Sproutside the Box

Today I'm talking with Deborah at Sproutside the Box. You can follow on Facebook as well.

 

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00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Deborah at Sproutside the Box in North Carolina. Good morning, Deborah. How are you? Good morning. I'm great. How are you? How's the weather in North Carolina today? Actually, it's cooler than it has been. It's been staying right around 86.

00:27 And we're getting a cold front on Northeastern.  So  it's a little bit cooler today, probably mid seventies,  but the sun's out. So  no,  actually it's not supposed to start raining until I think late Friday  into Saturday. And then Saturday is supposed to be, you know, pretty heavy rain. oh My daughter lives in Florida and she's on the Miami side. So I think she's probably going to be okay.

00:57 but if she was on the other side, she'd probably be getting rain right now.  Okay, so tell me a little bit about yourself and Sproutside the Box. Well, my sister and I started the business um back in February  and our initial thought was to purchase a farm  and tower farm. So we purchased a tower  and started growing aeroponically and

01:26 It was just amazing the vegetables  that the tower produces. so  then I thought, well, you know, it only had like 28 ports.  So unless you purchase a quantity,  you really wouldn't have anything em much to say for like a business or a farm stand. And so  at that point, we decided we needed something a little bit.

01:54 faster with a faster turnaround time  and we came upon a website  for microgreens through Donnie DeLillo for  Donnie Greens microgreens.  Anyway, so we took that class  and we began growing microgreens  and it's evolved rapidly. um We deliver to homes, we do home subscriptions  and

02:24 So we deliver in a 30 mile radius and we also have,  we've branched out into salads. And so  now we have a big clientele for our salads  and it's just expanding from there. Right now we're actually looking for land so that we can put a tower farm and the microgreens  with a barn dominium on one spot. So that's where we're at today.

02:54 So much fun. Okay, so I have questions. The tower garden is the thing where it's a bunch of tubes and they have holes in them and you put a thing in and it has dirt and then you put those seeds in the dirt. Is that how that works? No. Okay, tell me. With this one it has a base that holds the water with a pump and it has one tube with

03:23 seven pots and each pot has four openings.  So  in our case, when we first got the tower, we didn't know how to grow seedlings. And so we purchased the seedlings with the tower.  And it came in one package one day, we put it together in a matter of 20 minutes, maybe tops.  And we have the seedlings in there in the pump going, you know, within

03:52 a couple hours  and you add nutrients to it and then it's on a timer. So it  waters itself. You don't have to do anything.  that's pretty neat. What kind of space footprint does it take up? Like how tall, how wide? um It's probably, I would say six feet tall with everything. We also have a caster, um like a little

04:21 bench that it sits on so that we can roll it around if we need to change positions for a better sun. And then it's probably about maybe two and a half feet around. So it doesn't take up much space. And you can have one in the house, they have a smaller version that goes in the house. But ours was out on our deck. And so we just grew from February to April.

04:51 We just watched it grow. We went out and sat down and watched it grow. We were growing microgreens in the meantime  in the house,  but not outside. Do you buy your towers exclusively from one company? Actually, we only have the one tower right now, oh but we did buy that from uh Tower Gardens.  They were out of Asheville, North Carolina.

05:20 and they're very, very nice