Walk into the Seminole County Jail. Wait for clearance, then go to the hallway to your left. Pass through one door out into the open air. Through one more door right in front, and you’ve found the Seminole County Jail’s secret garden.
It’s a lush greenhouse, filled with enough vibrant green hydroponic lettuce to feed salad to upwards of 1,000 prisoners once a month. Then there are the tomatoes, also hydroponically grown, which feed the staff every eight months. And there are fish too, thousands of Tilapia, which feed the staff, although they’re not hydroponic.

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Photo credit: SeminoleChronicle.com

It was a combination of things that drew Grace Dinsdale back to the family farm 28 years ago, where she transformed a struggling dairy into a profitable plant nursery. One was the simple joy of growing things. Another was a complex sense of stewardship.
Both are at play in the project rising from the ground at her 130-acre Blooming Nursery. There, workers are installing an array of towering solar panels that will stretch nearly the length of the nursery’s 700-foot driveway. Nearby, a crew is applying insulating foam to a covered concrete tank that will hold 300,000 gallons of water.
When finished, it will be Oregon’s largest application of solar thermal energy. Instead of producing electricity, the solar panels will heat the tank water, which will circulate underground and warm the plants growing in a 54,000-square-foot greenhouse.

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Photo credit: Doug Beghtel/The Oregonian

I suppose I am a bit of a traditionalist at heart and if challenged would defend glass as the best material for greenhouses, cold frames and the like. Any ”working’’ garden with a brimming and beautiful greenhouse and some cold frames complete with clusters of plants in various stages of training or development gets me far more excited than any shop window in Hatton Garden. Now it seems I have been left behind. Many gardeners in Europe (especially Germany) are using polycarbonate rather than glass, while over here we remain largely unaware of its many virtues.
With the massive trend in ”grow your own’’, many more gardeners are finding that if you have some permanently covered space, you can raise plants in an environment where they can establish to a stage where they are less vulnerable to the vagaries of weather or peckish pests. The payback period for a traditional pukka greenhouse would, if assessed in purely financial terms, probably make it cheaper to have your vegetables shipped from Fortnum’s weekly. But off-the-peg polycarbonate greenhouses start at less than $330, have improved considerably in appearance and can easily be assembled by two people in under a day.

To read the complete story, click HERE.
Photo credit: Telegraph.co.uk

Paul Hudak watches the plow chisel through the sod of the baseball field. Hudak grimaces each time the plow hooks clank. Has the driver punctured something hidden under the soil — maybe pipes?
Hudak’s farmer friends have told him he is crazy to try to convert the field at Terra Nova High School into a productive student farm. And his untested idea of a student-run business selling produce to subscribers won’t fly, either.
The new teacher will need to win over those students, quickly. He will peddle seeds, talk about soil pH levels and try to muster interest.

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Photo credit: Faith Cathcart/The Oregonian

Ben Walmer, principal in the Somerville, N.J. based architectural firm, LiMN Architects, recently returned from rural Nigeria where he donated eight days of his time and professional expertise to help children and families step out of poverty and into a world of hope, the company announced in a recent press release.
The planned sustainable farm/school that will educate Nigerian farmers in sustainable aquaculture and aquaponic practices. The goal of the group was to provide the knowledge and infrastructure necessary for local farmers to raise high protein, all-natural fish and vegetables.
The project must be designed to be electrically self-sufficient because existing Nigerian infrastructure does not supply consistent power to the area … We have to create a system that will use fish, chicken, human, and other organic waste to generate power in prior to being utilized for the fertilization of fruit, vegetable, and fish feed crops.

To read the complete article, click HERE. Photo credit: nj.com

Students from Rio Rico High School were shoveling gravel into wheelbarrows recently while others raked the piles smooth on the floor of two new greenhouses on the east side of Interstate 19, just south of the Peak Canyon exit. Sweaty brows didn’t distinguish their smiles as visions of the tomatoes and hanging baskets filled with flowers they would soon be growing filled their heads.
“It’s good exercise for the muscles,” said Leslie Carranza, a 4th year student in the Santa Cruz Valley Unified School District No. 35 Agriculture Science Program. She is also secretary of the Future Farmers or America (FFA) club at the high school. She would rather be riding horses but loves anything to do with agriculture, she said.

To read the whole story on the greenhouse at Rio Rico H.S., click HERE.

Photo credit: NogalesInternational.com

Can you imagine being able to produce enough water in the Sahara to grow crops there? Can you imagine harnessing sufficient quantities of solar power to supply electricity to cities in Africa and cities in Europe? Can you imagine producing a sustainable bio-fuel that doesn’t impact on world food supplies? Charlie Paton, Michael Pawlyn and Bill Watts can and what’s more they can imagine all these happening in the same place at the same time.
This trio of visionaries launched the Sahara Forest Project: their proposal to combine two innovative technologies, Concentrated Solar Power and Seawater Greenhouses, to produce renewable energy, water and food in an area of desert known to be one of the hottest places on earth.
To read the complete article, click HERE. For an update on the project, click HERE.

Graphic credit: Treehugger.com

David Garinger knew something was awry as soon as he arrived at Yale’s Marsh Botanic Garden on the morning of Sept. 24.
The large, humid Greenhouse No. 2, which is part of the complex located near the Yale Divinity School, houses a panoply of different plants, some hanging from the roof, others protruding into the aisles. Immediately upon entering, Garinger — the curator of greenhouse plant collections at the Garden — noticed a large trash can was missing, and the trash inside it had been dumped on the floor. Confused, Garinger looked around and noticed the empty spaces usually occupied by 10 valuable desert cacti.
“They’re my kids,” Garinger said of the stolen plants. He said he felt “violated.”

Click HERE to read the complete story. Photo credit: Sean Fraga/Yale Daily News