Volksgarden Rotating Garden Lets You Grow Anything At Home

Green Energy Household — 02 September 2009

volksgarden

If you’ve got an extra two grand lying around and desperately want a space to grow some hydroponic tomatoes and such, then boy, do I have the solution for you!

It’s called the Volksgarden Rotating Garden, and it’s a gigantic wheel made out of food-grade plastic. The studs you see on that wheel hold nutrient material, and you put your plants into each one of those studs. The circular design allows you to grow fully eighty plants in under nine square feet.

Of course, the down side to this is that you’ve got to have a powerful wattage bulb–no less than a four hundred watter will do–in order to provide sufficient light for the growing to happen. This pretty much destroys the whole “going green” concept of the Volksgarden, but if you’re an apartment dweller who can’t get enough home-grown food, the Volksgarden just might be what you need.

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stevea

http://www.omegagarden.com Ted Marchildon

Thank you for reviewing the Volksgarden.

You can grow leafy greens, and even your tomatoes, peppers, flowers, peas, beans, etc in the Volksgarden with as little as a 125 watt compact fluorescent lamp as that is the size of the lamp in the picture above. We usually recommend using a 200 watt lamp, however you can use 400, 600, or a 1,000 watt lamp if you so choose.

Ted Marchildon
Omega Garden Inc
Allister Cucksey

As for the environmental benefits of the VG, a simple light is not going outweigh the benefits. Here is an example:
Volksgarden:
1) 400 watts at 18 hours a day, at 365 days a year totals 2,628 kwh per year (9,460 megajoules)
2) The VG can produce 25-35 pounds of leafy greens (and leafy herbs) and an estimated 15-25 pounds of fruit a month for an average of 300 pounds per year.
3) This equates to 31.5 mj/kg
4) the energy it takes to go down stairs and harvest the veggies from the VG right before you eat is roughly the same as it takes to go down to the freezer and get your veggies added to the energy you spend walking around the supermarket, so this can be discounted

Conventional Agriculture:
1) Consider the energy of producing the food, shipping the food all over the world, and then going to the supermarket and picking it up. The veggies have to be picked before they are ripe, waxed or irradiated to ensure a lack of fungus, mold, or insect infestation during transit or storage
2) those energy requirements amount to produce a pound of produce in the conventional agriculture model is (313,530 mj/kg)

So… let’s see, refresh my memory… 313,530 mj/kg is less then 31.5 mj/kg or more… hmmm? The volksgarden is an extremely efficient system for producing food. I do not say this as a person who is selling them, because I am not. I do not say this as a person who owns one, as I do not.

I am saying this as a person who has studied efficient and sustainable agriculture for the past 7 years. I am saying this as a person who has written two academic papers on the subject of efficient hydroponics, specifically studying the Omega Gardens technology.

I hope this clears up the ecological credentials of the volksgarden.
pyle

are u counting sunshine and immigrant labor in your supermarket model?
Historicalfacts

Using electricity to grow food is considerably greener than moving it from massive monocroping farms. The amount of water used is also only 1% of that needed to grow the same plant in an industrial agricultural system.
martinaustinx

Wow…… this one is really looking just cool and awesome. And this one is really looking incredible and promising thing about gardening. And the existing content and features of this post are really looking just cool. Thanks for sharing some great and inspiring thing.

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