Urban Vertical Farming

I have been reading about this for a while. I'd love to see someone try it... I guess so would this guy

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/opinion/24Despommier.html

Windmills in the North Sea

We saw these wind farms off the coast of the Netherlands right before landing in Amsterdam.

Visiting the Andres in Michigan [Part 2]

The neighbor's wheat field. Beautiful.

Visiting the Andres in Michigan [Part 1]

My sister-in-law grew up on a farm in Michigan and during our trip to the States we were lucky enough to hang out with her wonderful family (the Andres) on their farm. We had a great time and learned some things too. Below is the view from their home of their soybeans.

Soybeans on the left, barns in the distance. (The red barn was remarkably rebuilt by my sister-in-law's dad and brother. We saw the slideshow of the whole process. It's pretty amazing).

Beginning our walk around the farm. Corn on the left, soybeans again on the right.

Close-up of soybean plants.

Close-up of soybean flowers.

Matt.

Matt standing amongst corn.

We learned a lot about corn. If we can get our hands on some seeds, we'll try to grow it in our yard next year. 

We learned that the above part of the plant needs to pollinate each strand of the husk pictured below. Each strand is actually a tube that is attached to a single kernel of corn, and each tube needs to be pollinated in order for it's kernel to form. 

We learned that corn roots are very shallow...

... and very funny-looking.

Back from Vacation!

You may have noticed we haven't posted anything in a month. That's because we were in the good old US of A visiting friends and family, going to weddings, and of course checking out gardens. We had a great time and we took lots of pictures. We'll share those photos in upcoming posts, but for now, here's the update on our garden. A lot happened in our garden while we were gone, especially the (over)growth of weeds which I spent hours pulling out today. Good stuff happened too. We now have string beans, potatoes, many tomatoes (still green unfortunately), a cayenne pepper, a beautiful red sunflower, and blackberries. 

Above: String bean plants. Below: Close up of the beans growing on the plant.

The potatoes are the highlight for me. I was so excited to dig them out of the ground that I forgot to take photos of the process. But here they are.

Some are very small. We'll have to do some more research and improve our growing methods next year. All in all, I think this was a big success. I'll try for a second potato planting this summer, and then next year we have a big section of the yard picked out to grow only potatoes. We'll try several different varieties.

Below is a photo of all the potatoes cleaned and drying to get ready for storage. My hand is there so you can gauge the sizes of the potatoes.

Below is a photo of some of the tomatoes. The plants grew very big and had to be trimmed back a little to expose the tomatoes and flowers to more sunlight.

Below: our first cayenne pepper. There a a lot of flowers, so we should have more peppers soon. These grew very slowly, and my only guess as to why is that it wasn't hot enough for them.

Sunflower! This is the first one, but there should be more soon.

Here's a photo of the growing blackberries.

It started to get dark out, so I only picked a few.