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I have been researching ways to grow vegetable crops to make some extra money with hopes of building a solid growing business.
My motivation was originally an acquaintence who started growing micro greens about 20 years ago and has built the business to a million dollar business. He is about to retire and will be selling his equipment and accounts for about $360,000. With only 20 customers, I was impressed by the claims that he makes that much profit and still cannot keep up with the demand for micro greens.
So, I started a garden, with lettuce, tomatoes, okra, corn, beans, carrots and various other vegetables to get my feet wet with gardening. As a side note, my wife was always the one interested in gardening while I was working in Information Technology and was away from home much of the time. Now that I’m not working, I am able to enjoy the freedom of doing things I love to do also.
After embarking on my first real garden, I decided on building some greenhouses and a compost bin. I found a man who had lots of half-round professional greenhouses he didn’t need any more and he allowed me to disassembly about 2,000 square feet of greenhouses which fits nicely in my current .25 acre rental.
At this writing, the greenhouses are erected and the compost bin is built. The plastic still needs to be installed to cover the greenhouse and I’m learning about composting.
While thinking of ways to maximize the space of my greenhouses, grow and harvets the maximum crop yields with the maximum profits, I first decided on the square foot gardening method. This method uses 6 inch tall boxes with 4×4, 4×8, 4×12 grids where you can plant 16 different crops in a 4×4 container.
The difficulty I had with this idea is that you have to build the boxes, buy the vermiculite, peat moss, and blended compost to fill the boxes. Although this method required less work after setup, the cost seemed to be prohibitive for me in growing the quantitiy and quality I need to profit from the business.
In the process of building a supporting structure for the square foot garden boxes, I realized the yield and space utilization didn’t seem to fit my goals. So I start researching hydroponics.
At the grocery store, I noticed the significant price difference between organic lettuce and hydroponic lettuce. The price of the higher quality hydroponic lettuce was over double that of mere organics.
For my hydroponics system, I started with a coupld of 10′ plastic gutters, some 1/2″ poly tubing, a 20 gallon black trash can and a water pump. The concept for an expandable nutrient film technique (NFT) system is sound, but currently, the pump I have is too small to achieve the volume of nutrient flow I need to make the system work.
My blog will detail the steps taken and the progress made as I continue with my hydroponic adventures.