My Grandma Laura (bless her heart) was an amazing gardener. She could grow tomatoes on solid concrete, but as a teenager I teased her about her love of gardening and I regret it to this day. Rarely would I help her unless forced to by my parents and that never proved worthwhile for them or a fun experience for me.
She always had things growing every time of the year all over her house, inside and out. There was hardly a square inch of dirt that didn’t have something growing in it. Oh how I wish I knew what her secrets were now!
A few years ago out of a desire to become a full-fledged prepper I started taking on gardening and I even attended some classes at our local garden nursery and learned from some local experts. I managed to have some success as I grew hundreds of pounds of tomatoes (side note: I hate tomatoes unless they are in some sort of sauce, salsa or ketchup) and a variety of other things.
These pictures show some of that early success. I even tried creating some greenhouses to extend the growing season here in our high desert climate, which is actually quite short and very brutal to plants trying to grow outside the few months time frame that gardening is allowed here by mother nature.
Having moved to a new house 2 years ago I no longer had the available ground space to be able to produce that size of garden anymore. I did try two greenhouse type experiments that had limited success. Buying one of those prefab greenhouses from Lowe’s did not yield the results I wanted as the only thing it did was keep off the frost, but it was no warmer than the outside.
When the sliding glass doors were replaced on the back of the house, I kept those doors and propped them up against the south facing wall of the house. I was surprised at how hot it got inside of it even on very cold days! I managed to grow some things all year long, even though it wasn’t a lot, even green peppers. The problem with both of these was the watering as it took quite a bit of time as I did not have an automatic solution. Every time I did some watering I had to disconnect everything afterwards so it wouldn’t all freeze and break the pipes. This was a 20-30 minute per day process and that proved detrimental to the success of the garden and what was grown.
I then tried some indoor methods like getting a rack from a garage sale with some sunlit lamps at the hardware store. As you can see from these photos there are some salad-like items growing but they aren’t doing very well. I opened a new bag of miracle grow (the one on the bottom of the rack) and tried to plant some more lettuce but after a month it was only 2 inches tall and I gave up and put it outside.
So now I was in a quandary: 1-How do I grow the amount of food I want to grow to provide for my family indoors when I obviously don’t know what I’m doing? 2-How I find something that will automatically water, fertilize and light the plants so that I don’t spend so much time on it?
I found a solution with the Tower Gardens available from Juice Plus. Here’s a time lapse video from their website of the tower garden in action over a four-week period. As you can see, it’s a very impressive solution.
I had a taste of some of the vegetables that were produced on this system and they’re absolutely delicious. If you want to buy one, it will cost about $45 per month for the basic system and $80 a month for the top-of-the-line system including all the lights and everything. I figured that a few dollars a week was worth it to have fresh vegetables whenever I wanted that were free from any kind of pesticide or grown in a foreign country. I am now a lot closer to the goal of being a total prepper.
My next purchase is a small solar power generator so that they will be fully self-sufficient and not dependent upon our local power company to provide electricity needed to run the lights and the pumps.
I will update this post with photos of the entire process over the next couple of months including the assembly of it, getting seedlings started, and showing its growth so that you may judge and gauge it for yourself. Of course, if you Purchase A Tower Garden Here I will make a small commission, but that is not my purpose for sharing this. I have tried everything over the last couple of years (as you can see) and I’m just trying to do something to provide for my family.
kellywsmith1 