This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com.
Today we're at the Maker Faire here in San Mateo, California.
It's all about do-it yourself inventors and people that make things.
So I'm really excited to be here and check it out and see if there's anything having
to do with gardening here at the Maker's Faire.
So let's come inside and check it out.
Alright, so here's an excellent way to grow your own food in your house if you don't have
a yard like I did to convert into all raised bed.
You can grow in an apartment in the middle of New York City, even if you live in a trailer
you can grow this in your RV Kevin, if you're watching my show.
But this is algae, you can grow your own Spirulina wherever you are.
All you need pretty much is like an aquarium and this is it and you need a good kit like
from algaelab.org.
They're going to explain the process, they teach classes.
They'll teach you how to do this stuff.
So we're here with Eric, he's from algaelab.org and he's going to show us how to harvest this
Spirulina.
Eric: That's right.
So one window, growing Spirulina can supply enough to transform the diet of a person.
It's very easy to harvest, basically you down here the, your live Spirulina and you're going
to syphon it through here, through this cloth so over here.
This cloth has 40 micron openings, it's screen-printing fabric and it'll catch the Spirulina and then
the water will go through and put the water back in and spirulina's very water, it uses
very little water to grow because you recycle the water.
Then you're going to have a live, fresh super food you cannot buy live, fresh spirulina,
you can only get the powdered stuff and it's extremely sensitive to the drying process,
so you get much better nutrition from the live stuff.
As you can watch it here and you can see the green area growing that's live spirulina getting
caught on the cloth and you'll see it getting denser and getting bigger.
We're just going to get a little bit.
Normally I'd filter out about a quarter of the tank and that would give us a good tablespoon
or so of live spirulina and you can do that about every other day with a tank this size.
Then you just squeeze out the remaining water.
Just kind of gather it up and squeeze out that last bit.
Because that's very, very alkaline.
One of the things about spirulina is it's an extremophile.
It grows in extremely high alkaline environments which means nothing else will grow with the
spirulina because the alkalinity is so high.
Then when you've harvested you get this.
Live spirulina has almost no taste to it and it's got a nice creamy texture and is extremely
healthful.
That's basically all it takes.
You just pour the liquid back and you're done.
You can keep doing this day after day after day.
Because spirulina grows very quickly.
It's like a pet or a house plant except that it feeds you every day.
John: So I think is the first time I've had fresh, live spirulina.
I've often eat the powder, but this is cool that you do this fresh and watch for a future
episode where I will be growing my own spirulina one of these days.
So all do is you take this little toothpick here and scrap some off on the toothpick and
wow man, that's good stuff.
Nice really creamy texture.
I can just imagine adding that to a banana fruit smoothie.
It's going to be so good and I can't wait to grow spirulina.
So everybody out there don't say I can't grow anything I live in an apartment, you can grow
spirulina.
So we're here at the general hydroponics booth at the Makers Faire.
They're demonstrating how easy it is to grow hydroponically and here's the really easy
set up.
All they're really doing is using coke bottle and that seem system to be a nice theme here
at the Maker's Festival to, Maker's Faire.
To basically, they cut the coke bottle in half, they glued in some tube on the bottom
and that's the return line.
On the top they have a tube that's basically feeding water to it.
They got some hydroton ceramic ball things in there and some medium.
This is not soil and tomatoes.
So you got to make sure you have a good nutrient solution in there to allow it to grow.
You can see the return line comes into this little bucket, it's about a one gallon or
two gallon bucket and you can see they just have a simple pump in there and that basically
the return line's in the bottom and that the pump pumps up the water into the hose and
goes into each of the bottles, into the cut down coke bottles.
That's how easy it is to grow hydroponically.
Now this is just a demonstration system, I don't know if this would work on a real big
scale.
But if you're screwing around you could do something like this.
So if you're really serious about growing hydroponically you should get the general
hydroponics water farm.
It comes with eight different, basically five gallon buckets to grow your own food hydroponically.
Now this system is going to set you back approximately $500 so it's not cheap, definitely lot easier
to grow in soil but there's many advantages to growing hydroponically.
Alright so General Hydroponics now as a new line, it's called General Organics for the
home gardener to use in their, to grow plants outside.
It's really cool, such as this one here Bio Thrive.
It's a vegan plant food in a bottle.
Bio Thrive, another one, plant food this is called Bloom, this one's called grow.
They have Bio Root booster.
They even have something I really like Bio Weed which is a cold processed seaweed.
So basically this a raw food for your plants now.
So one of the cooler products here, I get the question a lot, John what do you do about
the bugs?
Well now I can use AzaMax for all my bugs.
It's an insecticide that's basically OMRI listed for use in organic gardening.
Basically what it is is basically it's extracted from neem oil.
So you could use neem oil which has the same properties of this but this is more of a concentrated
version which may actually work better.
We're here at the Maker's Faire and we're here at the Master Gardener's Food for San
Mateo and San Francisco County.
They have this cool strawberry tower that you can make.
So this is a great way to save space and grow lots of strawberries with two five gallon
buckets, yet another use of buckets that I didn't talk about before.
So this is great, here's the instructions here, but if you're not here to see the instructions,
you can actually download the instructions at groups.ucanr.org/sanmateo
to download your own instructions of how to build your own and plant a strawberry tower
made out of waste five gallon buckets and a whole bunch of strawberry plants and it
looks like they have several dozen strawberry plants in here and I'm sure it's going to
yield quite well, so check out the Master Gardener's in your area for hints and tips
an instruction on how to help you to grow your own foods at your house.
Have you ever wondered what you can do with your old window shade?
Well you know I have lots of plants in my garden that don't have tags.
So an old window shade is the perfect material to make plant tags.
All you have to do is grab a scissors and literally cut it out and then right on there.
So I'm growing carrots, I'm going to put carrots, real simple and then you can just stick it
in your planter and there you go, easy plant tag.
Everybody should do it.
I know you all got extra window blinds out there.
Label your plants, especially the varieties if you're growing many varieties you can get
confused some times.
A great thing to do with your old window blinds.
You can do ones with the metal as well and what I used instead of the blinds actually
is I go out and buy roof flashing, aluminum roof flashing, that works as well.
You can cut that up if you don't have your window blinds.
Now we're going to talk about worm composting, another booth here at the Maker's Faire has
composting regular composting also worm composting.
So you could buy something like this, it's called the wiggly ranch and this is to keep
your worms.
This is approximately $100 and they have other ones that will hold your worms as well.
Basically it's a nice design, it just comes off and the worms go in here, you put your
food scraps in here and you fill them up at the bottom first and the worm pee actually
you can collect with this little spigot in a jar that's really good for your garden.
As the worms finish off you keep only putting the produce in at the top and then they move
their way up.
So then you can take off the bottom trays when it's finished.
This is about a hundred dollars but if you want to do it the low tech method you could
just go to your local Walmart or big-box store and buy some of these roughneck, Rubbermaid
containers or even other similar containers.
Basically you just got to punch a whole bunch of holes in it for air circulation and there's
also some holes in the bottom there because the worm pee needs to drain out somewhere
and then you simply nest this one into another one so that the worm pee can drain out in
there.
It's really neat and easy.
Then basically you can see we're going to go ahead and you just put your food scraps
in here.
If you do it right it's not going to smell and it's not going to stink.
You definitely want to keep it in a nice area that stays pretty stable temperature, not
outside in the hot sun and not freezing.
But you can see here's all the stuff, all the different things you can put newspaper
scraps if your mixtures too wet.
And different food scraps and you'll see all the different worms in here, let's go ahead
and use the hands, let's see if we can find some worms in here.
It's going to compost faster with more worms and less fast with less worms.
There's little worms all in there, they're going to eat all this stuff and in about a
month here this will be turned into rich compost, worm castings is probably one of the best
things you can put in your garden.
So you can do this at home, you can check online for a little of different instructions
on how to do your worm box at home in your kitchen or get outside.
So I hope you've enjoyed seeing my clips here at the Maker's Faire, it's getting late and
there are sculptures and some many kinds of things to see here at the Maker's Faire [ {unclear}
they got a big train going here that's taking off and I think it's time for me to take off
too.
So this John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com.
We'll see you next time.