I had thought about a garden on the roof, or a platform hitch rack with a 2x4' garden bed on it (which I still might do)
However, I would like to at least grow salad year round...So, after much looking around I decided small counter top hydro might work best. We need to have something that we can line up on the floor when we are driving, so many methods won't work. They also need to fit in the small places we have near an outlet for the lights and it is far too small in here to have cords running everywhere.
I am sure things will evolve as we figure things out more, but to start I got a 3 pod LED Aerogarden for herbs. They use a tiny amount of electric with the LED and weensy air pump. They would easily run on solar, and we also have plans to build a magnetic generator which looks promising.
After a few weeks if we see this little system does work, we might get a few larger ones for salad greens and things. We can get the empty pods and grow our own organic heirloom plants.
So this is night mode. We set it to have the lights on through the night when it gets fairly chilly in here, and then draped a silk cloth over it to keep some heat in while still letting it breath...
Daytime mode, no silk. The light stays on for 16 hours, then will turn off for 8 through mid day.
For the first run we are just using their pods, herb seeds and plant food to see how it goes. Hopefully soon we will have some baby plants :) I figure if we can get them to grow in Feb, they will grow anytime.
I also found some felt vertical wall gardens which will be here soon. I might need to find some form of iron on waterproof fabric to add on the backs to protect the walls. Nyai doesn't know it yet, but these will be living in the bathroom because it is warm and actually has walls :) He likes alot of plants around too, so I don't think he will mind.
The vertical garden will have 21 pockets, so we should be able to grow a good variety of herbs and veggies. There are two skylights, and we can add one or two of the awesome grow lights Diamond from @solarshutdown recommended. (Well, Nyai can add them because he is an electrician and can wire them in correctly, but he doesn't know that I am going to ask him to do that yet either...hehe, I suppose I should talk with him about it...)
The card of the day , was V Hierophant , but I didn't have time to write about it today as I was re-organizing my work space to make room for growing some heirloom cherry tomatoes :)...I will revisit this card later.
Thanks for reading!