SPATS Cafe and SpeakEasy serves the best New Orleans food there is in State College and the owners, Duke and Monica Gastiger, are strong believers in the farm to table movement. What they wanted for SPATS was a unique way of growing fresh herbs and greens right on site for their customers to see. Thanks to the rotating living wall technology, this became possible in a very unique, intricate, and custom piece... 

Vertical Farming is simply growing up instead of out. Dickson Despommier brought meaning to the idea in 2008 with his book, "The Vertical Farm". His book essentially describes farming in skyscrapers. My spin on vertical farming is a little different and involves the use of conveyor systems. These conveyors essentially rotate troughs of plants along a vertical plane to achieve even distribution of sunlight as well as ease of maintenance. I did my master's research on these systems from 2013-2015 and collected some incredible data showing 2.5X the crop yields/square foot could be produced compared to traditional growing. For the longer description of my research you can go to SCIRP and check out my publication. 

Living Furniture was a great piece, but there was a lot of demand for customization from the industry. GreenTowers' solution for this was Living Interiors. This was a custom aquaponics piece made for Vanguard Medical Office in Cranford, New Jersey.

The Vertical Farming Research for my Master's program was focused on the idea of growing on a moving vertical plane. To make the research come to life, DIY prototypes were used throughout the trials. Thanks to the Penn State School of Engineering's CapStone Program, a new system was developed with the help of Cassandra Baum, Paul Fuge, Timothy Moore, and Ashlee Palm or "Better Farms, More Produce". The Vertical Farming Machine was brought to life and is now on the market!

It's simple, but elegant... a garden in a box that gets mailed right to your door... Just add water and watch it grow!

SketchUp is a 3D modeling program that brings 2d designs to life. The following are images for: a deck project in Northeast Pennsylvania, the 2013 Nittany Lion Inn Patio Project, The 100th Annual Horticulture Show, a small residential site, and a large residential master plan.  

There's nothing else in this world like sailing. There's a catch to this though...you need a sailboat. Fiberglass boats are not difficult to bring back to life with the right tools and materials. This 1976 Hobie Cat is living proof of that! 

GreenTowers got its start back in 2012 as a student pitch group with the mission of converting shipping containers into mobile aquaponic greenhouses. Sound confusing? Yeah... try actually bringing a project like that to life. Needless to say after the first prototype, the company pivoted just a little bit... This started the development of a lot of different avenues for the company;  Living Furniture, Living Interiors, BeeCoSystem, and GardenBox. 

Aquaponics at its most basic form is the union of aquaculture (fish farming) and hydroponics (growing without soil). Most aquaponics systems are very large (often hundreds of gallons of water) and are used for growing Tilapia and leafy greens. The systems I developed and tested used aquariums and grew microgreens from as few as five goldfish. With fluorescent lighting, half a pound of microgreens could be grown in less than three weeks. 

Take the DIY small-scale aquaponics research and plug it into a custom piece of furniture... Now you have LivingFurniture. Special thanks to Stephen Rountree for all of the hard work and dedication to making this an incredible piece!

My research tested the operation of a rotating plant conveyor system that incorporated soil-filled troughs. The objective of this project was to take the same rotational concept but incorporate hydroponic growing. A greenhouse structure was built around the conveyor system to ultimately create what you see here at the CoSpace in State College, PA, a 10' tall hydroponic rotating living wall greenhouse...   

There's something to be said for paper and pencil, and even more to be said for color rendering. These 2D plans were completed for residential landscape design classes and involved two properties in Center County.  

So when you first hear the phrase, "indoor beekeeping", obviously there might be some reason for concern. BeeCoSystem was a way to bring this idea into practice without getting stung a thousand times over. The concept is fairly simple; build wooden hexagon hives that can house bees, mount them on a wall, and let the bees go in and out through a tube. Watch the bees, increase the bee population, and get some honey once a while. These hives are currently at the CoSpace in State College and still house thousands of bees. For me, this project was a huge success and really allowed me to hone in on my craftsmanship. This was the fourth rendition of the hive body and the fifth is in progress!

Through my Master's work and other side projects, came a lot of experience with aquaponics. This included everything from the initial design, part sourcing, cost estimating, construction, assembly, testing, cycling, troubleshooting, growing, and harvesting. What you see here is a 3D model for an educational aquaponics system at SCASD (State College Area School District), a model for a larger scale aquaponics facility, and lastly the photos of a completed aquaponics system constructed by the Penn State Aquaponics 496 Class in 2012. Yes, those are tomato and pepper trees...   

So yes... it is possible to create a mobile aquaponic shipping container greenhouse. But after building one, let's just say I don't want to build a second one anytime soon. Just to move the container took a front end loader, an F-250, a fifth wheel trailer, and a John Deere track loader. The ultimate destination for this project was Greenmore Gardens in Port Matilda, Pennsylvania. Special thanks goes out to Mark Maloney for letting us operate it out there in summer 2014.