Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Couple O' Nukes. As always, I'm your host, Mr. Whiskey. And for those of you not watching on YouTube, I am in a room full of house plants as a little hint at today's conversation. It's very interesting episode, in my opinion, very different than everything else we've had on the show and not an episode I ever expected to have.
I came across this person online and when I saw their business and saw their website. And researched. The lifestyle that they're offering. It's very interesting. So I'm here with Mr. Cliffheart, and he is the founder of planter. Essentially, it talks about hydroponics led light growth and talking about gardening from within your home in a sustainable manner and in a healthy way.
Mayor that can be done in pretty much any space that takes a minimum amount of room in your home and is affordable and practical. And so in a world of economic turmoil, where a lot of people are coughing up their whole paycheck for groceries in a world where people are very hesitant to buy a lot of goods because of pesticides and chemicals, and then the organic homegrown stuff is triple the price.
This is an interesting solution. So Mr. Clift, please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about all of this. Yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate you having me on here to talk about it. Uh, well, I started working on growing food for myself about 13 years ago and lived in the greater DC area.
I always lived in apartments, small spaces inside the city and in suburbs, uh, had rarely ever had a backyard. So I started to challenge myself and I started with container gardens and I noticed that there just wasn't a lot of efficiency in that. You couldn't grow a lot of food and it really wasn't worth your time, uh, ultimately, but something happened about three years ago and, uh, we can thank cannabis, uh, however you feel about that wonderful plant.
Uh, it actually unlocked a lot of production in the led lights and that forced down led light. Prices to the point where it's possible to grow more than 75 pounds of greens, herbs, and fruiting plants indoors year round, and just the few square feet of space, put it in a closet, uh, devote a corner of your living space.
It doesn't matter. I mean, you can be in a high rise apartment somewhere in New York city. You could be in rural America, wherever you want. Uh, the nice thing about it is most of the plants that we like to consume. Live in the same temperature range that we do indoors. And if you take those plants outside too hot in the summer, much too cold in the winter time.
But if you do that indoors, smooth sailing, 12 months out of the year. Right. And I think now more than ever, people are renting compared to buying or homeowning. And so more people are renting and we've seen, especially in New York city, I've seen a lot of videos of just the. Size of apartments getting smaller and smaller with the price going up nonetheless.
Uh, but like you said, this is something that could fit in a closet, something that can be done in any style and year round. And you're talking about 75 pounds of vegetables from just one small space. And if done efficiently, you can have multiple setups in wherever you're living. And so that's going to be more and more and more, which I don't even know how, how many pounds a person consumes on average, but I know you've been living off of this for a while.
So. How many, how many setups do you have personally and do you know how many pounds you yield each year? Yeah, so to give it, just to give a high level sense of how it works, roughly one person should have around 15 plants growing herbs and greens in hydroponics. Hydroponics grows back 30 percent quicker.
It's going to get up to speed to start harvesting 30 percent quicker than soil. So about 15 plants per person, uh, kind of a ballpark. So how many members of your household figure out, how do you get to that number? So if it's, you know, two people, 30, 45, 60, something in that range. Right. Right. Presently I have, I mean, I have some systems offline, but, but if I wanted to, and I, and I put up everything I had, I could do about 200 plants in my space.
Wow. Uh, at the moment I have four. Well, actually seven, technically seven. There's a couple of smaller ones that only do like four or eight plants, which I don't really, I mostly use them for demonstrations out in the community. They're just too small to really produce a lot, but they're great for demonstrations.
They're light, they're easy to take out. Uh, but with that in mind, I, I harvest every day. I mean, I, if I, I mean, I have extra ones too, like I can do breakfast, lunch, dinner. Greens, herbs all the time. Uh, tomatoes take a bit longer. Your fruiting plants take a bit longer. We can go into, go into the details behind those a little bit more if you like, but, uh, those are, I mean, greens and herbs we're at grocery store prices.
It's simple. It's easy to do. Um, there's, there's just no reason not to do it for yourself. Just save yourself the trip to the grocery store and get the best possible greens you can. So before we get further into detail about all the plants were growing for those of us who aren't familiar with hydroponics, can you explain that concept to us?
Yeah, sure. So inside the regular soil, there's a complex web of biochemistry going on organisms living and dying in as part of that ecosystem. Nutrients are released from the soil. Which are then picked up by plant roots using water and then pulled into the plants to grow. Now, hydroponics is just soilless agriculture.
So what we've done is essentially recreate the nutrients, the major nutrients and many of the micronutrients needed for good plant growth, put that into a liquid package, and then we apply that to the roots of the plants. So that gets you a number of efficiencies. So Where are you buying these, so they're essentially bags of liquid nutrients, like, almost like protein shakes for, for plants, essentially.
Yep. And you find those available online or, or does your company sell them? Uh, we don't sell them directly. They're part of our subscription service. So like if you signed up for our basic service, you'd get a three month supply right away. And, uh, there's lots of different versions out there. The ones that we use are just simple.
Uh, you fill up your system. What, like start your system, put in your, uh, fresh gallon or half gallon, whatever it might need top it off over the course of a month. And at the end of the month, you're going to pour out your old nutrients and pour in a fresh gallon that releases all of the problems that you might have.
Typically you'll, you might in other systems, you'll have to do pH balancing. You might have to monitor oxygen connectivity, many things like it's complex. It's like chemistry, science, science experiment. Um, I've never liked that. I want it simple. Right. So that's the one that we recommend. We live very busy lives.
So. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Um, I spend, I spend a few hours a day in my garden. It is all harvesting. I spend, actually, I get tired of harvesting and eating the same plants. My biggest problem right now is how many times I can cycle new plants through the system because I want to try something new. Right. And so when you say herbs and greens, what exactly are you growing in your garden and that we can also grow?
So, a green loosely encompasses lettuce, all of your kinds of lettuces, your brassicas, which would be spinach, um, almost anything with a leaf, essentially. Herbs is kind of It's the simple way to put it. I mean, basil mint are kind of the most common versions of them out there, but there's thousands of kinds of these plants that we've we just never get to experience because because grocery stores have no incentive to provide us diversity.
All they do is provide us the same four things. But, uh, if you want to, you can have 16 different kinds of basil growing in your system and then choose among them. And there's hundreds of varieties of these plants out there. And that's a big thing, what we do at Planter. We introduce new varieties. We get people to expand their palate.
How do you cook with these things? It's a total lifestyle change. So with Planter and the subscription services, Do we get sent packets of different seeds or we can choose and select or how does that work? Yeah. So we went with a local community grower model. And I did that because one thing I noticed after doing, let's see, two, 300 classes online for free, people, people came to the class.
They're like, yes, I want to do this. But then they didn't start. And I think a big reason why is because it's a very human thing, and you really got to be around the right to do it. And you need to have a system to try something from to compare against what we have in the grocery store. So, our model is, uh, The basic stage, your first tier basically is a package that comes with three months of nutrients, seeds, and plugs.
And then we help you find a system to start with. So we've got a selection of like all of the available systems, the different kinds, the positives and negatives of each ones. It kind of help you to make that, that selection. So the systems are all sold separately. It would be hard to bundle them up together, get you started.
And then if you subscribe over the longer term. More nutrients, new seeds to try every month. So we, we keep sending you stuff in the mail. So that's the basic. The other two tiers are only available in our local areas where we have a community grower. That's DC, Maryland, Virginia and Cincinnati. And we're looking for other people that would like to start to grow as well as community growers, but that model is.
You can actually do a live class, get a system built at the end of that class. And then we provide you seedlings at the end of every month. So when you get tired of those plants, no worries. We just pull out a plant and we pop in another seedling in a week. You're harvesting from that new plant. So it's just a constant, constant flow of food.
Right. And of course, I imagine do you stagger some of your systems? So there's just always something new coming in. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Ideally, what you'd want to have is around the 30 plant level, because that means you can always have 15, 16 coming up. To speed and like producing heavily. And then a week or so later, you've got your next system coming up and producing that.
That's the most efficient way to do it. But those two systems you will be eating every day. I mean, realistically to keep the plants from growing out into the lights, you've got to eat constantly from the systems. So you need to be creative. Right. And just a different side of it. Are there any plants that are kind of off limits or that we shouldn't expect?
Uh, well, with the hydroponics, uh, and keep in mind that I'm not against soil growing. Like, I have, uh, fruiting plants do great in soil. I have tomato plants growing right now that I love. Uh, it has its place. It just is much slower. So it's like how much space do you have versus time and then how much you want to produce.
So keep that in mind. Um, there's a few things I would never put into a hydroponic system. First of all, mint. It goes crazy. Like mint is a weed. If you put mint out in the worst possible conditions, that thing thrives. Definitely don't put mint into a hydroponic system. Just put it under an led light in the worst quality soil you've got, and it will be fine.
Unless you really love mint for some reason, then by all means. Well, yeah, the only problem is, um, the mint I've seen the actually strangle pumps inside of the hydroponic systems and almost kill the system. It grows that ravenously, huh? Yeah, wow. Yeah, I learned something new today. Yeah, it just grows so well in soil You don't even need it.
Like the boost from hydroponics is kind of irrelevant. In fact, it's detrimental. The other thing that you have to you have to be mindful of with these systems is that most of them have very small root zones to grow with. Right. You're going to want to focus on dwarf fruit plants. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, they all have a smaller dwarf size and that's the right size for your hydroponic systems.
Don't be planting potatoes. They, uh, they have big root systems. So exactly right. Now for the soil based practices, I did see on your website, you talked about turning the waste in our home into nutrients for our soil. So can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. I'm a huge fan of vermicomposting, which is essentially using red wiggler worms that we would commonly use for fishing, but you can actually put those inside of a box, mix it with.
coffee grounds, tea leaves, banana peels, and shredded junk mail. And those worms will turn all of that scraps right into what is essentially kind of called black gold. It is the most perfect kind of compost. And to give you a sense of the production levels, I regularly take one pound of, of scraps from my kitchen and I put it into my box and that will turn into a pound of compost.
So it's a one to one conversion. It's very efficient. Right, and we all have way more than one pound of, uh, waste and scraps hanging around our kitchens usually, especially if you're a household of three or four or five, so that's, that's awesome. And so if I'm, I just want to make sure I'm understanding correctly that hydroponics is just like a, a, a tank and there's, uh, just pure liquid in it.
And then there's just the plants are just inside of it. Yeah. The plants do grow in a type of, of, um, it's, it's a medium basically. And it comes in two forms. One is coconut core, which is the leftover husk of coconut. The other one is rock wool and either way, I mean, essentially what they're doing is just, they are a, an inert mass to hold the root system in place, right?
As the plants growing, that's all. Now, I do want to get into the cost of all this a little bit, so we talk about you're saving money, you know, not spending all this money on groceries and expensive organic products, and we've talked about it's time efficient and it's space efficient, but what is the startup cost looking like when we're looking to getting a hydroponic system or an LED light system?
Of course, like you said, There's plenty of different kinds, there's different sizes, it's all depending, but the most basic one that you would recommend for people. Yeah, so there's a couple of ways to break this down. There's vertical system and box systems. Now, there's a lot of the box systems that are sub 15 plants.
Anything below 15 is probably not going to be efficient unless you're just growing it for specialty herbs. It's okay to start with, but you're not really going to replace the grocery store by growing specialty herbs. So the general cost is somewhere around 200 for a kind of a DIY system with a stand, third party grow lights, and a stand.
And a vertical hydroponic system that's, that gets you 16 plants at a time. And that's actually using a system that we provide in our live classes, but it does take some knowledge to put it together. There's some operations for it. So if you just want something out of the box, probably let pot L E T P O T their 21 plant system is probably the best overall it's similar priced.
It's around the 200 mark. That will do 15 plants at a time. Uh, no, sorry. That will do 21 plants at a time. And it also has a separate function for two fruiting plants. So you can switch between them. So if you wanted to like greens and herbs for one cycle and then put it, put in tomato plants or cucumbers or peppers, you could do that.
It's pretty flexible in that, in that respect. And for those cycles, the. Fruit budding plants will be a longer cycle. Is that correct? Yeah, in hydroponics, as long as you keep the system up, I've seen hydroponic tomatoes growing over 12 months. Awesome. And for that system that you just mentioned and recommended, what exactly does that come with again?
What does that look like if we were to set up in our home? Uh, yeah. So it's, it's a small box. It's about this big and it's got a light, a built in light above it. It will go up pretty high. So it will accommodate those larger tomato plants, you know, the dwarf size fruit plants. Uh, it has an app, lots of bells and whistles.
Uh, if you subscribe to our basic. service, then we send you nutrients, the easy ones that you just pour out and reuse as needed. It does come with nutrients. They're a little more, little more difficult. There's like an A and a B and you, you, I didn't get great results with them. So I just switched back to using ours when I tested my system initially.
Uh, but it, the thing I like about it is it hits the minimum on the plant numbers you want for the greens and herbs and it does have the flexibility for those fruiting plants. Um, everything else that can get you that level is usually somewhere between 600 and 800, maybe as much as 1, 000, 1, 200. Right, and I'd rather spend 200 than all that money when I, especially if I'm just starting out.
So, I think the best thing you mentioned there is the size is just, you know, a couple of feet. You could put it wherever you have a dresser or, you know, a desk or something. It doesn't take up that much room, so. What I'm really curious about because I'd have to study this more is how the LED lights affect growth rate and plant health compared to sunlight.
So obviously you've grown a lot of plants using LED lights. Have you seen a difference? How does it work exactly? Yeah, the primary difference between the LEDs and the sunlight is the intensity. So this obviously the sun is a giant nuclear reactor. These LED lights have to be really close to the plants in order for them to get the same level of intensity.
My plants, I, when I take them, so for example, like something grown outside, you could probably keep it in the refrigerator for a few days. I know that when I harvest my plants, if I throw them in the refrigerator, they're probably going to be dead in a day. They just don't last. So I harvest fresh, I eat fresh.
I never, never do anything. I just go harvest and eat it, which is, it's better. That's the way you want to do it. You don't want to have dead plants for a week. So, so there is a significant difference there, but from the light perspective, um, we're, we're kind of at the beginning stages of using these plants in hydroponic systems with led lights.
Not a lot of people are doing this, so I'm, I'm always discovering new plants, some plants that just, I've tried a couple of varieties, like for a while I didn't find a Mizuna that worked well in the lights, and I just couldn't figure out what it was, like maybe the temperature was, like they wanted a little bit cooler, a little hotter, I don't know.
But to a certain degree, this will be experimental. Like some, some plants just won't like hydroponic systems. They, you know, they either want a hotter or a colder environment than our homes. That's okay. We have thousands of varieties to choose from. Like we have no limit to what we can do. I mean, you could try a new basil plant every month from now until the time you died and you'd never get through the available basil out there in the world.
That's how much there is. Wow. That's, that's insane. And so I know you had mentioned earlier with the min plants, you talked about pumps with the hydroponic system. Is this running 24 seven, this water, or is it every now and then how does that system work? Yeah. There's a couple of different versions of the systems.
Uh, the ones that I typically use, like the vertical systems, those are going to be continuous. You could think of them like as a circulatory system in a heart. Okay. Uh, others, uh, the smaller box systems can be variable. So like they'll turn on for a certain percentage of the hour. And I honestly think that's probably why the vertical systems get such better growth than those smaller box systems, because I have known like product productivity wise, if I compare my larger vertical ones, even one similarly priced, like not different priced, they just get much better results.
And I think it's that constant circulation, the oxygenation of the water and. And, uh, the, the movement that really makes a difference. So my concern there is, you know, is that a big demand on our electric bill or what have you personally noticed? It's like a small amount. Yeah. Yeah. Luckily, I mean, the biggest pump I have is probably around an incandescent bulb.
Like that amount of wattage, I mean, really not much, uh, what, what's happened, um, kind of anecdotally, um, I'd recently read about, uh, there was a lot of concern about electric cars, you know, plugging into the grid and they were going to overwhelm the grid. Well, there's a study that I read recently that showed because we switched to LED lighting.
It actually led to a reduction in power consumption, even though we've been plugging in all these cars. So something similar is happening across, you know, all of homes because they're switching to the led lights. These are led lights You probably I would guess even if you did If you're if you're really aggressive and you did like 60 plants at a time, you shouldn't experience more than 10 or 20 more per year and electrical bills.
It's not a significant amount. Yeah. So, Cliff, what would you like to see with the future of your company and with indoor growing? I mean, It sounds like it's still in the beginning stages and you know, I'm sure every year, even every few months, you're seeing updates to the technology and the methods. So what would you like to see and what is your part in all of this?
Yeah, my goal is to have a community grower in every state as soon as possible. We have 4 states covered, but I would like to get everywhere and certainly every metro region. This kind of growing really needs someone there for you. Like, it's okay to do it via video. You know, you can learn a lot, but it really matters for setting something up the 1st time and getting that support.
So that's my goal. And I can promise that based on the technology, the technology trend that I've noticed right now with the systems we have with almost no scale and basically kind of kidding things together, we're at grocery store prices. Sometimes a little lower and that's with fresher greens all the time.
Endless diversity. You can drive the supply, you know, a few minutes of maintenance. You spend all of your time harvesting, basically. So a year or two from now, it's going to be much less, we're going to control our food supply in amazing ways, but we do need to develop a community around that. And so that's why I created a.
Uh, community grower model. So you'd have people that everyone wants to buy a system and do it themselves. You know, some people just want somebody to lead them down that path and make them successful. So we have both things for you. You've got community growers that can support you with the subscription.
And we have like quick start guides and seeds to get you going. And so for the community growers, what exactly are you looking for in a person? Just someone to be a local representative of planter. And so when people are. Looking into the service, they'll go with them to their home and help them set up, you know, their, the farm as we call, set everything up and help them get started.
Is that correct? Yeah, generally, um, at this stage, anyone who's crazy about urban agriculture, who loves gardening and wishes they could do it year round full time, they're a perfect person for this because it is early stage, generally speaking, but, uh, the community grower provides basically what I call garden ready as a service or grass G R a S.
And so, so that means they're growing seedlings out for you in advance for their customers. They're delivering that to their customers. They're showing them how to grow. If their customers go on vacation, they've got new seedlings ready for them to pop into their system. Their customers run low on nutrients, no problem.
They have them right there for them. It really localizes everything because I see this as the best possible future is for all of these, this kind of growing to be local. And I think this is the right way to do it. So, Mr. Clift, if we're someone interested, And being community grower, how should we reach out to you or, you know, how should we go about that?
Yeah, I'm certainly can sign up on our website. That's, uh, planter. com, PLANT3R. com or we, or Iwantagreenthumb. com. That one is fine. You can send me an email at CLIFT at planter. com. So PLANT3R. com, uh, reach out on our socials. We're on all the socials under the planter. So you can find us there. Um, we share pretty regularly.
Um, I do at least every other day, tips and tricks. I talk about my systems, how you can get it, get going. Uh, so if you're interested, feel free to reach out. Um, it's, it's an interesting and a very dynamic place. Um, almost every person who's going to grow hydroponically or just generally grow food for themselves in the future, hasn't done it yet.
And we're starting something very new. Right. Well, ladies and gentlemen, you can find all of that in the description below this website link so you can reach out and check out the service. Mr. Clifton, was there anything else you want to share before we sign off here? Um, yeah, so I would, what I'd like to say is it's never too late to start.
Look, you can start in January, you can start in July, it doesn't matter. You grow year round. If something breaks, if something goes offline, no problem. You're 20 days away from having another plant growing and crop crop production. So don't wait. No reason. You don't have to move into the farm outside the city.
No, you can start right where you are. And I think it's the most exciting future we can have. And, and when you move, especially now, a lot of people move apartment, apartment, very easy to take with you. So perfect, perfect to take with you. So Mr. Cliff, thank you for coming on the show. And like I said, a very unique episode and hopefully we'll get together in the future, a couple of years from now and see how things have changed and talk about it.
But thank you so much for sharing all of this. I appreciate that. You're most welcome. I appreciate it.
