Be Awesome and carry on!
Have you ever wondered where chocolate comes from? Â Have you ever wanted to make your own chocolate? Â From the bean? Â Here at Tribe Awesome, we wondered why we had never done it before. Â So, check out our new project on making your own chocolate!
Enjoy the fulfilling experience of grinding and roasting cacao beans to make chocolate!
YUM!
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   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!
 
 
 
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. Â 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/
Check out our new project, Awesome Spiral Book, in the Project section.  The project is awesome for presenting ideas in a stylish and simple format!
Have fun!
Enjoy!
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Calling all makers! Â Workshop Weekend is October 12-13! Â This is a great event for those of us who want to learn or brush up on making skills. Â There are classes from the building of sugar skulls to how to use Photoshop, and of course an Awesome Aeroponics Class.
Join us, Tribe Awesome, from 10am-12pm on October 13th (this Sunday) to build and learn how to care for an aeroponic garden. Â Sign up here right away, registration is closing soon.
Use the coupon code AEROPONICS0813 to get $10 off the registration fee.
We look forward to seeing you!
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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!
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!
Yesterday, we harvested a bunch of aeroponic beans. Â They looked and tasted great!If you are looking for another set of plants to put in your aeroponic garden, beans have worked very well for us.
We are growing bush beans, not pole beans. Â Pole beans grow like vines and would spread on the ground in the Awesome Aeroponics system, which is not ideal.
Happy bean growing!
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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. Â 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. Â We put in 15mL of the calcium.
