darkryemag: A quick chat with Dennis McClung serves as a virtual walkaround of his wildly fruitful g

darkryemag:A quick chat with Dennis McClung serves as a virtual walkaround of his wildly fruitful garden pool…How did this all start? We grew up in Los Angeles—my mom was in the FFA.What’s the FFA? Future Farmers of America.In LA?Yep. She was from Compton. THE Compton? Your mom was a farmer from Compton?Yep. Do you know if you’ve inspired other garden pools?Oh, absolutely. We’ve given tours to aerospace people—they want to put one of these on the moon. Even the FBI has come to check it out as a part of their disaster response strategy—in Phoenix, we have 10,000 empty pools. This kind of farming could feed a lot of people with very little resources, and they’re very quick to set up relative to the typical fields. We hear from people all the time who have done it or who are planning to, from all over—right now I’m writing an ebook to help other people get the same kind of system up and running.A nationwide-spreading, self-sustaining desert oasis with roots in Compton. I like it.Yeah. Me too.+++CHICKEN COOPWe found a bunch of shelving from a closed-down grocery store in a dumpster, and with a bit of jerry-rigging, we made it into our chicken coop. The waste drops through the netted floor of the coop, straight into the water—this promotes the algae blooms that make our pond so healthy. It’s beneficial chemically speaking, but it also means we don’t need to clean the coop the way you usually would. The chickens are real wanderers—they eat the bugs and dig holes in the yard. Once the sun goes down and they come back in, we close it up and next morning, there’s eggs. They’re happy, and so are we.SOLAR PANELSSolar panels aren’t the kind of thing you can find in a dumpster. We bought the cheapest ones, and as our energy consumption increased, we added more panels one or two at a time to run our irrigation pump and LED lighting. They’re hooked up to 12-volt boat batteries, and it’s about as simple as wiring a car radio. PLASTIC BUCKET HERBSWe grow sweet Genovese basil, cinnamon basil, and oregano year-round, and fed it with pond water. One of the challenges with growing in pots is that you don’t want to burn the roots with mineral build-up that open soil would otherwise flush out. We use fish emulsion to mitigate that—it’s totally natural, organic way to add high-nitrogen nutrients, which keeps container-bound roots happy.POLLINATOR-FRIENDLY WILD FLOWERS We attract bees with purslane, nasturtiums, and marigolds (which the chickens also love, and it makes yolks so nice). The bees can see the color through our tarp, and once they find their way in they go around and pollinate everything. We stick to heirloom variety vegetables and herbs, because they’re easier for the bees to open and pollinate. We’re careful about seed-saving because those varieties have a hundred years or more of thriving in this climate—we let 10% of our crops go to flower.RAIN GUTTER PLANTERS You can get a ten-foot stick of rain gutter for about five bucks. Because we use hydroponics, we can squish the plants closer together. We introduce earthworms to all our gutters, and they eat all the sludge from the pondwater, which in turn, brings micronutrients to our system, and helps keep it clean and flowing. 180 lineal feet of rain gutter carries the water around, through the clay pellets and vegetable roots and back to the pond—and when it returns to the fish, it’s full of good bacteria, which converts the ammonia in the pond into nitrate, which is plant food.TILAPIA POND There’s about 800 pounds of fish in the pond at any given time. The biggest one I’ve caught so far was seven pounds. They grow really fast—every once in a while, we have to put a predator in there to keep things balanced or else the ammonia levels would be too high for the system to handle. We have two tortoises and a turtle, and once a year or so we put one into the pond. One turtle can eat about a hundred fish in a day.UPSIDE-DOWN TOMATOES We’ve put vining tomatoes in the buckets—grape, cherry, and roma—and they grow down along with the basil, and they hang down from the rain gutter too. Vining tomatoes versus bushy ones just keep growing larger and larger. We keep them in alternate cycles of seeding and growth and harvesting, and this gives us tomatoes year round. When we give tours, I always let people taste them—they’re incredibly good.THE WATER SYSTEMWhen we bought the house it was roofed with shingles, which made the rainwater unpotable. We re-roofed it with aluminum, and now it’s a great water-catcher as well as being much better in terms of energy-efficiency. Roof water and rain funnels into the pond, the pump distributes it through, and gravity carries the clean water back down. So it’s a closed-loop system. We save our graywater as well—we use all biodegradable soaps and after it passes through about ten feet of the clay pellet gutters, it’s pure—just like a filter. When we don’t need the excess graywater for our main system, we use it on the roots of our fruit trees (And you can too!) GRAPE VINESWe started the vines in the very beginning—they’re still in dirt. By the time we converted to hydroponics, the roots on the grapevines were so large that it wasn’t feasible to convert them as well, so we left them as they were and they’re doing great. Everybody always asks how I pick our grapes—I wade out into the pool, which is 16 x 16 feet and 3.5 feet deep—to pick the lower ones, and I climb up top and lift the tarp to pick the top ones. DUCKWEED FOR CHICKEN FEEDThe tilapia pond gives us duckweed for the chickens, and the chickens give us food for the fish. We grow larvae for a calcium supplement—it’s black soldier fly composting. The larvae breaks stuff down very fast. In six weeks we have pure compost, versus at least 16 months for the same result with worm composting. The grubs are high in calcium as well, and the chickens love them, and of course they need the calcium for their eggs.More on Dennis’s garden pool at DARK RYE’s Roots IssueThis whole thing is such genius. The link in the article is dead, but here it is and it leads to a good video - http://www.darkrye.com/content/garden-pool-0 -- source link
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