Meet me on the water, the beginning of the Floating Farm.

"I went into the woods because I sought to live deliberately...."  That is the quote most commonly associated with Walden.  It is one of my favorite books but that is not my favorite quote.  I have always believed that though quotes are great, the book should be taken as a whole and all aspects of it should be, for lack of a better term, ingested.  "A mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation..."

It is definitely a book that should be taken as a whole and one that fits the idea of the Floating Farm and River Lab.  We wanted this endeavor to be bold and adventurous.  We wanted it to be educational.  We wanted it to be profitable.  We want it to be sustainable and inclusive.

This is the blog where we are going to talk about these things.  We are going to talk about learning about our world, how these things and these projects are coming along and how we are moving forward.  We are inviting you along for the ride.  Meet us on the water.

5 bells...
We are consigned to dry land for the next three weeks. We training to rise and shine at five in the morning.  We can get a lot of things going first thing in the morning, but the biggest thing for us is dodging the heat of the day.  As we construct the River Lab, one of our biggest considerations is the heat of the day and how to focus the sun to the plants that need it, without roasting the humans who don't want it.

The design for river lab is simple. It is a box that rests on a platform, supported by plastic 55 gallon drums.  Easy right?  We have to keep the vessel in the current and still take all of these things into consideration.  Once we hit the water, and in fact every day, the routine will call for rising at 5 bells and getting things done before the heat of the day arrives.

We go into the water on July 2.  Right now we are concentrating on the plants and getting them growing and situated in a way that can be transplanted to a floating environment. This has basically meant finding containers that can accommodate them.  The goal is ever the same and we are constantly seeking modular, uniform containers.  We have settled on the oil containers that that hold fryer oil from fast food chains.  They are sturdy yet pliable enough to be manipulated.  They are food grade which was a big plus.

We are cutting the tops off and flipping them over to insert them into the bottom part.  This allows a platform to hold up the soil.  This way, we are able to create a kind of earth box with a water reservoir at the bottom.  The reservoir is fed through Coke bottles.

Right now, as these come together. everything is a hack with the mantra of reduce, reuse, recycle, flowing through our heads.