Hot Weather Care

SunThe weather is getting warmer! That means you need to be more aware of how your aeroponic system.

Heat can hurt your plants.  If your plant looks wilty or if it is a warm day, you may want to move your plant into the shade.
To give your plants a treat, put a couple ice cubes in the root chamber. The plants will appreciate it!
The fogger in the system adds heat to the root chamber. The roots that are normally in cold ground are receiving extra heat. This makes your plants extra susceptible to hot weather.

Good luck!

Featured Awesomeness

Our featured awesomeness of the month is Raul Lozano from Valley Verde.  He works hard every day to bring low maintenance home gardens to low income families. He believes that in order to have a healthy life, you have to start with healthy food. For every garden someone purchases, he brings one to a less privileged family in the Santa Clara community. Please check out the awesome work he’s doing at http://valleyverde.org/.

TribeAandRaul

LeonaHoldingBucket

Camp Awesome

During the week of June 17 to June 21, we held an Awesome camp for the four members.  Every day we worked hard to bring the inner awesomeness out of everyone. We accomplished many tasks, including starting the process of creating a non-profit organization, setting up a bank account, preparing for workshop weekend, and creating this wonderful website. We also visited an aquaponics enthusiast and teacher, Rick Frey, of Oakland. He showed us his extensive aquaponics system and explained how it works.

Aquaponics Outreach – Visit with Rick Frey

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

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 greenhouse

Inside of Rick’s greenhouse

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