Mad scientist's homestead is parking size, off-grid system

i mean you see all this in here look at all these this is a huge cluster is this more than you would get just growing tomato plants oh yeah they grow about twice as fast and you get about twice the production in fact right now everybody's telling me they've lost their tomato crop because the weather has been so weird this year yet i i don't i do nothing i have i've been so busy doing the other stuff i have to do the garden has been totally ignored that's why everything looks such a mess because i just haven't had a chance to get out here and and actually clean up work on it what is the system we call it vertical hydroponics and we call these trees or towers and then the pot itself right here is called a quad pot this is a quad pot you can see it's extremely thick for the lip the reason we do this think of a house think of this as the eave so the e puts shadow on the side which means in the summer the roots are cooler in the winter the sun's lower on the horizon so it heats the side and the roots are warmer just like you need the lip is big to create the eve also as you can see with tomato plants it will lay over without kinking and hurting the plant and the pots got to be heavy enough because people don't realize i have about seven copycat companies out there that copied our system none of them can grow tomatoes because when they start getting big like this they split their pots in half and hours doesn't all this is just two pots if you look it's just one tower with just two pots and look at all the load i you know i i'm betting there's over 100 pounds of tomatoes right now on this one tree just looking at all these tomatoes and you can see there's more flowers which means more to come stuff looks kind of haphazard but the best thing about all this is no matter how lazy you are how little you want to work or how careless you are the game thing grows and grows gangbusters it's re that's why i call it easy grow the odds of you making a mistake is really hard i started doing the planter systems back in 1997. by 2000 i'd come up with a basic idea of how to do it by 2002 i was producing these tower systems like this as a kit this is your backyard basically i mean yeah it's what i would what i call a backyard garden i just have it in my front yard let me show you how the system works the first thing we do is we got to make nutrient or food for the plant so it comes into these three tanks which have my liquid concentrate the water pumps through this system it's putting the concentrate in and then it's now filling up my nutrient tank this is my irrigation tank so when it's time for irrigation which is about half an hour the nutrient this will move into this when this demands it when it's low this irrigation tank sends it out to the field through this water line right here goes to this pipe and it goes to these lines up here so when it's running now it's running you'll see in a minute this line is starting to come out so it'll water and if you come around here it'll go down you saw the holes in the pots right right it'll go through this pot through this pot then go into the green dish the drain dish will put it into the drain line which goes onto this big pipe right here go back to the sump tank which then again gets pumped back out into the field so it will come back yeah it'll just run in a circle until it's gone and as soon and as soon as it's gone this tank tells this tank i need more and it refills itself and then when that tank's empty it tells the ro system it needs more it needs to make more food and it kicks on the injectors automatically and makes more food so i always have a tank full of food a tank that's circulating and i irrigate the garden every hour for about two minutes from 8 am to 8 pm everything we did here basically was scientifically engineered this is one of my new pots it's got my logo i did this about eight ten years ago and i think i can pull up one over here that might be dirty but this pot doesn't it's dirty if i wash it it just has the patent number on it but this one is 20 some odd years old it was my original pots in 97. now granted if i were to wash it it would be just like this one so the strength comes from the thickness from the shape what's your sauce in there yeah it's a combination it's the design the thickness and the shape think about it if we did a regular square pot that's how big the corner would be you can't put a plant in that so we round it out and then we added the lip so things can roll over because you can grow a lot as you can see and you can see how much bigger the plants are than the pot is pots are almost invisible now and the design helps strength wise and oh this one's ready to be picked i call this one we call it a cinderella beefsteak they're at least a pound to a pound and a half a piece imagine 10 or 20 of these hanging off the side of a pot now you're talking 20 30 pounds hanging off the side of this so you can see why a normal pot would split yeah the copycat companies the biggest thing they did to make a cheaper pot was reduce the amount of plastic from a pound and a half to less than eight ounces so the entire pot is this thickness and they're indestructible in fact you want to you got it they just bounce they'd never break no it just bounced and i'm trying to make it hit on the edge and they'll torque but they just spring back i mean well let's put it this way we sell these to farmers the last thing a farmer needs to be doing is buying his main investment every year well i i have yet to ever have to replace any of mine but that doesn't make a very good business for you yeah but i'm not in business to get rich i'm in business to grow food and help people grow food that's my thing i've i've been rich i've been a millionaire and lost it it ain't what it seems to be i i am much happier doing it this way and i like to see it when people are successful go in here you can see there's lots of peppers my favorite plant here is this topsy tom grows well in this system more uh peppers every this is about 40 feet long 500 plants let's start from beginning we have here is the nutrient tank which basically feeds everything and we have bee steak next to that tiny tim you can see leaf lettuce got mixed reds have jalapenos on the top cucumber on the bottom we have california wonders which are a orange pepper you never have too many peppers they dehydrate well they're expensive these are topsy tom tomatoes these this grow like they like it in here and this here takes about oh all of uh five to ten minutes a day actually mix your stuff up feed the plants everything runs through these lines and then once it gets to the top what you've got here are drippers as you can see got extra lines here running down two individual pots so that everything gets fed well and watered well because as these things grow they take up more and more now we'll look at a conventional garden here on this side not ultimately space efficient because everything is growing in a row and not up and this is pretty low maintenance as well except for the weeding the weeding's not much fun another nice aspect of being in here is just the low maintenance and the ease of use smaller systems this is what we call a deck garden this is what most of my urbanites buy because it's got curb appeal it's sexy looking you know once you have the pots stacked on it they've got 50 gallon tanks they're fully self-contained and run themselves so diaz you could even put this on an apartment terrace apartment balcony that's what we get a lot of people doing they'll either do this one or they'll do a patio garden which is a single tower and the single tower of course those are my number one sellers because they're affordable and it'll grow 20 plants so your setup is similar to more conventional hydroponics but the pots are what make it unique yeah the pots and the stacking system we basically came up with the whole vertical hydroponics for growing food and we're the only ones that do a recirculating system most hydroponics especially tower systems do what they call drain to waste which means the water goes down through and just runs out on the ground to me that's a total waste this is the wind system now see it's a hydroponic garden and i designed it for farmers for people out in the country like preppers that's where the problem arised is with preppers what's the first thing they say we don't use power remember they're preppers they're off the grid so my garden all of a sudden became useless to them because it's got pumps so my answer was this this is the turbine system and you can see how easy that turns and the reason i went this way versus solar only the problem with solar only is in the best part of the country you get six hours a day of sun what do you do with the rest of the day to generate power yeah these spin really easy that's generating power right now i'd call it a tri-helix and how did you come up with this i kept finding the flaws in traditional wind power the biggest flaw in traditional wind power is you know what we call the horizontal windmill with the propeller on the front they spend most of their time trying to find the wind so that makes a regular turbine worthless because it's here then it's jumping to here then it's jumping back and it's never getting any time to turn because it's trying to find the wind and that to me was a waste of time so i went from that to this because i don't care what direction the wind is coming from it can come over here well this is going to catch it if it comes over here it's always going to turn so it's always going to be generating power it don't matter how gusty and how inconsistent the wind is gusting it's always going to catch it and turn now i i'd call it a tri-helix and the reason i call it a tri-helix is i do them in sets of three this first design each turbine could only do 150 watts so that's one two three four 450 watts is what i was getting out of this system i have since improved it to where each turbine is 400 watts now how did you improve it well my original design and if you want to see them i have them back over by the building i can show you most people think of an alternator like what you have on your car you know the big round thing with the big coils and it weighs a ton which is a good idea but it's totally inefficient it's meant to be run by a motor hence your car engine but that's what turbines are made with you know all current turbines are made with that style of an alternator what i did is the original design is what we call a pancake alternator or an axial flux alternator it's storage but i also have my old prototypes and my old test stuff in here it's a mess in your garage yeah it's essentially my garage here's a bunch of my blades that have been pressed and ready to be built these are the original blades i have newer ones this is the alternator that we made doesn't look anything like a car alternator does it this is the coil each one of these is a copper coil that's actually made in the circuit board that's how we get the wire wrappings instead of a regular coil this these are rare earth magnets a mother of geopolitics finally so those are the magnets this sets on the bottom there's another one of these that sit in the lid and it this will sit like this so as these and the magnets turn not the circuit board see in a regular system it's the coils that are turning usually but this has one on each side that spins which of course generates the power which comes out on these leads that's how simple it is basically no moving parts where we improved it is i went smaller so the new alternator this coil here is now as big as the hole and we do layers our new one has 16 layers and is smaller so the blade has better torque because the the more density yeah the more density and smaller so the blade is out here so it can turn and since there's more layers it generates more power we get 400 watts instead of 150. the whole process is here then nothing is outside of here correct i do everything right here except the metal work i do just up the street at the metal shop so this is the office for easy grow well we do some easy grow stuff it's my office for my internet this also spawned out of a need for people in the country that are gardening also need internet so and i do do the easy grow stuff this is where we can process and as you can see we also process our antennas this is what we do right here we make these so you can see inside is the modem that connects you to the internet using a cell tower this is all stuff i created this is well where this connects with your your farming is our greenhouses and everything have these on the roof that way they can see everything their greenhouse is doing and they're all in the country so it's not like they can get fiber coming to the house because that's our whole tiny farm system it's an intelligent tiny farm because to me what you see now is pretty much a joke all this you're seeing and getting back to the plants and all this is really in my opinion backwards why because we lived there already the teens the 20s the 30s that was how you did everything was farming remember how much work that was hence our system it's a part-time job that one is the emily arena in florida okay they feed everybody in the stadium from the tower gardens this is lettuce gardens in nigeria fully automated they they're actually stores people actually walk down these aisles buy directly from the pots and the guys harvest it and put it in the bags for them and our system actually makes it much more feasible because the sheer volume of food is eight times the density so for cities this really makes sense oh yeah it saves 90 of your water and for energy usage to pump the water and all that is a lot of no that runs on a single extension cord you know a standard 20 amp circuit is all it needs could you do it off great that's what these guys are for this is a power system we did in argentina this is buenos aires and there's the bleacher system in the middle of the highway okay there we go see all the turbines turning in the bleachers this one bleacher does a quarter of a megawatt the this system you can see six panels and six turbines this will generate about 1.2 kilowatts of power this system will run that whole garden off the ground about every three to six months i have to make new concentrate we use minerals so each one is a different mineral one is the micronutrients i have calcium and magnesium now the reason they're different colors is because i i actually put dye you know food grade food coloring in them that tells me oh the nutrients getting into the system same here now if they go clear i know these tanks are empty you know we started everything so late this year so peppers are not doing near as well so i'll be curious how well they do now on the other side cucumbers are doing fine they don't have a problem with the heat here you go i like doing this so i keep it at what i call hobby scale even though i can produce enough commercially to handle any size commercial garden these are cinderellas these are juliettes that's a cinderella where are my beefsteaks okay here's my beefsteaks right here we're still just a little family operation and i don't want to change that because i love my hobby i love being out here working with it and we all know when your hobby turns into the job it's no longer fun you're right that's why we call them uh cinderella beefsteaks

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 1,450,377

Keywords: aquaponics, home aquaponics, aquaponics garden, backyard aquaponics, homestead, aquaponics homestead, texas homestead, ezgro, ¼ acre homestead, small space gardening, rooftop aquaponics, nigeria aquaponics farming, low labor farming, hyper local produce, texas, quad pots, stacked garden, vertical garden, vertical aquaponics, offgrid aquaponics, texas inventor, container gardening, container garden kits, garden kits, aquaponic kits, garden towers, parking size homestead

Id: QSnHShly5R0

Length: 18min 45sec (1125 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/SniffyBliffy]

we could use this in our island irl!

[u/Lizbliz1973]

Where can I buy your stuff. I want to make my own garden please