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Alright, this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com. We're here in San Francisco at the spring
Green Festival, and out here in the rain. We're going to go inside and check out the
green festival. I'm going to show you all the cool green things and gardening things
they have inside the green festival. Let's get out of the rain. We're having fun here
at the green festival and I got this cool bug on me, and this bug will eat your plants.
It eats fruits and vegetables in its diet. It's from Malaysia. It's pretty crazy. So,
let's continue here at he green festival and ow, man, it's pinching me. Let's see if there's
anything else that's cool to check out. Man, it's really digging in my skin there. So,
we're here inside the green festival here in san Francisco and, you know, I love this
whole show floor and the one thing that excited me more than anything else the vertical home
garden booth and here's the amazing product they have, and I'm with Dr. Elwin Blighton,
and he's the designer, creator, and founder of this company and he's going to tell us
more about the vertical home garden. I can tell you about it. I mean, really quick, it's
basically in 4 square feet, you can grow 20 square feet wroth of plants. So, like 40 lettuce
heads in this small little container. So, you may see like my big large raised beds,
you know, I have over 100 lettuce plants in one raised bed. With 3 of these you could
do that same production on your balcony, on your patio, in your apartment, wherever. So,
let's go to the expert here, and let's have him talk about it a little bit more.
This is called the Phytopod. That's the name on the product and it comes in 3 different
sizes. There's the small size, which gives you 10 square feet of planting area, the phytopod
2, there's the medium seized phytopod 3 that gives you 50 square feet of planting area,
and there's the phytopod 4, which gives you 20 square feet of planting area. Basically,
what you do is you fill it with your favorite potting soil. It has an internal watering
system, and that allows you to plant all over it, like right in the side, and you can get
many plants on a small area. One of the most interesting things about the phytopod is that
it allows you to come in here, you make a hole in there and you put your seedling in
and you can plant pretty much anything you can plant in a regular garden, you can plant
on a phytopod. This one's got lots of strawberries on it, I threw in some flowers for color at
the show here today. I've got mint of up here, I've got thyme, I've got Swiss chard. Now,
this Swiss chard is the ultimate. They will grow huge and you'll be able to eat Swiss
chard off of this pretty much every day. You just harvest the leaves that you want, you
make your salad and by the next day they've grown back already for you, especially if
you live in sunny California like we do. We manufacture these right here in Oakland California,
across the bay bridge, and we're introducing them to the market this springtime. We strongly
recommend these for schools, for people who can't on their knees anymore, for the disabled.
We really believe this is a way to achieve personal green production. It gives you a
real gardening experience. Unlike most of the things that are out there, you will have
all the same problems you will have with the garden, except for weeds. No weeds.
This is really a green product here at the green festival, 'cause, you know what? Tell
us what these burlap sacks are from and what they are.
Well, we manufacture in Oakland, as I said, right there in the port district, and there
are many coffee roasters there. So we buy these burlap backs that the coffee beans come
in, the raw coffee beans from developing countries wherever it may be, and we have them sewn
specially so that they fit into the phytopod and as a result, we're using really something
that's a reused product. So, we're reusing that product. Much of the internal watering
system is made out of recycled rubber, and the basically idea is that if you wanted to
buy this at the beginning of the season and throw it away at the end of the season, you
could do so guilt-free. However, this will last you basically forever, like buying a
garden. You can replace the bag every couple of seasons or so, you may need to replace
this, but we sell those on our website. You can order it there and get a fresh bag and
repack the soil and add, you know, fresh new plants, or, if you like, you can just keep
it going. Here in California we can plant year-round, we can plant winter gardens, we
can plant spring gardens, and what we do is we just keep planting. When the carrots are
ready, we pull them out and put something else in, and, so, it's an ongoing, it's really
just like a fountain of green production and our mission is that schools can buy these,
especially inner-city schools, where, you know, they may not have any tillable ground
that they can dig up. They can use the basketball field. When they want to play basketball,
they just roll it out the way and paly basketball and out it back on. So, they can get that
real experience of gardening.
Do you have different models?
We do have different models. This is actually a bamboo phytopod 2, and it's kind of a deluxe
model. It's got this decorative feature of bamboo there. It really doesn't serve any
structural purpose, but it does make it look nice. A lot of people like the bamboo, or
you can get it without bamboo. It's just the wire mesh with the bag and the internal watering
system. You can also buy this dolly through us. We don't make them, but we have an arrangement
with a manufacturer, and they ship these out to our customers for us, but once you get
it on the wheel so you can roll it out the way, it's much more mobile and it's much more
flexible thing to have on your balcony or you patio.
Tell us how the water is distributed. You have this watering tube here.
That's right. The watering system was the hardest part. It really took 2 years to get
it to work correctly. I tried lots of different failures, you know, there's sort of a graveyard
of phytopods out there in the east bay from all the trials that we had, but ultimately
we arrived at a relatively simple system in which the water goes down and it's distributed
evenly over the surface of each layer and can percolate down and make sure that all
the layers stay moist. That's important. This is the phytopod 2. It has 2 layers, that has
3 layers, and that has 4 layers, and that's really the whole story. It comes in a box.
That's the other thing we wanted to....really it's very light, it comes in a box like this.
Each contains everything you need except for the soil and the plants. So, the idea is that
you can assemble this form this kit and have the full garden on your balcony in about 2
hours and if you can imagine going from having no garden on your balcony to having a 20 square
foot garden, fully planted, in about 2 or 3 hours of labor, that's going to be the best
news in gardening.
Wow. So, I'm very glad to meet you and, you know, he's given me one to take with me, I
don't today or he's going to send me one. So, I'm going to have a lot of episodes, experiencing.
You're going to see me put mine together and fill wit compost and grow lots of stuff in
there. So, be stay tuned for these episodes. I'm really excited about this practice, I
guess the revolutionary product I've been looking for for many years and it allows you
out there with a patio or small space to grow lots of food in just a small area.
You'll love it. Just go to www.verticalhomegardens.com and you'll find all our product line up there.
Well, thank you so much.
You're very welcome. Great to meet you.
Great to meet you. So, this is John Kohler with growingoyurgreens.com. Keep on growing
and grow vertically. It's smart.