

A group of Dutch entrepreneurs and designers from Mothership, spotted an art piece named ‘In Search Of Habitus’, by artist Jorge Bakker, and were inspired to create a life-size version for the city of Rotterdam, by installing 20 trees that will bob in the water, just like a fishing float.