As much as I love food and cooking it, I have a ridiculous amount of respect for farmers. Not just because what they do is an unbelievable amount of work, but because Sarah and I may have the brownest thumbs this green earth has ever seen.
When we first started dating, we put some herbs on our window porch in Atlanta. All the herbs died, even the basil. I killed basil. It's a weed basically, that grows so vociferously that they had to invent pesto to put it all somewhere. Yet we couldn't grow it.
When, in California, we spent a weekend setting up planters with vegetables and herbs, they had met a similar fate. Enter a tower water system and our last hope to turn our thumbs green. Long story short, it is a system that automatically waters the plants for you, growing the food 30-50% faster with no soil and it recycles the water! Five gallons of water will water up to four months with 28 different plants being maintained. They've been popping up at Whole Foods and different restaurants around the country. If you've ever been to the Solace location in Encinitas they have one set up for herbs.
It can grow every herb, fruit and vegetable short of root vegetables. We will be starting with arugula, kale, bibb lettuce, cucumber, heirloom tomatoes, chives, cilantro, parsley, eggplant and more. Well, we hope we will. This system and others like it, including aquaponics, are the future of urban farming.
This is a perfect start for us to take a small step to take a little of the burden of our food system and redefining fresh and local on a small scale. We will keep you posted with pics as well as recipes from the produce we get.