Research – Tribe Awesome

Aeroponics Outreach – MIT City Farm

Elise Meike — Sat, 09 Aug 2014 18:18:13 +0000

In our on going search for awesome projects and leading technologies in aeroponics, we found MIT City Farm. Their goal is to bring aeroponics to the forefront of agriculture and change the way food is grown on a large scale. Caleb Harper, the Founder and Lead Researcher showed us the systems they use and the technology they are creating to improve and analyze it. They also believe that open source is the most efficient and most effective way to achieve the optimal solution for farming. Tribe Awesome agrees. One system uses a technique called shallow water culture, which immerses the roots in a thin film of flowing water. This system allows for a high vertical density structure.

Their other system is a high pressure aeroponics setup. They use high pressure pumps and sprayers to atomize the water and nutrients. This is like fogponics (what we do) as the water is suspended in air. However, the droplet size is slightly larger in high pressure aeroponics compared to fogponics. We are not sure if this makes a difference, and are looking to do an experiment on droplet size.

Thank You MIT City Farm!

Aeroponics Outreach – Chapala Gardens

Briana Das — Sun, 27 Jul 2014 18:03:47 +0000

To meet other people working in the world of aeroponics, we looked at other systems that being used on a commercial scale. During our search, we came across Chapala Gardens, a group of green thumb innovators committed to creating a healthier community through gardening.

Recently, we visited their headquarters in Santa Barbara. Jake, one of the three partners gave us a tour and showed us the systems they sell.

Chapala Garden’s rooftop tower garden in Santa Barbara.

Their style of aeroponics with the Tower Garden^® is different than the fogponic method we use. The tower is around eight feet tall, with a wide base that serves as the reservoir. A pump in the reservoir pushes water to the top of the tower where it drips down on the suspended roots.

This is the reservoir:

This is an empty set of tower blocks:

This is a different view of an empty tower block that shows the holes that water drips through:

Like our systems, the Tower Garden requires a seedling. At Chapala Gardens, they grow and sell their own seedlings (pictured below).

To learn more about Chapala Gardens, visit their website at http://www.chapalagardens.com/

To learn more about the Tower Garden, visit the Juice Plus+ website at https://california.towergarden.com/

Aeroponic Tomatoes- Update

Elise Meike — Sun, 01 Sep 2013 20:26:23 +0000

We have an aeroponic tomato plant update! We have been harvesting our very own aeroponic tomatoes. They taste really good! Maintenance of the tomato plants has been manageable. We have had to keep their water levels up and making sure they have had enough nutrients. While we were on a trip for 10 days, we encountered a small problem. The water in our system was replenished every few days but we decided to have our plant caretakers not add new nutrients while we were away. This caused a lack of calcium and resulted in blossom end rot in a couple of the tomatoes that were growing at the time. The tomatoes still tasted good, but there was a part that had to be cut off. After replenishing the nutrients, the new tomatoes looked much better.

Happy tomato eating!

These are the new tomatoes… Yum!

Growing Aeroponic Tomatoes

Elise Meike — Sat, 20 Jul 2013 15:55:42 +0000

We are growing tomato plants in our aeroponic systems, and they are doing awesome! However, we have discovered that the plants use a lot of water and nutrients. We end up replacing the water and nutrients about once a week. When we first planted the tomatoes, we used the normal set of nutrients (25mL FloraGrow, 15mL FloraMicro, and 5mL of FloraBloom). After reaching three feet, we changed the “recipe” for the nutrients to 15mL of FloraGrow, 25mL of FloraMicro, and 15mL of FloraBloom in 2.5 gallons. We changed this to slow the leaf growth and focus on the flowers and fruiting.
All this work has paid off, the tomato plants are growing really tall! We harvested some tomatoes a couple days ago and they tasted really good. They did not seem to have a problem with Blossom End Rot as we have seen in the squash.

Below is a picture of tomatoes on the plant.

Here are the plants, trying to touch the sky!

Calcium Deficiencies in Squash

Elise Meike — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 03:34:44 +0000

This post is for those of you who are growing squash in your aeroponic garden (or are planning to, or just want to read it :D).

Our squash plants are growing like crazy! Unfortunately, this means that the plant used up a lot of the nutrients in the water. The ends of the blossoms on our zucchini plant were colored darkly. We realized that the plant had Blossom End Rot. That basically means that the plant doesn’t have enough calcium. We added extra calcium in that bucket, and so far the zucchini have been doing better.

So, back to you. If your squash plants look like they have Blossom End Rot, you might want adding some calcium.

Below is a picture of the calcium we use. We put in 15mL of the calcium.

Aquaponics Outreach – Visit with Rick Frey

Erik Meike — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 12:20:14 +0000

If you do not already know, aquaponics is a form of hydroponics that aims to be self-sufficient by using fish as a source of nutrients. In essence, the fish grow in a reservoir and create waste, mostly in the form of ammonia. Microbes then turn the ammonia into nitrites, and then nitrates, food for the plants. This is excellent for leafy greens which want large amounts of nitrogen.

Plants and Fish Tank in an Aquaponic System

To do some research, we toured an aquaponics system. Rick Frey showed and explained his system to us. It was awesome!

Rick custom-built an aquaponic garden inside a greenhouse. He is growing Tilapia and Goldfish to produce nutrients for his plants. He explained how the nutrition from the fish is not complete, making it more difficult to grow plants like tomatoes. Tomatoes want to have lots of other micronutrients that the fish don’t provide enough of. For plants like lettuce, that want to grow green and leafy, aquaponics works very well. So, depending on the plant, Rick believes that he would would need to supplement the nutrients produced by the fish.

Inside of Rick’s greenhouse

You can see some of the other pictures we took in the gallery below: