Things change fast in the Greenhouse. We published a beautiful Greenhouse photo (below) in our June 20th Blog post that featured the two Queens of the Greenhouse. They were huge Zucchini plants that were sitting in the back. In that picture, the middle beds had Okra and Corn that were little spindles of growth we hoped would survive. The original Zucchini Queens have been replaced by new Sovereigns, the Corn. It’s unbelievable how quickly and beautifully they are growing. And this corn is among the small number of corn stalks in all of the US that isn’t GMO! And believe it or not, this all happened in 18 Days.

Now you will notice that we have one rather challenging problem in our herculean efforts to grow corn in our Greenhouse. It’s obvious that at this incredible rate of growth, it won’t be long before our corn stalks reach the ceiling. We’re going to try to bend them forward and are taking the tomato plants that are standing in front of them out of the bed and planting them outside in order to accommodate the corn. We also have a ceiling window we can open to let two of the stalks grow out of the ceiling.

Next to the corn is a lovely little maid in waiting to the new Queens. It’s a Greek Basil plant. It seems that Basils of many countries love aquaponics systems. Here’s another shot of the Queen Corn, the Basil and the tomato plants.

Behind the tomato plants in another bed is Okra. We’ve never planted Okra before but it also seems to thrive in an aquaponics system. Apparently, Okra is a flowering plant that puts out edible green seed pods often called lady’s fingers or gumbo. So far, we haven’t seen any pods growing; but we sure do have the leaves.

In this last photo, you see the Queen Corn and the Okra together in one bed. The corn is spread across the back of two of our 11 sq. ft. Grow Beds. About midway in the shot at the top, you can see the roof window we’ll be opening so a couple of stalks can grow out of it.

So that’s the story of the recent Greenhouse coup. We’re learning gardening in this Food Forever™ Growing System as neither myself, Grace, or my partner, Oliver, had ever gardened before we built this aquaponics system and this Greenhouse. What’s important for you to realize if you don’t already know, we live in the California desert where the temperatures were 105 degrees F last week and there is no real soil, just sand. This is a climate-contolled system that is growing so much better than our outside raised bed plants with soil. This system is a great teacher, which explains why schools are buying our Food Forever™ Growing Systems; and we have them in several edible schoolrooms around the U.S.

Thanks for visiting. We’ll keep you posted on how the Queen Corn does as she runs into her “glass ceiling” (polycarbonate actually).

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