Hydroponic Farm

We discovered an all-organic, hydroponic farm near our house so we stopped by to see what it was about.

Here is a picture of our 'first harvest'. I couldn't wait to start cooking up a batch of tamarind soup and stewed greens. We used the turnips, parsley, tatsoi, part of the bokchoy, scallions and turkey sausage to make the soup, then the collards and turnip greens were stewed with scallions and some fine-chopped ham for a couple of hours. The cabbage is destined to go into a 'heated bath' with a nice corned beef, then the 2 bags of assorted lettuce leaves and broccoli have been commandeered as salad-greens. The rest of what's left will be taken care of pretty quickly.

Here are a couple of pictures Luann took while we visited the Urban Oasis Hydroponic Farm.

Dave & Cathy Hume take quite a bit of pride in the fact that they don't use pesticides or manure fetilizers that might carry harmful bacteria as have been found in the commercial produce food supply not too long ago.

Everything is carefully laid out so that the growing conditions are maximized for the produce that is grown.

The growing systems they use are available for purchase so you can do this at home, and they have training sessions to help homeowners decide if this is for them. They even take school field trips and such to show the kids what hydroponics growing is all about.

We were so impressed with how their farm is put together, that we bought a 'Farm Share' to see how this works out. As you can see from our first picture above, we got quite a bit that we will need to take care of before next weekend. It looks like I'm gonna have to start searching for recipes to accomodate our healthier eating... We'll keep you posted.