This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com.
We’re here at the Maker’s Faire and I’m at the foxy monster booth.
foxymonster.com.
They have these hats and I thought this would be a really cool intro for you guys to see
and we’re gonna check out some of the things they have here at the Maker’s Faire some
of the ways to grow vertically on a wall, and to grow plants inside your house even
if you don’t have a backyard.
We’re here at the Maker’s Faire at the windowfarms.org website and they’re promoting
growing food in your windows.
So once again you know if you don’t have a space, you don’t have land if you live
in a condo or apartment you could grow in your window with window farm and guess what?
It’s gonna virtually cost you little money to get this started because it’s using something
very smart.
We’re reusing or they’re reusing plastic water bottles.
So let’s go ahead and check this out.
So here’s the set up here.
Basically it’s just plastic water bottles and they paint it white to prevent some of
the algae growth you know so it’s not clear.
You put your plants in here.
It’s basically growing in hydroponic solution.
The water comes up through the tube into the one plant.
It drips down you could see it dripping down into this plant here.
This one gets watered, it goes down to the bottom one and it goes into the bottom reservoir
which just basically gets pumped up through this little aquarium pump and then just gets
pumped up back up again and just gets recirculated.
So a really smart system, really easy to do.
Anybody could do this in their condo apartment or home or even your business windows.
Grow your own food windowfarms.org is the website to get all the information.
They have videos and instructions on how to build this.
Alright so we’re here at the Maker’s Faire.
This is one of the coolest booths here if not the coolest and most awesomest for gardeners.
This is plantsonwalls.com and what the plantsonwalls.com what they allow you to do is grow on the wall.
So an outside fence, under an eve, even inside your house you could grow plants like vegetables.
So even if you don't have a yard to grow your own food like I do if you’re in an apartment
or condo or whatever, now even RV Kevin.
You could grow plants and food inside on the walls with no problems.
They’re fully integrated with an in line drip system.
You could just pipe water to it.
You’ll need to catch the water of course and do something with it.
It’s a really great system.
We’re gonna talk here with Chris and he’s gonna tell us more about this concept and
more about you know the construction.
Not only is this really cool it’s also made out of recycled material.
So that just makes it the coolest and it’s also the lowest cost system to grow vert.
Chris: What we developed here is a growing system that uses plastic, recycled plastic
water bottles, that creates a felt that’s been extruded.
The plastic water bottles melted and extruded and carted and made into felt.
What happens is is the water whips from the top and trickles down inside the panel down
the backside of the panel which keeps inside moist where the roots are and then the outside
stays dry and what we’ve grown here is vegetables.
Also we have tropical plants you can grow on them.
And here’s how it works.
We’re doing architectural installations we use a channel to keep the panel away from
the wall keeps the wall dry.
And then the panel just simply is bolted onto the channel.
It’s made of a light weight chloroplast board and then the recycled felt.
We ship the panels with a soaker quarter inch soaker hose of recycled tires and this you
can hook right to your irrigation system.
Use hose timers drip hose timers and keep them wet and Daniel’s gonna show you.
He’s been root wrapping them over here.
We use these plasts to make similar felt that’s called a root wrapper.
And here he goes.
He pulls down the felt, wraps it up, pulls it over, pulls it over, and then you can just
put it right in the pocket.
The water wicks right through the felt and into the plant.
It keeps everything wet allows you to use your panel and move plants around.
You can pull out a plant and move it over here.
Real easy.
Now you can either decorate or design or create walls any type.
John: Alright so here’s an example of plants on walls.
This is basically a free standing unit used for aquaculture.
We have fish in the bottom to basically take the run off water they’re gonna circulate
that run off water that the fish are actually gonna filter run up to the top and then repeat
the cycle.
And then you see they have bok choy growing in here tomatoes, marigolds, some asian greens
really cool.
And this is a great way to grow inside vertically on any wall and you know we need to maximize
our vertical growing space.
If I had tons of money you know I’d do my whole house with this stuff.
You could even do your roof.
With the plants on walls panels you could even make a dog house out of the panels and
have flowers on your dog house.
Your dog could live in luxury in a flower dog house.
How cool is that?
Alright so I’m here at the Maker’s Faire in the mobile pinball museum of pinball.
I gotta get back to that.
I hope you’ve learned more about vertical growing today.
See you next time.