IBCs oh you glorious totes
Well it’s time to get things moving. Upon moving to Asheville finding the wonderful IBC, or as they’re commonly referred to, totes was becoming quite a pain. The prices for these are about double what one would normally pay. I’m guessing that’s due to the fact that there’s really not much of a shipping commerce in the area. Through some searching and finding someone to loan me a trailer they have been found at a decent price and that includes the gas it takes to obtain them.
On Wednesday April 10th some of these lovely items will be acquired in order to begin the building of some aquaponics systems. Of course the good people that we are will be taking pictures, and hopefully this time giving a much better explanation on how everything works. Let everyone have this information.
If you are located in the Asheville area we will have a few extra. For a little bit extra plus the parts a system can be built based on the area which you want a system like this built along with the basic knowledge on how to run it in order to raise your own fish and salad bar.
A Move
We know there should have been an earlier update on this. Unfortunately there was very little traction in Winston-Salem, NC. Sproutable has moved and has a slight direction change happening right now. With the lease up it was decided to migrate out to the mountains near Asheville, NC in order to move forward with progress of trying to change how you view food, communities and everyone’s true definition of wealth.
With the goals in mind that we have, and are going to be fully published shortly, we felt that a location change would better benefit the state of North Carolina, as well as any state or country that follows along with what we do and try to help everyone out there lead more fulfilling lives.
Once things are more settled down and figured out there will be more updates as well as projects anyone in the world can do. One of our mottos is do things as cheap and creatively as possible.
The Digital and Electronic Sproutable
One of the ideas for Sproutable to stand out from everyone else deals in the idea of open source. That doesn’t just mean software with my background in IT, it means open source everything. This includes ideas, plans, schematics, and anything else you can name. If someone doesn’t have the resources to accomplish something of course they can contact us and we’ll see what we can do with the idea. With that in mind one of my initial ideas was to correlate data on any given type of farm.
I don’t actually have a name for the “product” or experiment yet. Perhaps the Sproutduino-Pi? That just might work. Not too terribly difficult to say. The question happens to be, what the hell is this thing?
First and foremost it’s a way of gathering data on what ever you want. If you’re a dirt farmer you may want to automate some watering based on the moisture in the soil rather than on a timer to save water and not have to worry about it. If you’re doing aquaponics you just might want to know when your water is reaching a certain threshold on the pH scale before it becomes a problem and kills your fish and plants.
I know people will say that this is all great and dandy. Automation, you can buy things like that at home depot or where ever that do almost the same thing. How can this idea sprout into something that is actually useful? That is an easy answer, though a very hard one to get to at first.
Eventually there will be a back end that you can run on any silly little computer at home and gather your data. Using this information you’ll be able to predict how things operate throughout the year. With his information and a prediction capability you can produce more and faster with less effort while working on various other projects to sustain yourself and your community. The long term goal is for all of the small farmers, gardeners and even some of the larger ones, to share their data around the globe and help each other out.
It may be a crazy idea, but it has begun and is moving forward each day. Please stay tuned for more ideas and things that you can do even if you have a small balcony.
You can see the photo album here
The Straight Poop
Who doesn’t love Joel and Polyface Farms?
http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the_straight_poop_on_sustainable_farming/
Some more work tomorrow
Tomorrow I’m going to do a little more work on Sproutable’s new aquaponics system. One of the great things about this build is that we can take our time. It’s definitely not growing season anymore until March. Can take time, do things slowly, and not worry about dead lines.
Expect some more pictures in the build even if they are not exciting. Also expect some pictures with the dirt garden to show how it’s going to be modified to be larger and fence in both gardens into one.