In these crazy times, it's especially important that we look out for one another. We'd like to thank Feed My People for fighting food insecurity in our community.If you're able to, please consider donating something to your local food bank to support families who are in need. After all, we're all in this together!
]]>Here's an excerpt...
...Other enterprises are focusing on more small-scale solutions: bringing vertical farming straight to the consumer’s home. Foody Inc., a company located three hours east of Seattle, manufactures hydroponic stacking plant towers that are made for residential and retail use. Company founder Greg Hendrick explains that Foody Towers enable farmers to grow nearly 40 plants (primarily herbs) in a little over two feet of ground space. Synchronized motors slowly rotate the stacked pots, allowing each plant a turn in sunlight, while a magnetic pump drives oxygenated water with liquid nutrients to the topmost pot, obviating the need for soil or fertilizer.
“Our chief concern,” Hendrick explains, “is making food accessible in a way that is healthy, environmentally friendly and financially conservative.”
Indeed, Foody’s vertical gardening towers are working to do just that—in Microsoft’s corporate offices, at a café installation at The Hague, throughout kitchens and school lunchrooms across the Pacific Northwest. The Foody 12 Hydroponic tower retails for $329.00, making it an affordable option for households that don’t have access to a backyard.
]]>]]>
There is no doubt that we will continue to need solutions to our modern agricultural dilemmas. Companies, like Foody, who create effective, yet simple, horticultural solutions are sure to become household names. People desire access to fresh, sustainably grown produce and there is no better, or easier, way to obtain food security than by growing your own food using a Foody Vertical Garden.
]]>The Foody Tower is a very clever design and a great solution for people who have absolutely no space for growing food. It’s made of a heavy-duty plastic that’s BPA free, which means no concerns about adding toxins to your plants.
The footprint for this stackable planter is just a little over 2 feet, which means it can fit in places where a standard pot would fit, but provide substantially more yield as you stack the parts on top of each other.
Another great feature of the Foody is its portability. If you live in a climate that has cold winters, you can easily move it indoors for the winter, then back outside when it warms up—letting you grow your own produce year round.
The Foody comes in two basic configurations, one for manual watering and the other with an automatic water recycling system. Here at The Dirt, we decided to try the manual system—and discovered there was a wealth of compost tea that accumulates in the base. Our resident engineer came up with a simple extraction method—a turkey baster—that works like a charm and lets us recycle the water both back into the Foody and to other plants in our garden.
The Foody also provides an easy way to grow a variety of vegetables, fruits and herbs. Each planting container has at least eight planter openings, and we’ve put in a variety of plants ranging from chives and carrots to beans.
While the Foody Tower can be used for hydroponic gardening, we found it works really well with soil and compost, just like any other gardening container.
RATING: We love it! We give it five leaves!
]]>