Portable Farms(TM) Aquaponics Systems

From: Phyllis Davis, Co-Inventor, Portable Farms(TM) Aquaponics Systems and President, Portable Farms, Inc.

Hello friends:
Today has been ‘Mr.Toad’s Wild Ride,’ for a Monday in our office (it’s been a busy day) and it’s close to the end of our workday, so I’m just going to make a quick shout-out and tell you that I plucked my first spring strawberry today that I had planted in an enormous clay pot in my backyard in December, and it was delicious. I took some tendril cuttings from the strawberry plant and placed them in water, in a pretty glass, then placed it my kitchen window for ample light. When the root of the plant grows about 2″ in length, I’ll gently place the plant’s root into the gravel in my Portable Farms(TM) Aquaponics System. I’ll let you know how it grows.

After much experimentation, I’ve found that some plants just taste better and grow stronger if they’re taken from a cutting and replanted in the gravel. For instance, mint. I’m originally from Dallas, Texas, and I’m a gal who likes mint in my iced tea. I’ve spouted mint (spearmint, peppermint, etc.) from seed, several times, and yet, it seems to thrive and grow better in my aquaponics system when I transplant a cutting (with roots) from a mature plant and then move it to my gravel grow-tray table. You may be thinking, “But mint will take over!” And, I admit that I am careful and that I shove a trowel in the gravel around the plant(s) about once a week to keep the roots from spreading. Badda-bing. Problem solved.

It’s great fun to experiment and there’s still so much to learn about growing various plants in aquaponics. I learn everyday!

In the meantime, I’m starting some seeds for lemon cucumbers (3″ to 4″ round, yellow, fuzzy looking things) which don’t have enormous vines (like slicing cucumbers do). These lemon cucumbers are delicious and a great treat in summer in salads.

I’ll also plant some basil for my Portable Farms(TM) Aquaponics Systems and for my in-ground garden nearby. We’ve eaten so much basil over the last few years that my dear husband, Colle, can’t bring himself to eat it anymore, so I make pesto and give small amounts away to friends and neighbors. I mix fresh basil, extra virgin olive oil, pine nuts (I lightly toast), garlic, and fresh Parmesan cheese into my blender and turn it on for only a few seconds and viola, fresh pesto. It also freezes well. On a hot summer’s day, there’s nothing quite like a tasty lunch of pesto spread on rough, whole wheat bread, and a small green salad. Perfection. And of course, I enjoy my ice tea with fresh mint.

Also, I’m very excited my new spring 2010 Burpee catalog arrived today and just flipping though it, I see several seeds that I can’t wait to order. Here’s a link to their website, CLICK HERE.

Life is good? All the time. It’s a choice.

Your friend,
Phyllis Davis

From: Phyllis Davis, Co-Inventor, Portable Farms(TM) Aquaponics Systems and President, Portable Farms, Inc.

Photo taken February 20, 2010 in our farm:
Red cabbage in forefront, broccoli on right,
Brussels Sprouts behind.

Hello Friends of Portable Farms, Inc.
We’re very happy that we’ve received so many calls about our One-Day Crash Course and Three-Day Intensive Course about aquaponics from people all around the world. For more information about dates, prices and course content, CLICK HERE.

Colle continues to refine his technology for Portable Farms(TM) Aquaponics Systems and today, he’s with our good friend Richard in Escondido, redesigning a key component for a new Portable Farms(TM) Aquaponics System that is currently being installed in Southern California by Butch, our installer.

I’m planting seeds this afternoon. We have an expression around here that says, “Always Be Planting. ABP.” Since not 100% of all seeds available don’t actually spout, we plant more seeds in peat pots than we think we might need. Every seed packet will tell you what the ‘germination rate’ is expected to be within that batch, so I generally plant a few extras to account for that factor. We’ve ordered some exciting new organic options to organic peat pots for seed sprouting and gravel planting, and I had HOPED Fed-Ex would have delivered them yesterday, but with the snowy weather on the East Coast, mails must be delayed, so I’m debating whether to plant today in peat pots, or wait until Monday when the ones arrive arrive. Hmmmm, a farmer has many choices to make every day when planning and planting crops and this is apparently one of them today.

We had planned to build the aquaponics system today (for the upcoming courses) but the rains required we change our plans since we can’t work outside today. In fact, our ‘yard man’ was here early this morning, trimming banana trees and was forced off his tall ladder because of the torrential downpour.

Off to work I go.

As the poet Robert Frost wrote in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,
“The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”

Your friend,
Phyllis Davis

From: Phyllis Davis, Co-Inventor, Portable Farms(TM) Aquaponics Systems and President, Portable Farms, Inc.

Hello and good morning.
Second cup of coffee in hand, I’m ready for my day.

Yesterday, I had a telephone call from a young man who is an organizer for Earth Day at one of California’s finest universities in the Los Angeles area. He offered us a free booth to display one of our Portable Farms(TM) Aquaponics Systems on Earth Day. We had a long chat about the event and he was so incredibly passionate about what we are doing and how he believes that aquaponics is going to change the world by providing people with fresh vegetables and protein (fish). He was well-informed about the topic and filled with such enthusiasm! It was such a pleasure for me to hear his visions for feeding the world and when I hung up from our call, I was struck by the fact that this young man’s fresh approach to growing food was from a clear perspective of understanding. He saw the value in the fact that aquaponics uses 90% to 95% less water than in-ground growing and doesn’t use chemicals like hydroponics does. My heart sang.

I was reminded of the scene in the musical stage play/movie Camelot when King Arthur met a young man, Tom of Warwick, who was filled with the hope of youth, and revealed his intention to become a Knight and tells the King he knows about his Round Table. King Arthur stood and told the boy to run behind enemy lines and then go tell all he knew about the Round Table, “Run, boy, run! Might for right! Right for right! Justice for all!” Well, it may sound a big melodramatic, but that’s how I felt yesterday after speaking to this young man.

You see, here’s the REAL TRUTH that needs to be told about the fact that producing enough FOOD is vital to protect the world’s health – one person at a time: According to Feeding America) 1 in 8 people in the United States go to bed hungry each night. Globally, 1 billion people are unable to secure a nutritionally adequate diet to keep them healthy and active, and 100 million of those people suffer from the consequences of Protein Energy Malnutrition (PEM). Childhood malnutrition claims the lives of 5 million children each year.

According to projections made by the Committee on Foreign Relations in their report on Global Food Insecurity presented to the United States Senate (February 2009), “By 2050, it is projected that population growth will require a doubling in farm output, yet growth rates in food production in some regions have been stagnated.” As countries become more affluent, the need for protein in their diet increases faster than the population or food production.” PEM is the most lethal form of malnutrition and hunger. It is basically a lack of calories and protein because protein is necessary for key body functions including provision of essential amino acids and the development and maintenance of muscles.

Matt Damon, the actor, did a powerful short clip by U.S. State Department reminds us that we will need to feed an additional 1.8 billion people by the year 2030. CLICK HERE.

We have had so many requests from people who would like to learn more about backyard aquaponics that we’ve launched the dates to teach a One-Day Introductory Course and a Three-Day Intensive Course covering all the basic components of aquaponics. We will not be teaching people how to replicate OUR patented Portable Farms(TM) Aquaponics Systems, but we will be teaching them to grow fresh vegetables and home grown fish for their families. We will not be teaching them how to build a large system for commercial growing.

I’m very excited about the new classes and Colle and I will build the system over the weekend that we will use as the classroom tool that we’ll use during the classes. The classes will be such fun for us and hopefully for everyone who attends! We love aquaponics and it’s a joy to share what we know.

If you interested in enrolling, call me at 858-750-2053. Class sizes are limited so enroll today. For more information, CLICK HERE.

It’s Friday and you know what I do every Friday at quittin’ time: I do my happy dance. So think of me later today when I’m skipping around with my hands in the air enjoying myself.

Your friend,

Phyllis Davis

From: Phyllis Davis, Co-Inventor, Portable Farms(TM) Aquaponics Systems and President, Portable Farms, Inc.

Photo above: Colle Davis, Inventor of Portable Farms(TM) Aquaponics Systems,
holding three heads of butter-crunch lettuce that took 40-days to grow

Hello my friends!
As we listen to our family and friends around the country talk about shoveling snow, San Diego celebrates our 70 degree F, warm winter days. Of course, we also deal with earthquakes (we had a big 4.5 shaker on Sunday afternoon – no damages), mudslides and a state that faces a $20.7 billion dollar budget deficit, so maybe snow isn’t so bad after all. LOL

While today’s blog may be slightly focused outside of our aquaponics systems, I did promise you that we’d also comment on us, our business and how we function as inventors and entrepreneurs.

Our fish and vegetables are growing stronger and larger every day. As the day’s lengthen, we’ll unplug our grow lights around March 1 and then add seedlings to grow plants that enjoy the warmer, longer days. We have planted and harvested many many plants in our relatively new backyard farm (installed in December 2009) since our move to San Diego. I’ve posted a photo of Colle Davis (above) with three heads of butter-crisp lettuce from our farm. We put all three heads in a very large salad bowl, added a couple of tablespoons of organic, Nappa Valley extra-virgin olive oil, a single clove of finely chopped/smashed garlic, and a dash of sea salt. Then we gathered a few friends around our enormous, round, dining room table and enjoyed our fresh salad, some grilled tilapia and a hot baguette of french bread. Ahhh . . . the good life.

Portable Farms, Inc. is busy with ‘our business’ and we provide tours to those who want to own one of our systems, so everyday is full of interesting people who come to tour the farms and sit with us near the farm and talk about their interest in becoming ‘self-sustaining’ as a family or community, or, about their interest in growing food and fish for commercial reasons.

Eat your veges today! Especially the green ones.

Your friend,
Phyllis Davis

From: Phyllis Davis, Co-Inventor, Portable Farms(TM) Aquaponics Systems and President, Portable Farms, Inc.

Greetings!
Above is a picture of the growing vegetables in my own backyard Portable Farms™ Aquaponics System that I took today! The vegetables in the Grow Tray Table are about 40 days old and thriving! In the foreground are Brussels sprouts and collard greens, behind that are a variety of lettuces, squash, red cabbage, zucchini, Swiss chard, and bok choy. At the far end of the Grow Tray Table are a variety of ‘determinate’ tomatoes (bushy types of plants – not long, leggy ones) that are all newly planted and about two inches tall. We only grow the foods we like to eat since we don’t grow food commercially to sell. However, our systems are designed to be sized for commercial growing or backyard farms.

This farm is only 10′ x 16′ feet and it grows 500 vegetables and 200 fish per year. Here is a link to an online 2-minute video about this Portable Farms™ Aquaponics System that appeared on ABC affiliate, KGTV, San Diego, on December 17, 2009.

We provide both backyard farms and large farms for commercial growing.

Yearly Production From the Portable Farms™ Aquaponics Systems

A 90′ x 120′ unit produces 60,000 vegetables and 23,000 pounds of fish
A 20′ x 30′ unit produces 3,600 vegetables and 1,400 pounds of fish
A 10′ x 20′ unit produces 1,100 vegetables and 400 pounds of fish
A 10′ x 12′ unit produces 500 vegetables and 200 pounds of fish

At this point, I’d like to point out that although aquaponics has been a natural part of the environment for billions of years (fish and vegetables living together in lakes, rivers, streams and Oceans), we’ve recreated aquaponics to operate within an automated system. So, from that perspective, there is still a lot to know and a lot of learn about growing food in an aquaponic’s system, so if you have an aquaponics system, we’d like to know what you like to grow and let us know your results.

Please note: Neither I or Colle hold out ourselves as ‘botanists’ because we are not. And, over the many years we’ve devoted to our farms, we admit that we have killed a lot of fish and a lot of vegetables, as we continued to perfect our systems. It’s sad, but true, yet that is the life of any inventor who experiments to refine their product prior to bringing it to market. In fact, I encourage all of our clients to study seed catalogs and buy a pack of seeds here and there, until THEY find food they like to grow and like to eat. It’s FUN to grow new vegetables in small amounts (a dozen or so plants), just to see what happens, and the seed packets cost (generally) from $2 to $4 or so, so if the plant doesn’t grow like you had expected it to grow in the aquaponics system, or you don’t like the taste, it’s not terribly disheartening. But, once you find the seeds that work for you, you’ll be very happy. If you own one of our systems, I’m happy to recommend the seeds that I use.

The warm, nutrient-rich water that is in the Fish Tanks plus the use of grow lights (suspended above the Grow Tray Table) to lengthen the sunlight provides maximum growing conditions for the plants. The plants ALWAYS think it’s a perfect summer’s day. But, when planting, we still need to take into consideration the seasons of the year. For example, it’s very cool (for San Diego cool means mid 40-degrees F at night and 64-degrees F during the day) this time of year, and I grow a variety of cool-weather crops that enjoy the crisp nights. For example, currently, I’m growing a variety of cool weather lettuces (bib and butter crunch), cabbage, bok choy and Swiss chard which all enjoy the cool temperatures. They all grow beautifully in our systems and most of our ‘crops’ grow about 10% faster than they would if they were growing them in an outdoor, in-ground garden. Plus, they use 90% to 95% less water than in-ground growing does. Amazing, eh?

As you may know, or may not know, we don’t grow ‘root vegetables’ in our Portable Farms™ Aquaponics Systems. The 3/4 inch gravel in the Grow Tray Tables is not a conducive medium for say, a carrot, onion, potato or beet. We DID plant a dozen short 5-inch carrots last summer, and we (and many other people who toured our farms) kept a close eye on them for weeks until we finally harvested them. On the day of the ‘big harvest’ a dozen people gathered around the soon-to-be-harvested carrots with their camera’s poised for the ‘big moment’, and all I can say is, it was NOT pretty. The carrot could not wind itself into the gravel as it grew beyond about 1/4 inch and although the little bitty-thing tasted great, it was not a success and we abandoned our futile attempt for growing carrots (much to my husband, Colle’s, dismay who was convinced they could grow in the gravel even if they were crooked). And, as he would say, “. . . that’s how we learn.”

Colle is off speaking to a local Rotary Group here in the San Diego area today. He speaks often and everyone enjoys his talks. Here is a link to his Speaker’s One Sheet if you’d like to forward it to the program chairperson in your group. Just a heads up, if he travels outside of Southern California to speak, there is a fee and also travel expenses involved (just so you know).

I’m in the office today, all day, talking about our systems to those who contact us. And, it’s a good day. I had a salad of fresh vegetables from our farms and a tall glass of fresh lemonade from lemons from my neighbor’s tree in her front yard (which she gives me). And, life is good.

More soon!

Somebody, post a comment, so I don’t think I’m singin’ in the shower here.

:>)

Phyllis Davis

From: Phyllis Davis, Co-Inventor, Portable Farms(TM) Aquaponics Systems and President, Portable Farms, Inc.

My Tilapia fish were so hungry when I fed them this morning at 7:00 AM, that several of them actually LEPT, like flying fish, when I opened the cover to their tank and I laughed out loud at their excitement. I feed my 150 Tilapia all the food they can eat in fifteen seconds per feeding, and no more. There is an enormous temptation to feed them more food because they ‘frenzy’ with excitement when I feed them, which is fun to watch and makes me twitter with joy.

Remember, the magic of aquaponics is the nutrients the plants receive are from the FISH POOP (it’s okay, you can say poop, don’t be shy) which provides the vegetables the nitrogen and other nutrients they need to grow strong and healthy.

We use NO chemicals (that means no pesticides, herbicides or fungicides), fertilizers, nutrients, antibiotics or buffers need to be added to the system to enhance the growth and the health of the plants and fish, and there is no need to continuously monitor the nutrient levels, pH, salinity, oxygen or anything else in the water or gravel.

Everybody always asks me when we harvest our fish, so I’ll tell you now. We harvest our fish when they are 11″ in length which usually requires 6 1/2 to 7 1/2 months of grow time in the fish tanks, and at that time, the fish usually weigh about 1.25 pounds. The fish, at 1.25 pounds produce two four-ounce fillets for cooking and feeds two people.

I’ll speak about feeding Tilapia duckweed in another post.

It’s mid-day on Saturday, and I’m off to plant seeds for a new farm, and do my laundry in the garage, and all those other Saturday chores that one does on weekends to keep their life in order. As the Buddhist expression says, “First ecstasy and then the laundry.”

It’s a perfect sunny day in Southern California and life is good.

Your friend,
Phyllis Davis

From: Phyllis Davis, Co-Inventor, Portable Farms(TM) Aquaponics Systems and President, Portable Farms, Inc.

Welcome to the Blog Side of Portable Farms, Inc.

It’s Friday afternoon, January 29, 2010, and this is the first posting for our new blog. We invite you to grab a cup of coffee and spend a few minutes with us as we begin our Grand Project with you today. We’re prolific writers, and we’re also educators (in the truest sense) and we look forward to sharing a great deal with you and we will (inevitably) also reveal our personalities. Both Phyllis Davis and Colle Davis will be adding to this blog and we’ll begin and sign each post with our name, so you’ll know who’s ‘talking.’

We, Phyllis and Colle, have finally realized that we need to create a forum that is larger and more accessible than our wonderfully complete website. Our website is updated almost daily, but we saw the need for a place for others to comment on our endeavors.

In this blog, we’re going to talk about the ongoing care and operation of our aquaponics systems. Of course, we DO have trade secrets that are part of our system, which are exclusively patented and we won’t divulge those areas, but we will be talking about planting and growing of the food, care of the fish, and most of the daily tasks that arise as we care for our farms. And, we’ll also keep you updated with photographs and images.

We’ll also be talking about the life of being the inventors for our Portable Farms(TM) Aquaponics Systems and the varied opportunities we have for meeting and working with people from all over the world and bringing our farms to the public’s attention.

We launched our company 18-months ago and applied for our patent about a year ago and completed the process in May 2009. And, we’ll gladly admit that it has been ‘Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.” It has been exciting to bring a new product to market, yet terrifying to bring a new product to market during this economic downturn (makes me dizzy to just think about it). We’ve met thousands upon thousands of people from all over the world who have traveled to Southern California to tour our farms. Within the last year, we have provided more than 5,000 private tours to individuals and groups. Daunting! We’ve received interest from over 172 countries. We’ve spoken with world and government leaders, heads of Fortune 500 companies, families, churches, prisons, those in non-profit arenas, school administrators, home-schooling families, hospitals, retirement centers, nutritionists, survivalist groups and ‘back to the land-ers.’

In the process of caring for our live fish and vegetables, we’ve worked 14 hours a day for 18 months to grow our business. So we have many stories and experiences to share with you about aquaponics and about our life as people, business owners and inventors.

We simply ask you to ‘play nice’ and avoid vulgarity in your own posts. That’s it. Now let the games begin.

It’s Friday. I’m off to do my happy dance now. More soon.

Your friend,
Phyllis Davis