Feeding America One Family At A Time with our Food Forever™ Growing Systems and Teaching our Students One School At A Time with our STEM Teaching & Food Growing Systems
Things are getting shaky in America with high Inflation, stagnant wages, many fired or quitting to avoid Vaccines, high gas prices, supply chain disruptions and shockingly low new jobs numbers. So being more Food Independent is not only important, it’s becoming a necessity.
Unfortunately, Biden and Trudeau are about to bring about another squeeze on our imports via the Canadian Border with another Vaccine Mandate on 30,000 cross border truckers who are to be shut down from operating between the two Countries as drivers will no longer be considered “essential” and have to show proof of vaccination to cross the border.
This Blog Post isn’t about Politics. Difficult as it may be to stay out of Politics, we do our best. We can all agree Inflation is bad for people. Fewer goods to purchase means higher prices anyway you look at it. We’ve been warning about inflation on our website for years. Now it’s here, but the Supply Chain Disruptions are a bit of a surprise.
And they are going to get worse because we live in a Global Economy. What happens when borders are closed to Trade? Disaster! How do we deal with disaster? We get more Self Sufficient and less Dependent on the System.
You can learn to Raise Your Own Fish and Grow Your Own Fruits & Veggies with little space, no land or even the sun with Aquaponics. How is that possible? Dedicate a room in your house or commandeer your garage and install an Aquaponics System and Grow Lights. You have a garden that not only produces food but fish to eat, too.
We all just celebrated the beginning of a New Year, which is supposed to bring new opportunities for career advancements and abundance. Given our present State Of The Union, that’s not looking to be the case in our immediate future, but we can ameliorate the possibility of the scariest of all scarcities, FOOD, by growing our own food year around.
EZ-15
Above is a photo of our smallest Family & STEM Food Growing System, the EZ-15. We’ve recently installed it in our soon to be Classroom as a Demonstration System for the myriad of Schools that are ordering it due to it’s size.
But we’ve come to a place where learning to grow food in Schools is not fast enough. Our students won’t be heads of households for years. As a householder, you can start learning to grow food in your own home today. The above EZ-15 System with it’s 16 sq. ft. of Growing Area isn’t going to provide all the vegetables a typical family of 4 requires, but it’s a start.
FGS-44R
Choose the above Family & STEM Food Growing System and you have 44 sq. ft. of Growing Area. Now, that’s a real prolific Food Producer and the Fish Tank can hold about 35 Pan Sized Tilapia.
Our website at http://www.aquaponicsusa.com offers everything you need to know to become an Aquaponics Gardener in 2022. This is the year to become more Food Independent!
“Bok Choy, a cruciferous green vegetable, is a member of the Brassica family. It’s also called pak choi or Chinese cabbage. Unlike most cruciferous vegetables grown in the United States, such as cabbages, Brussels sprouts, and broccoli, this particular variety of Brassica doesn’t form a “head”. Instead, it’s a non-heading cabbage that has thick crunchy white stems and broad green leaves.
Bok Choy is native to China, where it has been eaten for more than 1,500 years. While not as well-known in the United States as other types of cabbages and cruciferous vegetables, it’s also been cultivated in North America for more than 100 years. The vegetable is easy to prepare and is a common ingredient in Asian soups and stir-fries.
Studies show that cruciferous vegetables such as Bok Choy help to reduce your risk of developing cancer. It’s full of cancer-fighting compounds such as vitamins C and E, beta-carotene, folate, and selenium. Vitamin C, vitamin E, and beta-carotene are powerful antioxidants that can help to prevent cell damage from free radicals, which may help to lower your cancer risk. Selenium may help to slow the growth rate of tumors. Bok Choy is also full of fiber, which keeps your digestive system healthy and may help to prevent colon cancer.
Like other dark, leafy greens, Bok Choy is an excellent source of the flavonoid quercetin. Quercetin can help to reduce inflammation in the body, which may help to reduce your risk of developing a variety of chronic health issues such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.” (Quote taken from WebMD.com article entitled “Health Benefits of Bok Choy)
Now that we’ve read about these incredible health benefits of Bok Choy, we need to grow more Bok Chow and drink more Juice! One of these benefits, Quercetin, is of particular importance right now because it is such an effective antioxidant and anti-inflammatory. For these reasons, some Doctors are recommending it as both a treatment and prophylactic in dealing with Covid-19. “Quercetin suppresses the NLRP3 inflammasome by affecting these regulators. Quercetin, as an anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, analgesic and inflammatory compound, is probably a potential treatment for severe inflammation and one of the main life-threatening conditions in patients with COVID-19.” (Quote taken from NIH, National Library of Medicine article entitled “Anti-inflammatory potential of Quercetin in COVID-19 treatment”) Interesting that a vegetable that comes from China, which is where Covid-19 originated, could also be a great help in preventing and curing that new and frightening disease.
We are all familiar with the Stir-Fry Wok method of Chinese Cooking. Bok Choy is a popular Leafy Green in Chinese Stir-Fries. Here’s what I did with some of our Bok Choy for a tasty evening meal. You can see I added Cherry Tomatoes and Peppers all from our Greenhouse to make this delicious and healthy dinner.
But we have way too much Bok Choy to Stir-Fry it all so the next best thing to do is drink it, which means it needs to be turned into Juice. The first step in turning Bok Choy into Juice is to separate the individual leaves from the bundle. Then they have to be washed, and that’s where our great 3-Well Stainless Steel Greenhouse Sink with a separate spray nozzle comes in handy.
Once the Bok Choy is washed, it needs to be put into a Spinner to get the excess water off of it. In the same way you wouldn’t want a wet, soggy salad, you don’t want water in your Bok Choy Juice. Water will dilute your Juice. Now these cruciferous vegetable Juices are pungent, so you are going to dilute it with Apple Juice.
This Greenhouse Spinner is a life saver. As the blow up of the Label states, it’s a “COMMERCIAL SALAD DRYER”, so if you have a large family and make a lot of salads, you may want one of these. Don’t get me wrong. It isn’t automatic. That Lever on the top is a Bicep workout as you grab ahold and turn it for several spins.
As you can see in the above photo, there are two baskets. The White one in the sink holds the washed Bok Choy, and the orange one inserted into the Spinner holds the batch of Veggies that are about to be spun.
Once the Spin job is done, it’s time to make the Juice. Everything up to this point has been preparation for making the Juice. The photo below demonstrates my actual Juice-Making Set Up. It includes the Washed & Spun Bok Choy, the Juicer, the 4-Cup Catch Measuring Cup, the cutting Tray, the Juice receiving Bottles, the Funnel and the Knives.
And now Toto, from Wizard of Oz wants to say something important about WHERE WE ARE.
I repeat, “Dorothy, we are NOT in the Kitchen!” Believe it or not, cooking and juicing is not my favorite thing to do. I’m the Marketing Director here at AUSA, so I like creating interesting Social Media Posts, images, campaigns and writing copy like I was trained to do at the Barton Batton Durstein & Osborn (BBDO) Advertising Agency back in the day when I was a new San Francisco State University graduate. So it follows that the Kitchen is not my favorite place in the house. Therefore, I have devised an ingenious way to avoid it. The Juicing Set Up in the photo above is in the Livingroom.
I have a portable Tray, with a cutting board that fits inside of it, that I take out of the Kitchen into the Livingroom where I can choose to Sit or Stand to do the Juicing of whatever vegetable I’m working on. Now here’s something else that works out great because I’m NOT in the Kitchen. The Juicer is sitting on one of my two Coffee Tables that make an L-shape. So when I have to use the Juicer Pusher to push the Leafy Greens into the blade of the Juicer, I stand up and have the perfect leverage for putting all of my upper body weight into that task. Juicing from the much higher sink in the kitchen does not allow me that kind of leverage and makes juicing that much more difficult. After all, I’m not juicing things that most people juice like oranges, lemons, tomatoes, carrots. I’m juicing cruciferous veggies that have a lot of fiber, and one could say, are rather resistant to turning from a fibrous leaves into liquid. So this location is the perfect place from which to juice, and there’s the added bonus of being able to watch TV at the same time. If we were selling this Juice, I would have to be in an approved and squeaky clean Kitchen, but this Juice is for personal use, and my Livingroom solution works just fine.
And those fibrous Bok Choy Leaves give up their Leafyness to turn into beautiful, very Green Liquid, which has to be diluted because it is so pungent. So now it’s time to add the Apples. I buy Organic Fuji Apples that I cut into quarters and core before popping them into the Juicer.
Compared to juicing Leafy Greens like Bok Choy and Swiss Chard, juicing Apples is a Sit-Down Snap. Pop a couple of the quarters into the Juicer and push them through the blade with ease, so this part of the job goes quickly. You need to mix about 50% Apple Juice with 50% Bok Choy Juice to get to a taste that is delicious. If you want to sweeten up your Juice, just add a few drops of Stevia. Place your funnel into the top of your receiving Bottle and pour in your Juices, Label and Refrigerate for a bright, healthy, green drink!
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Thank You for taking away from this busy Christmas Season to visit our Blog. If you’re anything like me and would rather stay out of the Kitchen, I’m sure you’ve realized by now that there are a lot of other things you can do with a Portable Cutting Board in a Tray that you can take anywhere.
Enjoy the Season of Loving & Giving.
Sustainably,
Grace, Marketing Director of AUSA
Visit Our Other Social Media Sites below. To see Video Tutorials from our Demonstration Greenhouse, be sure to go to our YouTube Channel, last one in the icon List below:
We’ve been wanting to do Aquaponics Classes for quite a while now, and it’s getting closer to happening with the installation of one of our HOME and STEM Teaching & Food Growing Systems, the EZ-15, in the Show Room Section of a 600 sq. ft. Room we are now painting and preparing to be our Classroom.
This EZ-15 is the smallest Food Growing System we sell at this time, but a single-bed System is coming soon and will look a lot like one side of the EZ-15 except its clear acrylic Fish Tank will sit on the Lower Shelf. Desks, a White Board and TV will also be added to complete the Teaching environment, which we expect to turn into an operational Classroom early in 2022.
The Class will feature the basics of Aquaponics using Oliver’s E-Book, Aquaponics 101, which you can download as a pdf from our website’s Home Page and other pages.
Much like the story of coincidentally landing on the San Francisco Volcanic Field of Arizona when we made our move from California, described in a previous Blog post, ending up in a home with a built-in Classroom was rather interesting to say the least. We chose our home because it fit the many requirements we had to run our business out of it including a 70 ft. South-facing covered patio that we could turn into our Greenhouse and a driveway that could accommodate 18 Wheelers that come to pick up our STEM Teaching & Food Growing Systems for Schools, two extra bedrooms we could turn into offices, and a huge garage we could turn into our System Building Work Shop.
But the big surprise happened when we were looking at the many photos we took upon our first visit of what was going to become our home and saw this in the Control Panel. There was a Circuit Breaker with the words “Classroom Lights” written next to it.
Until that moment, it hadn’t dawned on us that we could turn what appeared to be a Den or extra undefined room into a Classroom until we saw that the previous owners had actually had the room built on to the home to be used as a “Classroom”. It even has its own bathroom, a designated heater and air conditioning system and a roomy porch for break time.
But running Classes was going to have to wait quite a while as we still needed to finish the unfinished garage and build the Greenhouse. Yesterday, we started running an 11 Day Series on how we converted the Covered Patio into a Greenhouse on our Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Pinterest Social Media Sites, so if you’re interested in that process, hop on over to one of those locations and follow along for the next 10 days.
Truth be told, our precious Classroom was a Storage Room for far too long while we continued to work on our Greenhouse, our Website, our Social Media sites, our marketing efforts to Schools and amass the thousands of dollars it was going to take to upgrade our electrical system for going off grid (still working on that one) and the purchase of a 9 ft. x 40 ft. Shipping Container.
So we’re still working on getting the Classroom and Class Content squared away, but we can finally see our way forward because all the storage we can’t bear to part with that was turning our Classroom into a storage heap is neatly tucked away in our Hanjin Container that arrived this summer.
Since this photo was taken, we’ve painted it to match our house and started the process of emptying the Classroom and garage of things we don’t feel an immediate need for but want to keep. Just to give you and idea of what’s happening in the Shipping Container world, prices for these handy storage rooms have doubled in one year. This one cost an amazing $7,500 to purchase and get delivered, but we’re not paying a monthly rental at one of those many public storage facilities.
The fact that an entire Shipping Company went bankrupt in 2016 and we are presently experiencing Supply Chain disruptions and shortages of around 80,000 truck drivers making that disruption a long-term one, makes growing your own food fish and veggies more important than ever. It’s time we go into World War II mode when every family had a garden. With Aquaponics you don’t need land or even sunshine. You can grow food in a garage or spare room with LED Grow Lights. So as we say around here, “Good To Grow”.
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That’s our news for now! Check back soon as several things will be happening between now and early 2022. We’ll be installing two more 320 gallon Fish Tanks in an area we have not shared yet called our Fish Room, completing the Classroom and running Classes, doing Aquaponics Tours and introducing our new smallest HOME & STEM Teaching & Food Growing System, the FGS-7 with a single Grow Bed and see through acrylic Fish Tank.
We so appreciate you following our Blog and hope to see you back here soon.
Looking at the Wall of Lettuce we were about to harvest, made us realize there was no way we were going to be able to eat it all by ourselves not even with our Greenhouse Manager, Keil Plotczyk, and our family helping out. We needed to bring in our Neighbors to keep from turning the best salad lettuce ever into juice.
The image above of Butter Lettuce is only half of the Lettuce Wall as the other half is Romaine Lettuce. So the first thing we had to do was invite the Neighbors over to see the Wall of Lettuce before the harvest and ask them to join our CSA. We plan to produce a Wall of Lettuce like this every 6 Weeks right through Winter at 6,000 ft. up in the White Mountains of AZ. In Spring and Summer, the grow out time should be around 4 Weeks. At $3 for the Butter Lettuce and $2 for the Romaine, it wasn’t a hard sell.
Once we had two families eager to join our CSA, all we had to do was spend a few hours harvesting, washing and bagging the Lettuce. We explained to our new CSA Members that we are selling “Living Lettuce” with the Roots attached, which means it will last at least two full weeks in cold storage if it’s carefully bagged.
Careful bagging means gently placing the Lettuce into a Large Zip-Lock or Plastic Shell with some water to keep the Roots fresh and then removing a lot of the air if it’s in a bag so the Lettuce stays as fresh as possible for as long as possible.
Below is a photo of what the lettuce looks like before the Roots are washed and trimmed. The Tray in this Photo above is a reminder that this Lettuce is Aquaganic™ meaning it is grown in an Aquaponics System where Live Fish fertilize the Plants.
Above and below, Oliver Duffy, our System Engineer, holds up two of these massive heads of Butter Lettuce right after they have been pulled out of his proprietary Vertical System we call “Duffy Ducts”, a Vertical Growing System.
The Roots need to be cleaned and trimmed before the Lettuce goes into the Bag or Shell. It’s amazing that Lettuce actually grows these long Roots.
It’s easy to deal with all of these Roots when you grow your Lettuce in the Nutrient Rich Aquaponic Water that runs down the Ducts in Oliver’s Duffy Ducts™ Vertical System. But when you grow Lettuce in a Deep Media Grow Bed with Grow Bed Media like Hydroton, it’s a different story. All those Roots you see that were easily pulled out of a Vertical Duct, get tangled up in the Hydroton and need to be separated out.
Lettuce grows beautifully in Deep Media Grow Beds full of Hydroton (red expanded clay pebbles), but you can’t sell it or store it as “Living Lettuce” with the Roots attached because there is no way to separate the Roots from the Media. This Romaine Lettuce was cut off above the Roots.
Oliver uses Ducts to grow our Lettuce Vertically, but they are harvested from a Horizontal configuration. In the photo below, you can see the Roots growing out of the bottom of one of the Ducts.
Once the Lettuce is bagged, it’s placed in Bins and taken to our dedicated Harvest Refrigerator.
Where it is picked up by our Neighbors who have just joined our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) Program.
We expect this Butter and Romaine Lettuce to stay fresh for a minimum of two weeks in our Refrigerator or our Neighbors’ Refrigerators as the Roots are attached and in water. These heads of Lettuce hardly realize they’ve been harvested.
Thank You for Visiting our Blog. It’s such a joy to share what we’re up to here at Aquaponics USA. Next Post will be about “How To Make Fresh Salsa In Your Food Processor”. And now I’m off to make a salad for dinner.
We’ve evolved to the place where we can produce this much Butter Lettuce on our Vertical Lettuce Wall every 4-5 Weeks. But this is only half of the story. We’re showing you our Proprietary Agri-Tech that we are sharing here as you can only see WHAT we are DOING not HOW we are DOING IT! We’ll be sharing the HOW as soon as our Provisional Patent comes through.
Here’s the other half of our Vertical Lettuce Wall. This is the Romaine side of our Lettuce Wall. We’re looking for outlets for our Lettuce, as it’s plain to see there is no way we can eat all of this Lettuce by ourselves.
So we now need to Name and Package our Aquaponics Lettuce Product, and we created our zerO Label just for that!
This Label says a lot about what we think is important when it comes to growing food. First, we believe the ability to preserve refrigerated food as long as possible is important, and with that in mind, we keep our Lettuce Roots attached to the Lettuce, which is why we can label it “Living Butter Lettuce” because it’s alive and will last up to 3 weeks in cold storage.
Unless you’re growing your Lettuce in a water only System without Grow Bed Media, you cannot grow Living Lettuce with the Roots attached because the roots get tangled up in the Media making it impossible to leave them attached.
The next thing unusual on our Label are the words, “Certified Aquaganic™”. We have an “Aquaganic™” Trademark which we created ourselves complete with a Certification Certificate, which we also created that holds Aquaponic Growers to rules that are more stringent than “Organic” requirements.
Then comes the statement that our produce is “Locally Grown”. The Grow Local Movement is taking the agriculture industry by storm and large chain grocery stores are purchasing and featuring Locally Grown produce more than ever. Any time food miles are reduced, freshness, longevity and health are increased.
And finally, the words, “Shielded from Radiated Rain, Snow & Soil” bring to mind the unpleasant fact that Fukushima happened and is still happening and affecting the entire world. Growing food in protected, covered Greenhouses and Grow Houses is the only way to insure against radiated food.
Above is one of our Living Butter Lettuce Heads jammed into a Shell for sale. I use the word “jammed” here quite literally because our Butter Lettuce is so huge it barely fits in the Shells.
Our Lettuce Product is the easiest to deal with. You plant the seeds, move the Seedlings into Stage 1 Horizontal (a Proprietary Agri-Tech Horizontal Growing Area), move the more mature Seedlings into the Vertical Agri-Tech Growing Area pictured above and wait until it’s time for harvest. At harvest you wash the Lettuce and place it into a Shell for Sale. Wah Lah!
But dealing with the other Veggies like Swiss Chard and Tomatoes is a very different story and way more time consuming to turn the veggies into packaged Products. Let’s start with the Swiss Chard.
Swiss Chard grows like weeds in an Aquaponics System, and it’s very forgiving. By that I mean, you can leave it in the Deep Media or Vertical Growing Area for a long time before harvesting it. While I’m writing Blog and Social Media Posts, conducting Tours or soon Classes in our up and coming Classroom, the Swiss Chard will not spoil. It will patiently wait to be harvested while simply getting bigger.
And it will grow Horizontally like above or Vertically like below.
You can only eat so much Stir-fried Swiss Chard, which is delicious. But we had to come up with another way to process our Chard and created a freshly juiced Swiss Chard & Apple Juice using our Jack LaLanne Juicer.
Below is the processing table set up in front of the TV because it takes a while to do this job. There’s a wooden tray with a cutting board inserted into it. You also need a colander, a bowel, a large measuring cup to receive the juice, the organic apples cut into quarters (need to remove the seeds), the juice bottle and a funnel for pouring the juice into the bottle. It took some trial and error to come up with the ratio of Swiss Chard Juice to Apple Juice, and finally, we added some sweetener, which is about 8 drops of Stevia into every bottle.
Two standard garbage bags full of Swiss Chard and several hours of work results in five bottles of delicious Swiss Chard & Apple Juice like the one pictured below. Now this juice is not like Orange or Apple Juice. You don’t guzzle down an entire glass full of it. A little bit goes a long way and Does The Trick (if you know what we mean).
For our next Juice Product, we’ll be juicing Bok Choy, which also grows like weeds in an Aquaponics System. And, Yes, it’s a time-consuming job to juice down a couple of bags of Bok Choy or Swiss Chard, but the juice is so healthy it’s worth it. The cardinal SIN of any Aquaponics Grower is to grow food and either let it rot on the vine or throw it away because you don’t want to deal with it, or worst of all, actually processing the food and then letting it spoil in the refrigerator.
In our next Blog Post we’ll share the process of turning a massive Tomato harvest into Salsa and Spaghetti Sauce. Oh, YES, we had to learn to use a Pressure Canner.
In 2016 we made one of the best decisions of our lives. We MOVED from California to Arizona where we purchased 10 acres of pristine land (strewn with volcanic rock, see 2 Posts back) that has a Well on one of America’s best aquifers, Coconino, and a perfect house with a covered porch that we turned into our new Greenhouse.
Being the City Slickers that we were, little did we know at the time that the two Road Signs separated by about 50 yards on the road that goes by our house were trying to tell us something important. The first sign read OPEN RANGE and the second one had a Cow sillouette on it.
If you put the two Signs together, you are being told that in this Rural Arizona world, Cattle Ranchers are allowed to range their cattle wherever they please, and if your property is not fenced or your gate is open, that means on your private land. It also means you need to expect to see them on your road so don’t hit one or you’ll pay for a very expensive cow without the benefit of eating the beef.
So it wasn’t long before we awoke to a yard full of cattle complete with calves and bulls all bumping up against our Garage and Greenhouse while heading for the bales of hay we had just arranged to serve as our Archery Arrow catch.
Our property was fenced but we needed to be able to control the gate, so our solution was to get an expensive electric gate closer/opener to work the gate from inside the house or on the Road. That worked great until one of those extreme Arizona Monsoon Storms hit complete with Lightning that struck the mechanism that was controlling the gate and destroyed it.
We fixed the Gate and were free of cow invasions for three years UNTIL TODAY when about 25 beautiful Black Angus took advantage of our gate still being open after an Estes Truck had just picked up one of our STEM Teaching & Food Growing Systems.
So here they are happily munching on the thick green grass that surrounds our Septic Leach Line.
And yes, we ran out with flailing brooms to try to get them to leave, but we might as well have been a couple of flies because they had no fear of us at all beyond our being a bit pesty. The danger was that pristine land I mentioned that is strewn with lava rock is under the grass covered landscape so you can’t see what you’re stepping on, and Oliver and I were lucky we didn’t break one or more of our four legs before realizing getting them off our property was a futile act.
So for the time being, we have a partial herd of happy cows exploring their new home. And we have once again been reminded when a Black Angus herd is practically in our Living Room, that we live on OPEN RANGE LAND.
Oh, and here’s the gang that just discovered the Hay Bales. Now they think they’re our pets. We surrender to being faux Black Angus Ranchers of OPC’s (Other People’s Cows), and bless their gentle Bovine hearts.
Way too many American homes depend on a “Just In Time” food shopping plan that models the American Manufacturing System borrowed from Toyota in the late 1980’s that de-emphasized the need for storing inventory. With the advent of Super Markets and Chain Stores, which exploded onto the American landscape about 100 years ago, shopping for food soon became a weekly or even daily event focused on a short, one-week or even one-day meal plan.
Long gone are Grandma’s gardens and the Victory Gardens of the 2nd World War. When women became major participants in the American work force, gardening became a thing of the past. So did Pantries of old that used to contain all kinds of delicious wonders including home grown and canned vegetables and staples like rice, beans and potatoes. Food has long been considered easily accessible requiring a quick trip down the street to a Grocery Store.
But what if that is no longer the case? American households would have to go into a shocking reassessment of what food security means. Some believe that reassessment is staring us in the face right now; and unfortunately, it’s winter when venturing outside to plant a Survival Garden is not an option for most Americans. So what exactly is going on?
Essentially, what is happening is a confluence of complicated issues that are being exasperated by the Covid Pandemic and our Government’s reaction to it. Early in the Pandemic scare, many American workers stayed home and collected Unemployment or worked from home to avoid contact with others who might be spreading the virus. To avoid public places, on-line shopping boomed and Jeff Bezos amassed an even bigger fortune than ever before as imports of both food and supplies sky rocketed.
Now, just when Unemployment has run out, the Government has caused a mass firing event based on thousands of workers not wanting to get the Vaccine due to religious concerns around Fetal Tissue cells used in the Vaccines or Natural Immunity based on their having already had Covid, both of which the Government is ignoring. The result is there are not enough American Workers to do the jobs necessary to get the Container Ships unloaded in a timely manner, and this is just the first shoe to drop in our “Just In Time” Supply methodology. We are about to see this catastrophic problem spread throughout all areas of Supplies and Services including Airlines (starting with Southwest), Hospitals, Police Forces, the Military, Trucking Industry, Packaging and Shipping Plants and more.
Also, you may not realize this, but those Container Ships sitting off shore in the 10 Largest U.S. Ports, including the Port of Los Angeles, Port of Long Beach, Port of Newark and New York, Port of Savannah, Port of Houston, Port of Seattle, Port of Norfolk, Port of Tacoma, Port of Charleston and Port of Oakland are carrying a lot of food from China that is being imported into the U.S.
As meat prices make a beeline to the moon, Americans will gravitate to eating more FISH, and guess what? The chart below (whcih was created in 2010) shows a whopping 50% of Cod in American grocery stores was imported from China along with 79% of the Tilapia among other imports that include fruits and vegetables, snack foods, spieces and tea. Remember those numbers are from 2010, and only grew larger as time passed.
And you can do it in a spare room, a garage or a greenhouse. Aquaponics is year-around food growing technology that doesn’t depend on Land, Soil or even the Sun because the new LED Grow Lights substitute for sunlight. If there was ever a time to learn Aquaponics and build or buy an Aquaponics Food Growing System, this is it. Go to our AquaponicsUSA website where we offer a wealth of information about this amazing Survival Food Growing technology.
Here’s a really fun story to share about the location of our new Arizona Home and Greenhouse. Most people think of Arizona as dessert, but we’re not in the dessert. Actually, we left the dessert of Yucca Valley, California to come here.
We’re on a Plateau in the White Mountains of Arizona at over 6,000 ft. in elevation on a piece of land that is covered with Juniper Trees. Eight miles East of us is the beautiful little town of Show Low, Arizona, which is only a few hundred feet higher, but that few hundred feet make all the difference as Show Low is covered with Ponderosa Pine Trees. Certain species of trees require certain elevations.
Now I want to point you to the Brown Outcroppings in the picture above. Those are the Big Volcanic Boulders that are popping out of the greenery. There are a lot of these Boulders, but buried in the greenery are thousands of Little Volcanic Rocks that cover our land. It would be difficult to cultivate the land without using some heavy duty earth and rock moving machines. Right now we’re not considering venturing beyond our Greenhouse.
If you would like to get an exterior Tour of our Greenhouse Click over to our AquaponicsUSA YouTube Channel and watch our new Video after a LOOOOOONG Break with Oliver Introducing Our Arizona Greenhouse.
But here is why we named this Post “Aren’t Coincidences Wonderful?” Our land is covered with Volcanic Boulders and Rocks because 1,000 years ago, what is now the Sunset Crater in the image below was an erupting Volcano that sent the Volcanic Boulders and Rocks over to our property in a dramatic explosion of Mother Nature’s tendency to vent. Our Property is actually sitting in a Volcanic Field.
‘There are 3 Seed Trays of Seedlings in the Greenhouse that need daily watering. We don’t need to water our Aquaponics Crops that are in the System because the System takes care of that, but when you’re germinating Seeds you need to water everyday.
Below are 3 Standard Seed Trays that have been growing Seedlings for about 2 weeks. We cut holes in our Humidifying Lids to allow more air flow into the Trays as it’s getting quite hot here in our Arizona Summer.
Below is what I call my Seed Tracker Sheet. As I plant the Seeds into the Seed Plugs, I fill in the Sheet with the Code Letters that tell me which Seeds are located where in the Seed Tray. For example BLC means Butter Lettuce Charles and RR means Romaine Red.
As an aside, here’s a little Cat Diversion. We can always depend on Magic for that.
Oh, and then there’s the Bee. He flew by me on the porch yesterday so now I have a clear glass jar waiting for that to happen again. My plan is to capture him and put him into the Greenhouse. I’ll let you know when that’s been accomplished. Did I just hear a Buzzing Sound?
Thank You for following us. We Write and Post to you and for you.
Our Arizona Greenhouse and our STEM Teaching & Food Growing System Orders have had us so busy we didn’t have time to talk about it. But what is the point if we don’t share what we’re doing with our Followers, so besides Videos, we’ll be sharing more Blog and Social Posts, too.
Check back to see what we’re up to now. You’re going to be amazed. The circled words in this announcement are the most important words of all starting with our “Followers”. Without you, we’re up here at 6,000 ft. in the White Mountains of Arizona without a rudder (not exactly connecting my metaphors), but you know what I mean.
Thank You for Following Us. We’ll be sharing our newest Seedlings later this week. Newly germinated Seedlings are like little Plant Children, adorable and in need of daily care. They can’t wait to show themselves off.
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