Backyard Farming, $100,000 a Year, Working Part Time, 1/3 Of An Acre!

I couldn't think of a better way to make a living.

Will definitely have to investigate this.

In sick of not having money, and im sick of buying food. This is genius, thanks

Hydroponics and Aeroponics are a great way to grow. There is a pretty big learning curve with them though.
Organic and fertilizer based grows have their own issues. Organics and chelated chemicals rot and mold at reservoir temps above 69 degrees and without heavy oxygenation tend to clog and gel up systems and are not as friendly if you have drip emitters or systems with line pressures less than 45psi. It gets real annoying. The best cheap small system I have ever seen was built with 8" big mama grow blocks made from spun volcanic rockwool. feed by an oxygenated sprayer tank. The tank has a built in pressure reg@45psi. It will go through a inline filter and into regulated drip emitters on top of each block. The system will run on a timer for 1-2 min every few hours, the end result being little to no run off and water waste. 7 gallons for 10 plants over 7 days is what I was seeing. Extremely efficient. Chemicals used in hydro have come a long way. I would not consider ever going back to organic, quality chemicals used are all food safe and extracted from those organic sources and stabilized for much more consistent pH levels. In my experience, hydro produces better tastes because it allows a more thorough removal of fertilizers. Dirt just holds it in.
Man awesome thread, I could spend hours on this topic

Just replying to keep this in my MYATS history. Very interesting. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

Awesome thread. I am bookmarking so i can try this out in the future.

I would love to hear anyone's experience of trying this from scratch/nothing

a reply to: DaphneApollo

You can rent a sod cutter from basically any tool rental place (including Home Depot, as the link shows) and take care of that grass problem. Now go...make your riches!

originally posted by: DaphneApollo
I had no idea California was that bad!

I would love to have a garden like on your page link, but I have too much grass. And it won't stay out of the way long enough for anything else to grow, it takes over. If it would, I'd be rich. Woohoo.

Cover your grass with a light proof membrane for a year, that should kill it.

a reply to: Justshrug

After watching my wife want to have a nice, flourishing garden for the last three years, I would say this--start small, at least for the first attempt. Hell, even start off with container gardening so that you can better understand how to care for each individual species of plant. Read up extensively on what you want to grow, because sometimes what seems logical will kill the plant (like watering frequency, types of pesticides [I'd recommend going organic], amount of sunlight, etc.).

There is myriad sites on the interwebs out there, so just start googling/binging and have fun.

I'd also recommend that you look at aquaponics, if you like to have fish you can eat as well...it's a pretty awesome, closed system that supplies it's own fertilizer naturally and is relatively cheap to get started. It's actually a really cool system, and does a LOT of water recycling in it so you're not constantly re-watering over and over.

I have a small garden that i just started

for the winter season i planted broccoli , cauliflower, romain lettuce, cabbage and tomatoes .

Lets see if i can get it to grow lol .


FFOr setting it up I bought a 16 foot 2X6 and got it cut into 4 4 feet , then i screwed it together into a square , put it inmy backyard and filled it with soil and then planted .

armakirais

This type of stuff has been my passion ever since I started to try and learn the root of the world's problems. Excluding the irresponsibility of humans both mentally and physically that, thankfully, in some areas seems to be fading away, it turns out that Geoff Lawton has hit very near the mark...

"All the worlds problems can be solved in a garden."

In my opinion, large-scale governments have no ecological precedent and their inefficiency/tyranny have almost always been a thorn in our collective side because: top-down management on the scale of 500 or so politicians for 300+ million people is unnatural in a energy-management sense. Nature teaches that efficiency (stalled entropy) is modeled by increasing beneficial connectivity at LOCAL levels. So a crappy government fills the niche that is created by an irresponsible crappy public. Want to fix a runaway government? Start by eliminating it's need/foothold by doing many of the things the good people in this thread have posted.

Permaculture, aquaponics, hydroponics, low-tech creativity such as rocket mass heaters and a blend of appropriate complex technology organized as locally as possible can literally transform our world and the way is operates.

snf

a reply to: signalfire

Great post. Thank you

a reply to: signalfire

Your friends in Cali are crazy, produce is quite abundant and cheap.

Everything else was great. I farm 3 months of the year when I'm in GA and if I spent more time here I'd probably follow a similar design.

I am new here, so I think this is the right spot for this, but the one thing I have noticed with any of these systems is water quality issues. More specifically speaking TDS values and pH levels. This topic should have its own string, but I find it extremely relevant to this subject. Water taken from municipal water supplies in the 2 states I hv tested have came back with between 400 and 500 ppm of dissolved solids. These solids are anything from minerals to pesticides and herbacides, to chorine, nicotine and pharmacuticals. For example, plants such as tomatoes enjoy a range around 700-1000 ppm of total dissolved solids of the nutrients, I belive. The problem is, when fertilizing these plants organic or chem, your numbers dont add up. You have to count the unwanted elements to your final mixture. In other words, you will never get the required nutes to the plants using treated tap water, when your TDS numbers start at 500ppm you only have room for 200ppm of nutes on a 700 ppm plant.
This is besides the point of pumping toxins directly into foods. The solution to this is to never use tap water without a 0ppm reverse osmosis filter system and the cheap solution, if available, is to use rainwater as your water supply, it usually containes 5-20 ppm of TDS.
This little discovery is the reason I don't drink non ro filtered city water and champion the idea of rain collection vs treatment of water for human consumtion. What really gets me is the pay for poison water supply in this country. Rabbithole worthy topic imo.
Hydro can be as easy as you make it, I see alot of guys with overly complex systems, I have built and designed some pretty insane systems and the problem is when you have a problem like pH swings, or pump failures that can wreck a whole crop in a couple hours. They require constant monitoring and adjustments to maintain acceptable pH and TDS/ec ranges. Start small and simple, at first with a bucket of water and nutes with a fish tank bubbler in it as your supply, run it into a hydro approved material that holds air and water but resists mold, such as rockwool or fired clay pellets. Practice keeping that in range with food safe pH up and down. Hannah makes good devices for this measurement. You can grow out from there. If anyone on here needs any type of advise geared towards hydro, let me know, I love this topic and see it as the only escape from rediculous food prices on toxic food.

Get real

Backyard Farming, $100,000 a Year, Working Part Time, 1/3 Of An Acre!

You could never do that unless you was growing weed or opium poppy's and it sounds about as true as those electrical generators that work from water instead of gas.

But if you like gold and have some money I can part you from then read my new book about how to dig for gold in your own back garden and become as rich as a bankers or if you invest in my secret pdf then I will show you how to dig for diamonds and live like a king.

Farmers know how to make a profit on the land and if they are having a hard time then you or me will have no chance.

a reply to: VirusGuard

You're just jealous. Urban agriculture can be very profitable, and this guy proves it.

originally posted by: funkadeliaaaa
a reply to: VirusGuard
You're just jealous. Urban agriculture can be very profitable, and this guy proves it.

No I am not jealous in the least or taken in so easy and NO I don't play lottery games.

Making toilet paper "Can be" very profitable but me knowing nothing about it would not fancy my chances and the guy selling generators that run on water "proves it" too.

I am 100% for people growing their own food and think that kids should be forced at school to do a lot more then just growing a carrot seed in a cup but talking about making $100k a year from a little bit of land is taking it a little too far for me.

Still don't let me stop you, go for it mate and let me know how you get on but be warned we are about to get an artic blast of cold air and I would want you to factor that in to your calculations with all this profit at stake.

Profitable till government regulation catches up to you or a swat raid maybe. One of the keys of fixing what is wrong with America should be the encouragement from government for small family farms, but this isn't the case. If there is a large agro industry here then expect a bunch of government regulation designed to crush the small farmer.

But I think its great him doing what he is doing, lets just hope he can continue for the long term.

originally posted by: VirusGuard
Get real

Backyard Farming, $100,000 a Year, Working Part Time, 1/3 Of An Acre!

You could never do that unless you was growing weed or opium poppy's and it sounds about as true as those electrical generators that work from water instead of gas.

But if you like gold and have some money I can part you from then read my new book about how to dig for gold in your own back garden and become as rich as a bankers or if you invest in my secret pdf then I will show you how to dig for diamonds and live like a king.

Farmers know how to make a profit on the land and if they are having a hard time then you or me will have no chance.

You didn't watch the video or the extra information at his website or FB site, did you?

If you HAD, you would have made note of the fact that as soon as he harvests a fast growing in demand crop like specialty lettuce for the restaurant trade, he immediately the same day replants another crop; he's harvesting in about 6 weeks, from April (started indoors, and he said the heat island effect in the city helps also) and so every plot he has is producing from April to October or so. So a new harvest/new profit every 6 weeks. Then he puts in lettuces that start in the late fall, go dormant during the extreme cold, and get going again very early in the spring; he also gives lectures on how to do all this, and I presume he's paid for that, but that's not included in his sales/gross profits.

He specifically states in his information that he learned over a few years' what sold, and for how much, and plants accordingly to get the highest yield and profits from the land; nothing that takes the whole summer to harvest like big squashes or watermelons...

Maybe if your attitude was more 'learning' and less 'debunking' you'd have more luck.