‘Greens in a Box’ – a shipping container turned greenhouse powered by solar panels

 
The Sustainability Workshop’s winning hydroponic garden.

Sustainability Workshop students win FreshDirect urban farming challenge

By Juliana Reyes
Technically Philly
June 25, 2013

Excerpts:

Students from the Navy Yard’s alternative project-based high school Sustainability Workshop won The Green Angel Fund, an urban farming challenge sponsored by online grocer FreshDirect, and will present their work at the National Indoor Gardening Expo in San Francisco in late July.

The challenge, which aimed to raise awareness about inner-city food and farming issues, was to build “the nation’s most innovative hydroponic garden” in three months.

The two schools were chosen to participate in the challenge because they are both located in “food deserts,” or areas where the community doesn’t have access to fresh food, a spokeswoman said. (The Sustainability Workshop is an alternative senior year program that will expand into a school this fall.)

Working with a South Jersey farmer that supplies FreshDirect, the students built a garden that they called “Greens in a Box:” a shipping container turned greenhouse powered by solar panels. The garden is heated by LED panels and is currently growing six different kinds of lettuce and three different kinds of basil, according to a press release.

Source: CityFarmer (http://goo.gl/or1SL)