This solar powered vertical garden is an off grid living original design developed from a need to grow food in a small space using high-yield-high-density aquaponics growing techniques. The system is originally based off of a shipping container’s ability to stack vertically, as well as provide a portable and shippable solution for easily transporting and setting up a vertical farm. It will work in just about any backyard garden, and has potential for inner-city urban farming applications.
ESTIMATED FOOD PRODUCTION: Food production (based on an average high-yield-high-density growing system, is estimated at about 5 pounds per square foot. The vertical growing trays are 39 feet in length by 2.5 feet wide each. That equates to 97.5 square feet of growing space per tray. There are 10 growing trays in each unit, totaling 975sqft of gardening space. This means each unit is capable of growing (under optimal growing conditions; weather, temps, water, nutrients etc.) an estimated 4875 pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables per harvest.
THE TANK: The “fish tank” outside is basically a simple above ground portable pool powered by a single AC water pump which pumps the water to the top of each growing unit. This fish-tank is about 4400 gallons. This is capable (with proper water filtration through the aquaponics system) of raising up to 2500 or more tilapia at about an average weight of 1 to 1.5 pounds. That over a ton of fish, or 2500-3750 pounds of fish. Tilapia are the fish of choice because they are easier to raise, grow faster than most foodstock, and they taste great too.
WARNING: Water weighs about 8 pounds per gallon. This is an untested system. It’s a design concept, not a real product, nor is it for sale. If you build one, or plan to stack them, be sure to get an engineer to make sure it can support the load of thousands of pounds of water, wood, steel, and plastic that sits on each lower level. Do not try to build one of these without proper engineering and architectural knowledge, plans, permitting and oversight.
The purpose of this growing system is to maximize the yield of every quare foot of gardening space and to show that people simply don’t need a very large space to grow food. You can grow more food in a smaller space and help feed the hungry and poverty stricken people all over the world.
I’m releasing this design and open sourcing it for the benefit of the world.
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This design is OPEN SOURCE and free for all to use under the share and share alike non-commercial license and the GPL license. Meaning, you are free to use this design, build one for yourself, as long as you SHARE-ALIKE and attribute the design to off grid living and link back to us.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
