Spring Survival: Organic Gardening

Are you a locavore at heart but  you’re just too busy to get to the Farmers’ Market? If you need to have a farmer’s market in your own backyard to earn your green stripes, the Tower Garden® promises an easy, eco-friendly, way to grow fruits and vegetables even if you have a brown thumb.

The Tower Garden® is a vertical garden system, ideal for patios or decks, that uses an advanced form of hydroponics, called aeroponics, to grow “more colorful, better tasting, better smelling, and nutritious fruits and vegetables”. Its closed system technology continually recycles water and nutrients pumping the mixture from a 20-gallon reservoir at its base to the top of your garden. From there, the nutrient solution drips through the central “tower” distributing water and nutrients to the plants’ roots as it travels back down to the reservoir.

As organic as you wanna be

Rooftop farming in New Orleans

The nutrient solution, Tower Tonic®, is an all-natural ph-balanced mineral blend designed to promote rapid growth. If you grow your garden from seeds, to avoid pesticides that may be present in store bought seedlings, you are well on your way to organic gardening.

And if you want to avoid chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides throughout the growing process, the aeroponic system makes it easier to stay organic. That’s because the all-natural earth minerals produce strong, healthy plants that can better protect themselves from plant pests and disease, and because the soil-less system is not subject to ground pests.

NASA experimented with an aeroponic system on the MIR space station and reported that plant-growing time is reduced dramatically while cutting water usage by 98%, fertilizer use by 60%, and pesticide use by 100%.

Roots on the Rooftop

The Tower Garden® was developed by local food movement leader, hydroponics expert and CEO of Future Growing LLC, Tim Blank. Blank was also affiliated for many years with the Walt Disney Company and his aeroponic garden system was displayed at Epcot for many years.

Chef John Mooney’s rooftop garden in NYC

In 2010 his big breakthrough came when Chef John Mooney of NYC’s Bell, Book & Candle became the first “roof to table” restaurant when it installed enough towers on their rooftop to supply a 60-seat restaurant for 10 months a year. Rooftop farms have also been installed at Rouse’s Supermarkets in New Orleans, and Step Up On Vine, a housing unit for the homeless in Hollywood. In 2011 O’Hare Airport installed 26 towers to supply four restaurants making it the first aeroponic farm ever installed in an airport.

Where to buy the Tower Garden

The Tower Garden® is sold to the consumer market through Juice Plus+, a manufacturer of fruit and vegetable supplements.  JuicePlus+

Armonk resident/aeroponic backyard farmer Lauren Bernard

has also been instrumental in attracting the attention of camps and schools who use the system to teach kids about growing fruits and vegetables and to encourage healthy eating. They have even donated them to Boys & Girls Clubs throughout the country.

So what’s the local angle? Armonk resident, Lauren Bernard, is a JuicePlus+ representative. For more information or to purchase a Tower Garden® (or to start your own aeroponic farm – come on you have a big deck) you can go to her website or email her at nybernards@optonline.net.

Each Tower Garden® unit is 2 1/2 feet in diameter and can hold up to 28 plants. Harvest time is as little as 4 weeks. Best of all – no soil … no trowel … no garden gloves … NO WEEDS!

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