Enjoy a meeting and tour of UCLA's urban gardens with Wendy Coleman, Founder of LA Urban Farms, plus a Vertical Urban Garden including the first round of seedlings to grow 20 plants, pump, nutrients and everything they need to start growing. If winner lives within the delivery service area they will set up the garden. If not it will be shipped and they will be walked through the steps to set up their garden by virtual meeting or call. After initial setup they would take care of their garden themselves.
Tyler Gibbons for Pasadena Magazine "You’ll find LA Urban Farms in locations as diverse as UCLA, The Getty House, home of Mayor Garcetti, the Google cafeteria, the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas and Stanford University. It seems vertical gardens are sprouting up all over—and for a good reason! These super efficient, economical, low maintenance gardens just may be the future of produce farming and a vital piece of the sustainable community puzzle. The garden towers mentioned above, as well as those contemplated for the ThriveLA project, are distributed by LA Urban Farms. These modular towers can produce as many as 44 individual plants as quickly as every three weeks, in the case of leafy greens such as lettuce or kale. A bit longer for fruit baring vines, or tomatoes, squash and the like. A marvel of efficiency, the tower can do so using 95 percent less water and one-tenth the area required for traditional agriculture. And as Coleman relates, the benefits go well beyond the stunning production achievements. As she says, “There are so many wonderful things around horticulture therapy involved in the life cycle of plants. Planting something and watching it grow. To be part of that process creates such a different sort of connection between you and your food.” Sounds fantastic, but how does it work? Made of the best food grade plastic available, FDA compliant and free of the harmful components usually found in agricultural plastics, the garden tower is made up of stackable growing pots, that require only a 2.5 x 2.5 footprint to produce up to 44 individual plants (commercial unit) or 28 plants (residential unit). Seeds for the unit are germinated in natural rock fiber “seeding cubes.” Once germinated, they are placed in full light for a week or two, then transferred to the tower. The base of the tower is a reservoir that holds up to 20 gallons of water and a small wattage immersible pump. Research by world experts in plant and human nutrition led to the development of a proprietary aeroponic plant food that is added to the water. This nutrient rich food is the world’s first high performance ionic mineral solution specifically designed for all types of food and flowering crops."