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We have a 15x15 foot room in our house. Last week I told you about all the things we grow in that room, and how we do it. We grow wheat grass, and two specialty salad greens -- baby sunflower greens, and a special variety of peas that we grow for 10-12 days, and then use the whole, young shoot. These make phenomenal salads. You can add other things to those greens, and there is no end to the kinds of salads you can create. And the neat thing about it is that it is being done right in our home. This was an existing building, so we are already heating it, and lighting it.
What is very important, is that you have the correct environment to grow these plants. You have to be able to control the temperature, humidity, water, minerals, etc. And it has to be done in a carefully supervised manner. For example, the best temperature, world wide, would be 68 degrees F. So each area has to work to make sure you are holding to, or very near that. You may need heating, or cooling, or both. Here, for water consumption, we use about 17 gallons per day for the production of this food. You can also grow hydroponically using minimal water and care. There really are a lot of choices.
Everything is there, and the energy footprint for everything thing extra we use in this room, is about $50 a month for electricity for the supplemental lighting. Each week, out of this 225 square foot room, on vertical racks, we have 125 pounds of those specialty salad greens, and about 5 gallons, or 600 ounces, of fresh wheat grass juice. With the wheat grass juice, you have to understand that is about the most dense nutrient food on earth. One ounce of wheat grass juice is nutritionally equivalent to over 2 ½ pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables. Remember, this is every week. And we are now only at a 75% capacity. We have more room to grow, but have not had the time to add the new shelving, etc.
So if you multiply that out, 2 ½ pounds per ounce of wheat grass juice, you are using the equivalent of 1200 pounds of produce just out of that one room. That is every week. Now just visualize that if we set up, in the four County area, 100 little grow rooms like this, with the processing kitchen attached, we can teach people what we are doing here. They will learn how to produce some of the most nutrient dense, wild, live, enzyme rich food. It has everything you could possibly need to live--not just survive, but live--and increase your health, and do it all over the County 365 days a year. And that is just one aspect of what we do.
We also grow in cold-frame greenhouses, outdoors, year round. In the winter time, when it is 20-30 degrees below zero up here, we are producing, with minimal input, these hardy salad greens, kale, spinach, chard, beet greens, some lettuces and herbs. All these are things that we integrate with the indoor salad greens, so we are incredibly diverse, and seasonal, because the green house produce changes with the seasons.
We grow carrots, and we time the planting so they are at full maturity as they are going into deep winter. So there are the carrots, fully mature, sitting in these beds in the green house, in a perfect state of preservation, because they are still alive, but dormant. We harvest and eat as we go through the winter.
Right now, we’re getting into the longer days of late winter and early spring, and the young seedlings that we planted all winter long, that were harvested and emptied, are now exploding with growth.
The last aspect is, that we garden outside in the soil, during our summer growing season. So even though we are way up here, in Wisconsin, in the north, I am very confident that with this project we are embarking on, we can show people how to produce at least 75% of their food, year round up here. I don’t know how much food that is brought in from outside, the people up here consume, but I suspect it is a very large number.
So each group can adjust to their various parts of the world by seeing what grows indiginously there. What are your seasons, what is your weather? Then you use the types of crops that grow in those conditions.
But there is one major thing that we most humans need to stop doing. Man is not superior to nature. Man is a part of nature. One of the reasons that this world is in the state that it’s in, is because man has felt that he is superior to nature. That is a Big mistake.
I want to thank all of the Light Workers who are holding the protection for us, so that we are invisible to the Dark side. And I know, that if we were to have someone want to come in, we would be given notice that the person is not to be allowed in. We are doing some incredible work here, and we want to be able to give it freely to the world.
We feel that this is really important stuff going forward, and when the significant changes start to occur, we want to be prepared. And actually, they have already started occurring. More and more we are having so many synchronicities occur, with having people we need to meet suddenly be in our lives. And so many are looking for new ways to do things. I marvel at how the Universe is putting the pieces of this puzzle together for us.
Marietta: It’s really an exciting time we are living in. When we live from the heart, and get out of the way, we can let the Universe guide us to do that which needs to be done. There are many small things that have happened, but they became futile attempts to slow us down, and I don’t feel that it’s going to happen any more.
This is my WEBSITE address: www.growgreens.com
Q. Do you have any suggestions for greenhouses for cold climates?
A. We are using old hoops that we bought used. Old galvanized pipes covered with plastic. Then we adapted an idea from Elliot Clark in Main. I put a second layer of greenhouse plastic inside, suspended from the top part of the hoops, so it leaves an air-space between the two layers. You can do it with a fan to create an air bubble, but it takes more electricity to run that. I decided not to do it. Instead, I have literally created a second green-house within the outer shell, which gives you extra protection.
Then, when it’s really, really cold, what we do on our growing beds, is to use small hoops. which are designed for using what is called floating low cover. It’s insulated and sort of like a napkin made of a kleenex type of material, which is spun-bound polypropylene. It allows light and air and water to penetrate it. Then we just use these little wire hoops which we space down the bed and put this floating low cover over the top.
So literally, we have 3 layers of protection for those plants, and your cold-hardy greens, like kale, spinach, chard and beet greens, these types of things, with that 3 layers of protection, it’s not so much the cold that could damage them, it’s because of drying out from the cold. When plants aren’t properly mineralized, the cell wall bursts, and the water that is in the cell then leaks out, and that is what actually kills the plant, because it damages the tissue. So with those 3 layers of protection, and optimally mineralized, we do very well.
Let me tell you a story -- this was hard for me to believe it would work, but I experienced it. Two years ago we had a row of ever-bearing strawberries in our garden, and they bear in the spring and then again in the fall. They are a special variety, and it is the light level of the daytime that triggers the flowering and fruiting.
So here it was, mid-October, and we hadn’t had a killing frost yet, and these strawberries were in full blossom and already had fruit. We were really looking forward to having these strawberries in October. Our weather was holding very well, and we had already started to pick strawberries. Then came a storm system from Canada and we went from 50 to 20 degrees F in 24 hours. So I covered this row of strawberries with the floating low cover, and prayed.
There were 3 successive nights, that the actual air temperature was below 20 degrees, and we were having 20-30 mph winds pushing that cold in. The wind chills were probably around zero or below. I kid you not – after that weather was over and had mostly stabilized again, I went out and uncovered those strawberries, and not one blossom was damaged, not one berry was frozen.
That is what feeding all the minerals does to plants. It’s amazing. I’ve seen crops of the hardy greens totally frosted, frozen solid in the green houses in the winter, and as soon as it warms up, they thaw out, and they start growing again. It is absolutely amazing. In the past, I’ve had just one tiny little green house furnace running on LP, and all I do is try to keep the temperature in there around 30 degrees at the coldest. I’m not trying to heat, I’m just trying to keep it from getting real cold in there.
This spring we are relocating our greenhouses, because I found out what a heavy snow-load does to greenhouses which aren’t properly located by the buildings. I had one of them caved in totally, and one partially. So I’m taking them down and will re-install them, re-erect them, and I’m purchasing an Amish-built wood stove that has a water jacket so I can do radiant heat. I will circulate water along the stove and will have two lines buried right in the soil in the greenhouse. I’ll heat with wood, which we have lots of here, and I’m really looking forward to use this new way of growing in the wintertime in these greenhouses.
You don’t try to grow tomatoes, you grow the crops that are the most adaptable, and the most resilient to the cold temperatures and lower light levels, and that is your cold-hardy greens. The other thing is the timing of your planting. You want to plant at the proper time, mid- to late summer, so the crops you are planting are at full maturity, which at our latitude is mid to late October.
Then what happens, is that as the temperatures and light levels drop, those crops are sitting there, fully mature, and in a perfect state of preservation, because they are still alive, in a semi-state of dormancy, and they are there for you just to harvest and eat. So that can take you through until –the hardest time of the year here, is about Christmas until mid-February.
By then, you have exhausted most of what you had at maturity, and you are getting very little re-growth. It is the darkest time of the year, with very little light, and very little heat. At that time of the year in Wisconsin, there is very little sunshine, as well. That is the time when we are not at a loss, because we have our indoor growing, and we’re feasting on this awesome food, and augmenting it with the little bit we can get out of the cold-frame greenhouses.
I truly feel that this radiant heat concept with circulating the warm water in the soil bed, can even augment our ability to grow during the deepest part of winter, because it is the soil temperature that is critical, not necessarily the air temperature. If the roots and the soil are warm, the plant roots are able to extract the nutrients and moisture that they need, out of the soil, to provide plant growth. So I am hypothesizing that we will be able to grow incredibly well this coming winter, even through the hardest time.
Marietta: We have also found out that with the Planetary Water Unit, the water is ordered, and with it being ordered, it doesn’t expand, so the cells don’t rupture, and then the plants do not die. And we had a rose that bloomed in the snow, and we even had pansies bloom where we were using this Planetary Unit water.
Q Are you greenhouse plant bed raised?
A. I did have raised beds, with the sides made of concrete blocks, because the concrete will hold heat, and then release that at night. I liked that concept, but as I worked with it, there were drawbacks in caring for the plants because there was so much stooping and leaning over, which is hard on the body. So when I move the greenhouses, I have a new design. I’m going to completely renovate and re-mediate a new area of soil, and then bring in some really good, high organic matter of old bog soil which is a rich, black, loose soil. Then I’ll add all the bio-dynamic preparations, and our compost, and all the microbes, and we are literally going to create our perfect soil.
I’m just going to fill that on top of the existing soil, to about 6 to 8 inches of new, solid soil. Then we will ergonomically design our pathways, so the caring of the plants will be easy on the body, and without too much bending and stooping. We will dig out pathways, and I’m envisioning lining them with wood chips, or pavers of some kind. So we will, in a sense, be creating semi-raised beds because we will be digging out the pathways, so they will be recessed. I want them to be easily known, and once we have established the areas where we will be growing things, we will never walk on those areas which will prevent compaction.
The radiant heat tubes will be buried in the new soil we are putting on the original soil. I’m thinking they should be down about 6 to 8 inches from the top of the new soil, and probably will be laid on top of the existing soil, once it has been re-mediated, tilled and loosened so the two soils can merge. Then we will put the soil we are manufacturing over the top of the radiant heat tubes. That is the vision I have for it right now.
Marietta: One of the things that Robert was considering doing, was lining the outside with jugs that you paint black. Then you fill the jugs with water. Some people who have done this found that it does help to keep the greenhouse warmer.
This man in NY, who has brought forth a vortex brewer, you should have him on this call. I have one of 150 gallon units here now, and I’m planning on installing that right in the center of the greenhouse. It creates and pulls in so much etheric energy. When you ground that unit into the earth, it utilizes that energy, so the plants can feed off of it as well.
That can be like a heat sink. The nutrient solution that he (Steve) makes, which we formulated together, has to be super cold before it will freeze, due to the very high mineral salt content. So what I am thinking, is that I might want to put a heavy solution of that nutrient in the vortex brewer, and then be constantly vortexing it. It will hold heat, and then dissipate it as the green house cools.
So I have a lot of interesting ideas, of things that I want to take full advantage of, for energy that exists in nature. Then I can utilize that energy, rather than paying for LP gas.
We are going to look into spheres instead of the hoops, and a circular ceiling window for lighting. I have also talked to people about certain Sacred Geometry formulas one can use, and we do have some sound vibration. There is so much out there yet to study, and we hope to be able to follow through on many of those things as we move ahead.
Marietta and I are about to start using different systems of radionics in the indoor system of growing. WE feel that this method is very important for the future. Because it may become harder and harder to grow outdoors, if we can continue to increase our indoor growth for food, it will help us as we move forward into the future.
Tara: I have also found out that if you use a spherical shape, the heating and cooling becomes much more economical, so it might be better to go that route for a long term business. I have also learned of a lady in India who is a scientist and she had grown seeds that do not require a lot of water, yet are very nutrient dense. Vandana Shiva is her name. Try googling the name.
Some very timely books on this subject are the Anastasia Series put out by The Ringing Cedars of Russia. They have been translated into English, and are well worth the time, money and effort.
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