Alright, let's size out a shelf for us.

Quick centering moment...

This does not and SHOULD NOT be perfect.

Don't worry about maximizing space. Don't worry about making it perfect. Don't worry about being precise. If you're really worried, start small and get a feel for it, then make something bigger the next go around.

Also, don't follow my instructions perfectly. I'm building for my space. But you build for your space. Make it cozy. Make it yours. Make it different. Or do exactly as I do and enjoy it, I don't care, it's your's! lol!

We're putting together a place to hold a bucket of water. It need not be complicated or stressful.

Okay!!! LETS DIVE IN!!! YAY!!!

A couple things to keep in mind while we're choosing a shelving system (system used LOOSELY here):
- How much *floor* space do you have. Whats a good-ish footprint. Width and Depth.
- How tall are your walls / how high up the wall you want to build. Height.
- How much space you want between your shelves. Space for the grow bin and space for the plant to grow above it.
- (IMPORTANT!!!) Ensuring it can handle the weight of all the bins filled with water.
- With that, ensure it can handle getting wet. This should be a utility shelf.

So we're growing in doors. You have limited space.

If you have virtually NO space. Then you can do a single-unit grow bin with a footprint of 6 inches by 6 inches, right? You can find a link to that build in my bio page. But if you have a couple of feet, you can build a shelf.

I like to grow out of 5 gallon plastic (it says its food safe... I dunno...) storage containers. Think the 5 gallon "Commander" storage containers found at various chain hardware stores. The dimensions for these are 16.4" x 12.3" x 8.6". I can fit three of these side by side in a roughly 3ft wide shelf. There are many other options, but consider what you want to grow out in a roughly 3ft by 2ft footprint shelf, right? You pick your grow bins, plastic, glass, metal - but we'll use these bins as the example moving forward.

Ok. That's my footprint. Roughly 3ft wide. 2ish ft in depth. That's what I want any given shelf footprint to roughly measure.

Looking around my house. I have a section of floor space that I can push my clean clothes pile out of the way and make room for 3x2 shelf. Heck. In a corner, I can put a 3x2 shelf facing one direction and squeeze another 3x2 shelf against the other wall and it makes a 5x3 L shape thingy... Cool. I'm doing that. Gonna put my lettuce wall in the corner.

My height is roughly 9ft.... holy shit, that's a tall ceiling. Okay... Anyhow, you sort out how tall your ceiling is. You don't have to build all the way up, right. You can build out along your wall if you want more shelving. But that gives you the max amount you can play with.

Now here's the big thing. You're going to want adjustable shelving. That's key. That lets you set up the distance between shelves to tailor it to your grow bins and plants.

I've found two options (let me know if you find more!):
1) Adjustable Wireframe Utility Shelves
2) Adjustable Wooden Storage Shelves

Frankly, the wireframe utility shelves are your best option. They are generally affordable. They are adjustable. You can attach all sorts of things to it with zip ties and the like (good for setting up your lights). They can hold a LOT of weight.... this is awesome. And the BIGGEST THING!!! While they are generally affordable when bought new, more importantly you can often find these used for cheap or even free via craigslist, facebook marketplace, or dumpster diving. They hold up for a long time and people give these away all the time. Go snag some for free.

But! I live with someone else. And they have veto'd it for the lettuce wall. They're cool with a wireframe shelf in a utility closet or garage, but not next to where we are eating. But they bring about an important point. They associate wireframe utility shelves with work (they were a baker several years ago). And that specifically looks too utilitarian to them. They want more wood and nature in their lives. So! I'm going with the second option.

The adjustable wooden storage shelves.

I can stain them. I can paint them. I can make them really pretty. ( I pointed out that I could make the wireframe pretty too!!! And you can!!! But I don't have personal negative vibes associated with wireframe... I must compromise! And I do so gladly and easily. :P )

Real quick aside and to that point... Aesthetics are REALLY important. You absolutely must make these things look pretty. And you can do so very simply and without a lot of cost. Decorate the shit out these shelves. Whether you're going for hygge, or solarpunk, or cottagecore, or for psychedelic jackson pollock splatterpaint. Make it pretty for you and your's. I'm tired of minimalism... no more millenial beige. You can do that.. I don't mind. But make it to where when you look at this shelf, you smile and your heart lifts and you breathe easier. Make your space a place of beauty.

Ok, back to shelves... The one bad thing that I've found for a lot of the adjustable wooden shelves though, is they CAN NOT hold a lot of weight. Like... the one I'm looking at right now, the shelves sit on little pegs that sit in a hole in the side wood. That's shit. Absolute shit. A little bit of water weight and those pegs will pop right out and down goes the shelving.

So, I'll have to buy some metal brackets to hold these shelves up. The wood of the shelf is good wood (not particle board that can separate if it gets wet) and it can hold weight. The side beams can hold weight. Wood is good in compression. Its just the joints that suck. Alright, cool. I'll use the pegs to get the selves in the right place and then I'll bracket them down.

For me, I'm going to go with the Ikea Ivar special: (not an ad). It's what I have used on my current kitchen garden shelf. And I've liked it so far.

Lastly, how many shelf sections (the flat space to hold your bins) do you need? This depends on how high you make the shelf and how much separation you want between your shelves.

For me, with my specific grow bins, I need around 1ft 10ish inches. That leaves enough room for the height of my bins. The height of the plants I'm growing here. And a little space for my LED grow light strips. With that and my room height, I can get 5 shelves in with the top shelf holding a grow bin and me attaching grow lights to my ceiling. I think my math maths... check me if I'm wrong...

Alright! So here are the dimensions for my shelving system. This is for me. Your's will be different. I'm getting two setups with five shelves each:
Height: 89inches
Width: 35inch (shelves are 33 inches themselves)
Depth: 20inches

I'll need to buy some simple brackets for the back. I'm going to buy some pretty brackets for the front. And some stain for futher prettiness.

That gives me five rows of six bins that grow five plants each.

So that's 150 heads of various leafy greens.

If I stagger it out with a new growth every week and if these plants mature at six weeks (first growth - four weeks second and maybe third growth), that means I can get a first growth of 25 plants each week on a continuing rotating schedule!

I can't eat all that lettuce and leafy greens.

I'm going to HAVE to give away a lot to my neighbors for free.

The Kratky Hydroponic Lettuce Wall will be comprised of a couple of things:

1) A utility shelf with adjustable shelving
2) Full spectrum LED "grow" light strips w/ timer
3) Grow bins

That's it.

The utility shelf can be broken down into the following requirements:
- DANGER!!! WARNING!!! IMPORTANT!!!: The shelves should be able to actually hold the weight of your grow bins. Water is heavy. Many shelves by themselves cannot support the weight of the water and will need support. So check the weight rating on the shelves you get. We'll continue to talk about this further as we built out the shelf.
- ANOTHER DANGER!!! WARNING!!! IMPORTANT!!!: You need a way to anchor your shelves to the wall SECURELY!!! You don't want this thing tipping over. You build it too high and it falls on your kid or dog or cat and they may die. Secure this to your wall. Especially the higher you build it.
- Shelves need to be adjustable to allow enough space for the bin to sit and for the plant to grow
- A way to attach the light strips to the shelf above the grow bin
- Bonus: Make it pretty

The Grow Light Strips can be broken into the following requirements:
- They should fit the length of the shelf you pick and be attachable to it in some way
- You should be able to control them with a timer (either on the light itself or set up with a wall socket timer
- Have a method of increasing the light or decreasing the light (easily add more light strips if needed, or adjust brightness, etc)
- Be full spectrum "grow" light. Note: it does not have to SAY grow light. Sometimes lights are like cakes. A regular white cake is cheap. Add the name "Wedding" to that same cake and it gets expensive. As long as the LED light strip generates enough light for a plant to eat, we're good.

The grow bins can be broken down into the following requirements:
- They should hold water.
- They should be fully opaque and not allow any light into the bin itself.
- They should hold some sort of grow medium to allow a plant to grow on top and provide access to the roots to get into the bin to access the nutrient water
- Bonus: Make them pretty

That's it.

No pumps.
No aerators.
No central reservoir.

Just a place to put a kratky bin and grow lettuce.

We'll tackle how to size and shop for a utility shelf next.

#solarPunk
#indoorGardening
#verticalFarming
#hydroponics
#kratky
#kratkyMethod
#vegetableGardening
#gardening
#postScarcity
#foodSecurity

. @kechpaja - Au contraire, my friend!!!

Prepare yourself for a lengthy rebuttal! (And thank you for the opportunity to info-dump on you!)

So this *is* an example of post-scarcity infrastructure. But how and why?

High Level Definition of Post-Scarcity Food (so that we may agree on terms): Post Scarcity is where we produce more food than is consumed and distribute that food out. It can be universal or local - so unevenly distributed post-scarcity or the fact that one area has it and another doesn't, does not imply that post-scarcity in the place that has it does not exist.

Great.

In the *pragmatic* sense: Post Scarcity Food needs inputs and outputs. Contributions and Distributions.

Overview:

*Current* Contributions / Inputs (read: not ideal, not what is being built or hoped for, but how it is right now):
- Charity (which you reduced food rescue and free fridges down into)
- Food Rescue (not charity... not even mutual aid)
- Mutual Aid

Current Distributions / Outputs
- Centralized
- Decentralized
- Peer-to-peer

Detail:

Contributions / Inputs

- Charity: Examples of this include food drives, food banks, church food pantries. Charities are not ideal and often have conditions tied to them ("Means Testing" and the like). They rely on "people being kind and generous" as you put it. If all we had was charity, we would not be in post-scarcity. While charity is often a cover for artificial-scarcity (our current over-arching economic model), it CAN be used as an input into post-scarcity. You just can't rely on it and need to build it further infrastructure. I use it because its there, but it's more of a transition thing.

- Food Rescue: Food Rescue is not Charity. Food Rescue is not Mutual Aid. Current Food Rescue relies on a capitalistic model. A for-profit store/restaurant/bakery/etc makes food to sell. Cannot sell all of it. Instead of throwing it away, it "donates" the left over good food to be consumed elsewhere. Food Rescue is NOT out of the goodness of a corporation's heart. Corporations do not have hearts. They cannot be kind or generous. Instead, Food Rescue is applied to the bottom line / profit margin and is justified by things such as "lowering the fees for trash" and "having a tax-writeoff to a non-profit (again within a capitalistic system). But! While Food Rescue is not charity and relies on the current capitalist system, it absolutely shows that we produce MORE than is consumed. Ironically, an example that we have the MEANS for post-scarcity. I use it because its there and is a ready source of feeding people. While I push for post-scarcity, I care about feeding people *now*.

- Mutual Aid: This is the ideal and the model for a full post-scarcity economy, and we're already building this out. Community Farms / Ranches (Centralized), Community Gardens / Local Small Scale Ranches (Decentralized), and Home Gardens / Home Ranches of various forms (peer-to-peer) are ways that we produce for ourselves, our neighbors, and our towns. This is post-scarcity mutual aid and does not rely on the people being kind and generous. It relies on us taking care of our neighbors AND ourselves (call it selfish if you like). Mutual means mutual.

Detail:

Distributions / Outputs

- Centralized: The charity model uses food pantries / churches / mobile pantries to distribute out food from a food bank. We can utilize that now, but we are absolutely not (nor should we be) limited by it. Instead, Free Stores are the Centralized model of post-scarcity mutual aid.

- Decentralized: Free Fridges & Community Pantries - This is where my fridge above fits in. It's not charity by any means. It's a node in a distribution network.

- Peer-to-peer: The simplest form of this is one person handing it to another. A neighbor asking for sugar. Handing off your extra squash on your street corner. You can scale this up using things like mobile apps such as Olio to coordinate this across larger areas.

Great, so we laid out inputs and outputs for post-scarcity food.

To give a specific example, see this post: https://infosec.exchange/@tinker/112582425833711424

There I show how I used the Input of a Mutual Aid Home Garden and the Output of a Decentralized Free Fridge.

None of that was charity. None of it was "kind and generous". Instead it was building the infrastructure for post-scarcity mutual aid that I use myself.

I take from the free fridge all the time. I drop off at the free fridge all the time. I produce for the community. I consume from the community.

We have the tech & the means. We have built infrastructure already (see the original post). We are now scaling it out.