Smallest Possible Rotation Space For Daily Yield Hydroponics
Even the smallest shelter can support a system like this one for daily greens! With automation of a sort and even timed grow lights! All On A $20 budget!!
Sprouts are easy and cheap to grow and, as locally grown vegetables, they offer additional environmental benefits by avoiding pesticides, food additives, and pollution from transportation.
Sprouts offer a powerful source of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and enzymes that fight free radicals, as sprouting can increase their potency by 20 times or more.
Because sprouts are oxygen dense, they protect the body against bacteria, viruses, and abnormal cell growth.
Vitamins, such as A, B, C and E, and essential fatty acid nutrients increase in sprouting.
When sprouting minerals bind to protein, making them more easily absorbed in the body.
Sprouted seeds, grains, and legumes help support cell regeneration.
Rich in dietary fiber and a digestive aid in absorbing other vitamins.
THE BIGGEST LOOMING THREAT IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW
Learn to see the signs … because it could not be more obvious at this juncture they are going to use the most reliable, ancient and powerful tool for genociding populations in their toolbox. They’ve been doing it for centuries and it has never failed.
Hunger. Famine. Starvation.
They are going to try to starve us to death before they offer us the bugs as the only thing left to eat. We have to be smart. We have to be efficient. We have to be clever and adaptive. We have to come up with mechanisms for feeding ourselves that are so simple that these systems will not fail us no matter how tight our situation gets.
The Vault-Sys / CD-OS module for hydroponics I have been working on for twenty years is going to be more expensive than this solution. It’s going to be larger scale, more automated and is going to do everything but harvest the produce when it is ready to eat. That’s not what I am writing about here.
This is the ultimate village idiot last resort failproof solution I am going to discuss here. It’s an alternative when everything else is not available. It is not anticipated this setup will be managed by anything other than a timer that comes packaged with the solution normally. If you didn’t get a timer with your kit, don’t worry - you’ll have to plug and unplug the lights manually.
First, let’s talk about aspects of survival, shelter life and diet in a famine that you can manage. The aspects you can control.
If you’ve got a bag of beans of any variety, you can add fresh salad to your meals.
There are two important things I have gleaned about personnel in long term survival shelter scenarios by reading research documents from the 1950’s and 1960’s about studies conducted by the Civil Defense program and the Rand Corporation.
Two Things you can control in your shelter personnel
If you have chosen wisely in your companions, the adults are likelier to fare much better than most of the people you see in disaster movies.
Most of the civil defense research projects for long term shelter inhabitation done in the 1950’s got their experimental subjects and volunteers from military personnel. These types of people usually have far better profiles than civilians in handling long term boredom, stress and diet restrictions.
There were far fewer “screaming meemies” in shelter experiments than Hollywood would like you to believe. Very few experiments ended up with people banging on the inner hatch shrieking to please be let out and having to terminate the exercise. It was the ending of quite a few Twilight Episodes but the reality is the adults in these experiments remained civil, clean and disciplined up until the end of the studies. They tended to handle both psychological and physical stress quite well. I doubt if your average millennial nowadays would last 24 hours underground, much less 24 days or even 24 months.
On the other hand, what these same experiments showed was that failing morale in children was one of the greatest stresses on the adults of any other control factor in shelter living. If the children were unhappy, the adults were unhappy and it was contagious … in no time everybody in the shelter would be plunged into deep depression, anxiety and fearfulness. The anxiety of children is infectious to the adults who feel tasked with their care and wellbeing no matter what other control factors are present. If they can’t help those children, it makes them feel like they cannot help themselves either. Therefore seeing to the happiness, security and well-being of all children in the shelter is paramount to keeping the adults stable and in charge of their emotional states. (Whether they are your own or somebody else’s children and kin)
Diet is one of the most important factors in keeping people and children coping well in survival situations. It’s critical to survival itself, for more reasons than just sustenance.
Two Things you can control in the most critical component of shelter existence - your shared diet
One of the things you will notice right away in shelter meals is that the metabolism of both the adults and the children in the shelter is not adjusted correctly for the new schedule of food groups and requirements. Chances are your Western diets make you a glutton for sugar at least twice a day and your blood sugar will vary correctly. You may be getting adequate calories but the lack of fast foods, candies, sweets and salt and transfats will feel very weird. The children will notice it right away and it will take a while for their metabolism to adjust itself to feel “normal” and satiated after a meal. Their blood sugar will have to relearn how to balance itself on the back of a likely high carbohydrate, low protein diet that is calorie adequate but otherwise feels restricted.
One good way to handle this is to divide the meal and the dessert into two definitive stages. When the children finish the meal and feel it was not quite enough or adequate, instead you can teach them to look forward to the dessert as a habit. It’s more than just the serving of dessert, it’s the psychological trappings of eating dessert together. Both children and adults should learn this is a time of togetherness, no distractions, no leaving the table. Some can help prepare dessert, others can sit and talk in anticipation about it. It’s supposed to be fun and enjoyable. It’s good if it can change a little bit each night so it is always novel and a bit of surprise. Whether it’s hard candy, jello, canned fruit, powdered ice cream mix, raisin bran cookies, biscuits with peanut butter, caramel popcorn, chocolate or some other confection with a good shelf life. It’s great to have a folder filled with recipes you can use to vary every single dessert so that it prevents dietary fatigue in children, who will learn every meal is to be enjoyed as a prelude to the dessert. Dinner is also a good time to serve a hot beverage for the adults and children to begin settling down for sleep.
As for the diet itself, nothing quite adds as much variety to the storage food as fresh greens every single night. One of the best candidates for a crop that can be harvested every few days in rotation is sprouts. You can sprout beans, wheat and many kinds of raw seeds to produce both nutritious sprout roots and even budding leaves. You can make salad dressing from bottled apple cider vinegar and All-Spice by dropping a tablespoon of spice into a bottle and shaking it up. A little of it goes a long way. In combination with a main entree the sprouts can be served a variety of ways and they’ll definitely make dinner and lunch feel real, varied and nutritious. Bean sprouts are high in insoluble fiber and Vitamin C, in addition to peptides thought to lower blood pressure. They have been proven to improve digestion and may help with sleep with small amounts of melatonin.
The thing about fresh greens compared with a new dessert every night is that the greens will take a little bit of daily work to plant and harvest that is usually not as elaborate as the preparation of a dessert.
Our goal for this kind of hydroponics is inspired by the writings of Cresson Kearney, the author of NUCLEAR WAR SURVIVAL. We want to turn greens production into an extremely compact procedural practice that yields a daily harvest sufficient to feed your existing inhabitants every day. In as little surface area as possible with as little energy requirements as are possible. The ideal sprouting facility would fit into less than a meter square and be powered by no current or as little current as you could expect a single small solar battery could produce in a day or less. The sprouts need light to grow and small LED light sources are adequate for this kind of production - in fact, they are almost ideal.
This setup could be powered by a handcranked battery, a solar panel or even a small “D” cell array of commercial batteries. The fact we’re powering LEDs instead of incandescent bulbs means daily power requirements can be met by a fraction of what is required in conventional indoor hydroponics. Cresson Kearny claimed in NUCLEAR WAR SURVIVAL that he had successfully sprouted from candle light … which is about as low-tech as it gets!
Meals are a good time to make it a ritual to thank God for his blessings and to reinforce the feeling in the group that we are fortunate, secure and well provisioned. Two or three meals a day which restore morale can be the secret to shelter life being tolerated well and keeping despair and sadness away. It’s not good for the inhabitants to take their meals in isolation unless they are quarantined and have no other choice. Otherwise they should learn to work together at meal times if nothing else. It’s the same for the work around meals … washing dishes, preparing, cleanup afterwards. It is good to retain a roster for kitchen detail and rotate everybody through the job regularly.
The habits around greens production are an important job and can be a good way to involve people in the task so they are kept busy with seeding the sprouts, keeping them misted with water and harvesting the yields with a trustworthy methodology. Each day there should be at least one person checking the sprouts to make sure they are getting light and the temperature is not so cold it impedes their growth. Then when these sprouts are stored somebody making certain they are kept clean and cool until they are eaten at meals.
BEST SPROUTS FOR RAPID HARVEST, NUTRITIONAL VALUE & TASTE
Remember to use clean, unprocessed organic beans, seeds or grains.
Avoid any sprouting from seeds that might be chemically treated
Avoid seeds, beans and grains contaminated by leaks, mold or spoilage
Mung Beans - Highly recommended - Sprouts fast in 24 hour cycle, highly nutritious
Quinoa - Another 24 hour sprouter! Can be made into soup or salads. Nutty tasting.
Brown Rice (!) - Ha! Didn’t see that coming, did you? 2-3 days to sprout, tastes nutty
Kidney Beans - Very nutritious, unusual tasting but they sprout slowly (4-6 days?)
Buckwheat - Two days to sprout and very nutritious
Chickpeas - Weird tasting but good, very good in soups and stews (2-3 days sprout)
Alfalfa - Can be used in salads, nutty crunchy and even features small leaves
Lentils - Sprouts in 3-6 days, extremely nutritious, mixes well into stews and salads
… don’t stop here! You can sprout nearly anything untreated and chances are it will be a great addition to your diet.
Some sprouts need certain wavelengths of light to photosynthesize, specifically those in the red and blue portions of the light spectrum, which regular white lights don't emit. Grow lights should be full-spectrum, meaning they put out similar wavelengths of light as those emitted by the sun - or at least emit blue and red wavelengths specifically.
The best grow lights for energy efficiency are going to be LED lights. They are widely available including full spectrum and dedicated red-blue arrays.
Many plants don't need light until they've sprouted. However, some seeds must be sown on the surface and receive bright light to germinate in the first place, so be sure to check the directions on your seed packet or reference the instructions you have on the type of seeds/beans you are sprouting.
How to Sprout Just About Anything With Nothing But A Glass Jar and a Piece of Linen to Cover The Mouth
This is possibly the lowest tech sprouting factory you can get away with. It is hard to imagine survivors who cannot put this setup together to sprout regularly.
Use clean potable water for soaking and rinsing each time.
Step 1: Soak the seeds to prime them to sprout.
Use a colander or strainer to thoroughly rinse your mung beans with clean water in the sink or a bowl. Run water through the beans until it runs clear, then run your clean hands through the beans to remove any dust or debris. Get off to a good start by making certain the beans are clean when they absorb the water they need to begin sprouting.
A good rule of thumb is to use three parts water to one part seed. Start with 1 tablespoon of seeds. Place the seeds in a clean wide-mouth glass jar, cover with water, and stir to make sure all the seeds are wet. Cover the jar with a mesh lid or a piece of muslin cloth that has been secured with a rubber band. Set the jar aside and allow the seeds to soak for 6-8 hours.
Step 2: Drain and rinse the soaked seeds so they get oxygen.
Once the soaking time is up, you need to drain your seeds. Tip the jar over the sink and drain out the water. Add fresh water to the jar, swirl it around a little, and then drain out that water. Make sure to really shake out as much water as you can. Set the jar angled downward in a bowl to help with aeration and drainage. It’s important to keep the seeds draining nicely, and this seems to do the trick. Set the bowl with the jar in it in an out-of-the-way spot. It doesn’t need to have sunshine, but it does need to be able to breathe.
Step 3: Rinse, drain, repeat.
Visit your sprouts twice a day and rinse them with fresh, cool water, drain, and prop back up in the bowl. For most seeds, you’ll start to see little baby sprouts within a day or so. Keep on rinsing and draining until the sprouts are the length you want. Usually this takes 4-5 days.
Step 4: Harvest, store, and use your sprouts.
Give your sprouts one final rinse and drain, then remove the jar lid and place all the sprouts onto a clean, absorbent kitchen towel. Then, wrap the sprouts up and close the container. Extra moisture is the enemy of sprouts. Store your sprouted harvests in cool locations for a week at a time. After this they should be eaten or thrown out.
Special Considerations
Seeds won’t sprout in freezing temperatures. Keep the seeds at room temperature minimum. If necessary heat the space they are in with a candle, lantern or incandescent bulb. The lightbulb is good because it yields both grow light and heat if you keep the seeds in an insulated space.
Don’t rinse the seeds in any questionable water, no gray water and don’t reuse water that has not been filtered and oxygenated. To oxygenate the water, try pouring it back and forth into two containers until it begins to show bubbles again. Radioactive water has been shown to stunt seeds from developing in very small doses, so make certain your drinkable water supply is not contaminated in any way.
Not all sprouts need light but the ones that do can actually get away with very low level lights if that is all you have. A little more light won’t hurt any of these sprouts but it always contributes to a faster turnover.
I hope this stack helps to introduce this subject. I look forward to an entire manual or a very extensive article showing how to set up VAULT-SYS for even limited setups to automate them. Although this barest minimum described above is the simplest possible hydroponics factory you could run in a shelter, there are architectures that might use no more than a broom closet or a single square meter to yield vastly improved harvest of fresh produce.
Genesis KJV 1:29 - 1:30
29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
Regards, Tex
Love this from another sprouting enthusiast. My partner has been sprouting for a while now, always uses the mason jar technique. Cleaner than plastic, and we have the option to do that, at least at this point.
Great info again, this substack has been a goldmine of useful articles for me. Thanks!