THE PLANTING AND GROWING POWER TOOL
Growing with aeroponics saves water, fertilizer, labor and time. All of these are precious commodities, but even more so for the homesteader, who has so much work to do just to keep everything going, and often, not a lot of money to do it with. To add an automated “power tool” like the Eden Grow Tower to your operation can bring so much value. The aeroponics technique used in the Grow Towers is super-efficient with water and nutrient solution, so you can grow more with less – less money, less time, and less work. No soil also means less risk with soil-borne diseases, nematodes, and insect larvae that can eat your plant roots. Not to mention, it’s SO MUCH CLEANER! And the growth rate in a Grow Tower is greatly accelerated simply because the plants are getting all the nutrients and oxygen they want, without having to drive a root system through soil searching for them. All the energy in the plant goes into growing fruit and edible leafy greens and herbs.
The Eden Grow Tower provides everyone with the ability to grow fresh produce in your home, garage, basement, workshop, or greenhouse 365 days a year. Its automated operation takes a lot of the work and worry out of growing your own food. For the homesteader, who is growing outdoors in a more conventional fashion when the seasons permit, there are unique benefits that the Grow Towers deliver.
Purchase one of our grow towers and put a produce section in your home today.
TOP FIVE BENEFITS SPECIFICALLY FOR HOMESTEADERS
1. Automation
Did we mention the Grow Towers are automated? With the Eden Grow App to power the entire process, you won't need to spend hardly any time at all tending to the Grow Towers. OK, once a week, you should top off the water. Every couple of days, you want to check the EC (electrical conductivity - a measure of the nutrient solution concentration) and pH, just to make sure everything is in the normal range. But otherwise, you can go on and take care of other things, like repairing the fence, cleaning out the chicken coop, building a new compost pile, or planning your next big project. Meanwhile, the Grow Tower is just doing its thing, running in the background and getting your next meal ready. Just what you need - a "force multiplier", fully automated, with virtually no time required, making the most nutritionally potent and delicious, flavorful food for you and your family.
2. Year-round Food Supply
When you are trying to be as self-sufficient as possible, your food supply takes on a whole new level of priority. Depending on the climate where you are, growing outdoors may just not be an option in winter. And while canning, freezing, dehydrating and pickling are all great ways to preserve the excess food that you produce during the growing season, having fresh fruits and vegetables in the depths of winter is just good for the soul. Likewise, in warmer months, when lettuce, broccoli, cilantro, and many other plants tend to bolt outdoors because of the heat, you can keep them cool indoors. You can keep the growing going all year round and provide a continuous harvest for yourself and your family.
3. Add high productivity, fast growing cash crops
Growing strawberries, specialty or exotic varieties of leafy greens, or a wide variety of fresh herbs in a grow tower can provide a great cash crop, especially if you can make those products available all year long. The accelerated growth rate will reduce your “time to market” and allow you to recover your investment quickly, and your ability to deliver a reliable, year-round supply will make your customers love you, especially if they are using your supply to run their own businesses like in-town produce markets or restaurants.
4. Propagating from cuttings
Many homesteaders need to be frugal and propagating new plants from cuttings is a great way to increase your orchard, woody herbs, fruiting vines, and even ornamental shrubs for almost nothing. Aeroponics, the method used in the Eden Grow Towers, is especially good at cloning new plants from cuttings. And the Triple Deck gives you space to start 96 cuttings at once! You can use a few spots on your Grow Deck to propagate a new plants while starting other plants from seed in the same deck.
5. Growing potatoes for seed and eating
Starting seed potatoes with the Grow Tower is very effective. Aeroponics is used in commercial seed-starting operations for producing up to 10 times the number of potatoes compared to conventional methods. While you won’t be growing a baking-size potato in a Grow Tower, you can produce hundreds of “new” potatoes – great with butter and sour cream and also perfect for planting. While our Potato Deck is still in development, early tower prototypes are being used right now to grow seed potatoes successfully. Potatoes can carry diseases, and because you are using a potato to grow more potatoes, the diseases can easily spread. But starting the small seed potatoes in a Grow Tower is much more sanitary, because there is no soil that can harbor diseases, and much cleaner when it comes time to harvest – there is no dirt to deal with at all. Just clip the potatoes from the root stems and you’re done (a great time-savings advantage, too). Most store-bought seed potatoes are required to be inoculated against disease, but you can avoid this chemical treatment altogether, making for a totally organic process.
Bonus! So Much Variety!
With space for up to 32 different plants on a single grow deck, and with up to 3 decks on the Triple Deck configuration, the Eden Grow Tower provides a great way to cultivate a lot of different things – and do it year-round. Growing so many different things, in a fully automated system, allows you to focus on the larger crops you want to grow outdoors, while giving you so much more variety and flavor to add to your diet and share with your family and neighbors. When you’re trying to grow everything your family needs, having one integrated, automated system (or multiple systems) will provide you a low maintenance growing operation that will yield so many different kinds of fresh produce. The possibilities are endless.
As a homesteader, or someone desiring to one day become a homesteader, there are many moving parts to figure out. But one great time-saving investment you should consider, to give your family a continuous supply of clean, fresh, nutritious and flavorful produce, while freeing you up to focus on the 100 other things that need your attention, is an Eden Grow Tower. For more information, check out our towers here.
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Blaine Comeaux is Vice President of Business Development for Eden Grow Systems. In this role, Blaine oversees all aspects of Eden’s sales and marketing efforts. Blaine believes the food we eat affects every part of our lives and wants to create ways to ensure everyone has access to healthy food choices. Blaine worked in the energy industry for over 30 years where he promoted high tech solutions to customers around the world. He has a B.S. in Petroleum Engineering, is an avid suburban gardener, and now, in his Career 2.0, is directing his technical skills and experience in market research and product promotion to his true passion of automating the growing process.