From a recent magazine article:
The cover story is the pioneering intensive gardening project of Glenn Ekblom working with Mike and Jo. This is both a fascinating story and an incredible opportunity for the game-changing sustainable community-making that Vista del Valle is known for.Don't forget our continuing musical weekends. Enjoy Jazz Brunch on Sundays from 12-2PM with the Joe Anello Quartet. Delicious food and great company!
Hydroponic garden amazes all visitorsVista del Valle's demonstration greenhouse is running like clockwork by Stephen DuplantierWhen you step inside Glenn Ekblom's oblong tent tucked away in a corner of Vista del Valle's lush gardens and paths, you see a lot of plumbing tubes and valves and stacks of garden pots, but mainly you see impossibly gorgeous, healthy, and huge heads of lettuce, plus tomatoes, and basil.You are standing in an intensive hydroponic greenhouse where the neat rows of 480 stacked square pots can grow 1,920 garden plants in one third of the time it takes outside in a traditional vegetable garden. The tubes deliver a nutritious elixir of fertilizer to the top pot for 11 minutes four times a day. The hydroponic fertilizer drips down to water all the pots below it.The hot March and April sun in Rosario de Naranjo warms the inside of the tent more than then plants need, so every two hours all the plants get a misting spritz for a few minutes from tubes and spray heads in the ceiling of the tent. The cooling mist lowers the temperature a full 24 degrees in just seven minutes. The mist also contains more fertilizer and an organic fungicide to keep all the leaves healthy. The mist is so fine and the system is so well tuned that in two weeks of showers all day long, only 25 gallons of water is used.Nothing is wasted. The spray that drips to the floor flows out of the greenhouse to an outside melon and squash garden.Glenn proudly shows off the neatly plumbed tubing system, turbine pumps, filters, timers, and valves. This system from the Vertigro company in Florida is a proven way to grow superb vegetables in small spaces. Glenn, originally from the Florida Keys, is an old hand at landscape design and horticulture. This demonstration project at Vista del Valle is so efficient and so fast that it easily supplies all the kitchen supply needs of the restaurant with plenty left over. The controlled hydroponic watering and fertilizing yields healthy plants and vegetables with almost no waste or loss. The efficiency and compactness of the system is a key to its future success in communities in Costa Rica with little access to organic vegetable supply. As our world changes and contracts with the multiple crises affecting it so dramatically, it has become more and more important for communities to be self-sustainable and able to create and run locally-based food enterprises. This is why Michael and Johanna Bresnan, owners of Vista del Valle, were so interested in creating this demonstration project.One important mission of Vista del Valle is sustainable living and developing the practical means to get there."When the best organic produce for community consumption also becomes a source of money for enterprising small business and coops, then you know you are doing the right thing," said Michael in describing the hydroponic greenhouse. Johanna commented enthusiastically about how a single mother could work in a cooperative greenhouse close to her home and leap ahead to be in the vanguard of organic food production and cooperative local economics.I went back to take another look at the jewel-like greenhouse shining in the midday sun. The plants were so beautifully green and lush that you knew they were happy. I spotted a forest of leaf lettuce, hybrid tomatoes, and the healthiest-looking Italian basil I have ever seen. You could almost hear that green house salad trio of lettuce, tomato, and Italian basil singing the classic Neapolitan love song O Sole Mio-- "my own sun." If you sneak back to the greenhouse and are very quiet this is what you would hear Glenn's plants singing--in between drinking their fertilizer cocktails and taking their frequent showers. O Sole Mio (in an English translation): What a wonderful thing a sunny dayThe serene air after a thunderstormThe fresh air, and a party is already going onWhat a wonderful thing a sunny day.But another sun,that's brighter stillIt's my own sunthat's in your face!The sun, my own sunIt's in your face!It's in your face!In Neapolitan, their song goes like this:(Listen to the three tenors--Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and José Carreras-- sing this classic O Sole MioChe bella cosa na jurnata 'e sole,n'aria serena doppo na tempesta!Pe' ll'aria fresca pare già na festa...Che bella cosa na jurnata 'e sole.Ma n'atu solecchiù bello, oje ne'.O sole miosta 'nfronte a te!O soleO sole miosta 'nfronte a te!sta 'nfronte a te!
