Small vertical farms pick up where Big Tech faltered
www.washingtonpost.com/business/202…— Jeffrey Dean (@jeffdean-uga.bsky.social) May 14, 2025 at 7:43 AM
Good news: I’ve got access to my email account again, so you can send garden pics to Anne-Laurie (at) balloon-juice.com. And if you’ve tried to contact me since mid-March… please re-send!
From the Washington Post, “Small vertical farms pick up where Big Tech faltered” [gift link]:
At a greenhouse in Mesa, Arizona, nine-foot towers of tomatoes and cucumbers and other assorted vegetables reach skyward, bathed in diffused natural light.
“We can grow 10 times the food using 90 to 98 percent less water,” True Garden founder Troy Albright says as he walks past rows of butter lettuce, basil and softball-size fennel bulbs grown in a vertical aeroponic environment that recirculates nutrient-filled water from a reservoir to seedlings above. In one month, his farm produces 15,000 pounds of leafy greens.
“Even when it’s 115 degrees outside, we can still grow food,” Albright says.
Vertical farms have emerged as a potential solution for problems as diverse as food insecurity, changing climates and urban renewal. Their economic viability, however, is in question. During the past five years, almost $4 billion of venture capital funding has poured into large energy-intensive and tech-dependent indoor vertical farms, yet many of these companies, such as the Jeff Bezos-backed Plenty, have declared bankruptcy. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Only a handful of vertical farming companies remain operating in the United States.
“We’re now in vertical farming 2.0,” says Nona Yehia, co-founder of Vertical Harvest, the first hydroponic vertical greenhouse in the U.S., based in Jackson, Wyoming, with plans to open a farm in Maine this year…
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What’s going on in your garden(s), this week?
War for Ukraine Day 1,185: Russia Continues It’s Combo Drone & Missile Attacks
sab
I bought a lettuce bowl (a small planter with a diverse collection of lettuces) last week. It’s growing live lettuces on our deck, instead of already picked lettuces wilting in our fridge. Husband is thrilled. ( No snark /// there. He smiles every time he goes by and sees it.) If I was more enterprising I would have started one myself but I am not enterprising lately.
Gloria DryGarden
I’ve planted lettuce and arugula in the part shade pots, by seed, and seedling starts. I’ve got dill sprouting, and a few cilantro seedlings. I was trying to sprout sunflower seeds, but made a mistake. Other veggie seedlings are waiting to be hardened off before going in the ground. I’m foraging a wild spinach and garlic chives from around the yard.
I have pansies, baby snapdragons and moss rose in pots, too, for love and color. We’ll see how this goes.
There is nothing like fresh salad with fresh herbs you just picked…first plants have to get a little bigger
sab
I used to garden a lot, to the neglect of indoors. My retirement plan was to stop with the yard. That is a big reason for our move last year. Get spouse on one floor with no need for stairs, and get me out of the yard. Stepson’s gardening girlfriend is discovering what I left behind. Irises, peonies, shasta daisies, daffodils, beebalm/monarda, obscure shade plants.
sab
@Gloria DryGarden: I do need to start a/an herb garden. I miss my chives. And basil. I am planting sprouting onions from indoors into the backyard. And garlic flowers are pretty (and perennial) and too whiffy to be inside.
Gloria DryGarden
@sab: this time of year, at the peak, is paradise in the garden. How sweet that your old garden is in the family.
Gretchen
@sab: I have pots on the patio with miracle gro moisture control potting soil. All the usual herbs: rosemary thyme parsley basil dill chives tarragon oregano cilantro. Cilantro usually bolts pretty quickly but it’s handy to have the rest available all summer. I don’t do much vegetable gardening any more now that I have a farm share. That’s about as much vegetables as we can eat
CarolM
@Gloria DryGarden: I have never been able to get sunflowers to grow! Last year I sowed seeds outdoors and they never germinated; this year I started them indoors under grow lights but they don’t look healthy. I’m not sure what will happen when I transplant them outdoors.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Gloria DryGarden
@CarolM: I wish I had luck with sunflowers. It turns out even people with “green thumbs” kill plants. I have this on good authority, the expert at the native plants nursery.
The sunflowers whose seed lay on the ground in winter, often volunteer easily.
The packaged seeds that say plant after frost, don’t manage to grow for me. All those pretty colors.. well, too bad. They need more rain, or something. or perhaps I should plant them before frost, hell with the packet instructions. Or under cardboard until they germinate, so the birds don’t get them. I’ve done that with peas I planted later.
You see my nym. If plants are princesses that need lots of water, they have to be in special microclimates, like some shade. I’ll have to ask the friends who succeed with sunflowers.
Jeffg166
The slugs are having a great time eating anything I put into the vegetable garden. I am thinking about forgetting about any produce from the vegetable garden this year. I don’t have the energy to deal with them.
They Call Me Noni
I don’t do any vertical gardening but my stargazer daylilies have definitely gone vertical. They’re about 4′ tall right now. I need to divide them this fall as they are very crowded.
Another Scott
@Gloria DryGarden: I got a couple of sunflower seed varieties to try to plant this year. They’re still in the packages, waiting – I need to hop to it in the next couple of days… Though the weather has been weird here in NoVA the last week or so. 44F when I glanced at my phone this AM! :-/
I remember taking a train in Austria a few years ago, and it went past some giant fields of sunflowers. It was quite the sight! E.g. (not my picture). The mechanized farms have figured out how to grow them – they should let the rest of us know!
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
JAM
@Gloria DryGarden: I grow sunflowers that reseed themselves every year, but this year I tried to grow the straight native species of sunflowers in the same area and not a single one sprouted. So I’ve reseeded the area again with some old Ferry Morse seeds that are only sprouting now. Luckily there are already several bird planted volunteers close to blooming, so I will have two crops of sunflowers this year. Maybe the native seeds were bad, but it’s humbling anyway.
Trivia Man
@CarolM: i got some good looking sunflower seedlings but they got leggy. When i put them outside, they weren’t strong enough to stand upright. Still green, but not thriving. The next batch i take outside for a few hours to try and make them strong before i transplant.
MagdaInBlack
Many, many (over 30) years ago when I was taking some Horticulture classes at Kishwaukee Jr College, out near Dekalb, IL, we visited a start up hydroponic “farm” growing vegetables and herbs. Now here we are with aeroponics.
frosty
I cleaned up my two 4×4 squares two weeks ago and planted lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, and pole beans in one of them. So far they’re coming up well and it’s time to plant the other one. I’m hoping I can keep planting lettuce every two weeks and have it fresh all summer but I expect it will get too hot for it in July and August. We’ll see.
The raspberry patch needs another plant or two also. Time for a trip to the local nursery today!
The other garden activity is building a compost bin out of 2x4s and cedar fence pickets. I got two sides done and started to attach them with the third side and found out I’d goofed, so I had to take them apart and redo them. The instructions only said what to do and showed a picture with no other details. Oops. I console myself by saying it doesn’t matter what it looks like, it’s not furniture.
This is the one I’m working on:
https://athomewithashley.com/diy-compost-bin/
CarolM
@Trivia Man: Thank you! I’ll give that a try.
CarolM
@Gloria DryGarden: Thanks, I enjoyed the sunflower discussion in this thread, I won’t give up hope yet.
No One of Consequence
@CarolM: Sunflowers will sprout indoors, but it is likely you don’t have enough lumens to power strong early growth. Those guys need as much sun as they can get. If your indoor sunflowers didn’t look healthy (assuming enough nutrient in the soil or water), then my guess is that your grow lamps weren’t powerful enough. No worries there, and don’t go buying beefy ones, just try to time your sproutings to get outside under full sun asap once they emerge and get a few inches tall.
Hope that helps,
-NOoC
Gloria DryGarden
@CarolM: to follow up on #20, don’t disturb their roots when you transplant. I think they might be delicate about that.
@frosty: butter head lettuces are more heat and bolt resistant…like, butter crunch, for example.
Glidwrith
@No One of Consequence: As a kid, my parents dug up part of the yard for a new patio and dumped the earth in an upper tier of the yard. That spring, a veritable forest of plants sprouted. They hit the four foot mark before we figured out they were sunflowers. The biggest head was two feet across and that forest was the best for hide and seek.
They never grew again, but we had sunflower seeds for years.
oldgold
What’s going on in your garden?
While it is probably true that hard work in the garden never killed anybody, I have always figured, why take the chance?
Despite this heartfelt belief, today, in honor of Memorial Day and in fulfillment of the Motherlode’s “or else” edict, I planned to work on transforming West of Eden (A/K/A “Your damn weed patch.”) into a serene butterfly garden.
Alas, I awakened to 32 degrees and a howling north wind at 35 mph. The Motherlode, citing the Geneva Conventions, despite my protestations, ordered me to call off my horticultural Memorial Day plans.
No One of Consequence
@Glidwrith: That sounds awesome. I’ve never had that experience, but some climbers I was living with planted some in the High Sierra. They did sprout them indoors, but moved them outside pretty quickly, as I recall, and man, they got enormous in that Cali sun.
Having a forest as a little kid of those to run around in would be otherworldly cool.
-NOoC
StringOnAStick
I built 16” tall raised beds for the veggies this year, and I’m really glad I did. I will keep taking photos and get a post together about it. The secret is to have a constant supply of started plants to put into places where you harvest something, and use plenty of compost tea as a folar feed.
I started some sunflowers inside and got them out to grow during the day as much as I could as it was still too cold to plant them out. I planted them and they were doing great but then the CA quail found them so now they are surrounded by a wall of garden fleece to give them a chance to get big enough to handle their feeding.