 I'm Wendy Lo and I'm your friend as we journey to take your health back and what a journey it will be as long as you take the right steps to do so. We are coming to you live from downtown Honolulu from the studios of ThinkTech Hawaii. Today our topic of discussion will be on growing healthy. Remember now, growing healthy, okay? So remember that word growing, you can do it. What I would like you to take away from today's discussion is that taking your health back is easy. Then you are ready to take that step because no matter how much we share information with you, guide you and push it down your throat, if you're not ready to say, you know what, I'm tired of being sick and tired, you're going to continue to be sick and tired. But when you're tired and you want better, then take that first step and we're here to help you along. Today, I'm your host and your guest sharing all my knowledge of growing healthy by growing with the Tower Gardens. But before I get started, I just want to tell you a little bit about me. So I am not the right person actually to talk to you about growing and making things grow from the earth because I can't even grow flowers. You give me an orchid plant, I'll put it in the pot, it grows. A couple of weeks later, the flowers fall off, it's done, I'm done, I'm over it. So this is really unusual and very out of the box for me to be in this field as it is my first career and I'll get to that in a minute. It's a little bit about Wendy. I am a mother of two beautiful young ladies and that's all I wanted to be is a housewife with two young ladies and a husband and just cook and clean and take care of the family. And that's what I did until I got thrown into the business world. Then I started making chocolates. I made chocolates for about 20 years. And if you can see a slide there of me and my daughters, first of all, those two young ladies were born into the chocolate factory. So I had Cassandra, the one in the forefront. And then I had the second one as I opened my first factory. So it was like I had twins. Jumped in there, survived for 20 years, loved every moment of making chocolate. And I was a happy camper. I thought I would die a chocolate tutu. And what happened was when I turned 50, I sold it, I retired. And another career opportunity came to me. But before we get to that, let me show you a picture of what I used to look like for the last 20 years. And that is me with the hair net and the garb. And some people won't recognize me, but that's what I look like in the factory for the past 20. And now we started another factory called Chocolate Unmission. And they're continuing to perform and produce the best chocolates in all of Hawaii. But that's what I used to look like. So about seven years ago, I was introduced to a concept of growing. And it's called the Tower Garden. And so on this slide here, this is what I started growing on my balcony. Mind you, no experiencing growing, no even passion or desire to grow anything. But what happened was this opportunity came to me via a company, the Tower Garden Company, and we were test marketing to see what it would be like if people like me were being given a tower and see how easy it is to grow or not to grow. So I flew mine into Hawaii. I started with the little seedlings and I'm going to show you in a little bit how simple all this is. Start with a little seedling. After two weeks of germination, we put it into the Tower Garden. And then it grows on its own for about three weeks in the tower. It's ready to consume. So the next slide shows you I left my salad or my lettuce in a bit longer than three weeks. And so that's the same tower a few weeks later. And see how mature all that lettuce came. And so as we grow, you're supposed to cut and eat. And that is right there. It represents non-GMO seeds. I don't use any pesticides. It sits in the tower and there's a little pump that turns on and off 24 times a day feeding it all the nutrients in the water. And so I basically don't have to do a whole lot. And that's why my job is so simple because I travel a lot. I want to say raising produce and veggies on the Tower Garden is a little easier than even raising children. I don't want to compare them, but it does. It is. And what I get from it is I get very great results of great food that I get to consume daily. So I've been living off of my tower for the last seven years. Every morning I'll cut kale, blend smoothies, and I drink it every day. When I go on the road, I make fresh kale smoothies or whomever I can pass it out to. But the whole idea, again, non-GMO seeds, no chemicals, cut, five minutes old, blend it up, and it's right into my body. So I'm very, very excited about that. So our company said, wow, and your tower's growing really well. But you know what? We can't get towers to Hawaii because it's going to be about $100, $125 to ship that 48-pound box to Hawaii. And I don't think the people of Hawaii will be willing to pay that amount of shipping costs. So I said, let me try. So what we did was we gathered up some orders, and everybody was excited that saw my tower. They all wanted a tower or another tower here. So we sold the first 30 or 40, and then another shipment. And then it got to the point where everybody pretty much was jumping on board. So I asked the company, can we now get towers in Hawaii? And they said, not yet, Wendy. I don't know. We still got a test to market. So what I did was I said, what if I purchased a 45-foot container, a Mattson container? And this is exactly what I did. That Mattson container would hold about 150 tower gardens with the tonic, with the extensions, with the dollies, with everything the tower garden needed to satisfy 150 towers. And so the company allowed me to do that. We brought the tower garden in via Mattson container. Went from Memphis to Long Beach, from Long Beach to Oahu. And then when it landed, it looked like this. It was one container full of tower gardens and their items that you needed to run it. So I called my crew, my juice-less crew. I said, hey, I need help. We got 150 tower gardens that need to be unloaded. So we opened up the container. And I can honestly say that we brought in almost 1,000 tower gardens. And every one of those first tower gardens went through my hands. They're 48 pounds. They're about 18 inches high. And they're three feet in diameter. So it's a three-by-three box, three-foot-by-three-foot box. And they passed through my hands. Everything that came off of that 45-foot container, we brought them in. I believe we brought in about eight container loads. And then the company said, wow, Hawaii wants tower gardens. And I said to the company, Hawaii doesn't just want tower gardens. Hawaii needs tower gardens. Because of the fact that we have so many different companies producing food here, using a lot of different systems, chemicals and all. And so the fact that we have a lot of urban dwellers living in condominiums like myself or just living with small spaces because real estate is a high commodity here. And so the tower gardens just makes sense. It just uses about a three-foot diameter of space that will grow right now up to 52 produce, herbs, tomatoes, cucumbers, that can supply a family of two to four enough produce throughout the course of each month. And that's why I think this is so important. Because when you start teaching the children how to use the tower gardens and give them the responsibilities that they're gonna grow the vegetables for dinner, you know, the whole idea is when they grow it, they're gonna consume it. And that's the really neat part about the tower that generations, whether they're Kiki, whether they're the Kapuna, they both can use this opportunity to grow, grow the best source of food for their families and say they go out to eat dinner tonight. The lettuce, the kale, the tomatoes, stay on the vine and they're continuing to grow and they're buying fresh tomorrow. There's still live living food versus food that was cut a week ago and you know, who knows how long it's been sitting on the shelf. So once we bought in the tower gardens, we were very blessed. Schools adopted the tower gardens. So we have a shot here of a tower garden flourishing and this is done by high schoolers. This one sits at Eulani School. They have a sustainability department and Debbie out there, she grows on every growing medium. They're using aeroponics, which we are called. They're using hydroponics, aquaponics, sorry, and traditional farming. Every system works. It's just the one that fits your needs and your purposes. So we're here to just promote people just falling in love with growing and putting the best quality into their bodies. And that's what we're really wanting to make the people of Hawaii aware of. So growing healthy. You choose which media you want and you decide what works best for your space, your time, and then you go at it. I know a lot of kupunas when they were younger, they used to grow, but now they're at senior homes or assisted living homes. They don't have the opportunity to grow. So why not give them this opportunity? Have a tower garden there. They can tend to the garden when they feel like it. They don't have to bend down to the ground because they just don't because it's a vertical growing system. And I just think it's just the best thing. So a lot of different programs throughout Hawaii have adopted these programs. We have them in public schools, private schools. We have them at Easter Seals. I know that the Culinary Institute of the Pacific is just starting to adopt this concept. They right now have one with indoor grow lights, which I'm gonna share with you later in the show, but they're growing these vegetables and herbs within their culinary institute in their kitchen. And so that's so exciting because the chefs can turn to the tower, cut and season or cut and put into the bowls after washing and then prepare the dressing and out it goes. The freshness is robust. The smells are, you can smell it when you come onto my balcony. Who knew lettuce had smells? I had no idea. The cilantro, the lettuce, all of the different herbs, you can smell it even when the wind is blowing up high on my balcony. So I know that we're onto something and by studies from the University of Mississippi, we have studies that we can provide that shows that the vegetation that are grown on the towers registers sometimes up to a half more to two times more the nutrient content than some produce that are produced in Mother Earth. So some of you are asking, what is the tower garden and how does it work? So I've bought with me a little video to show you how the tower garden is and how it works. And then after that, I'll explain a little bit more in detail after you watch this little video. Tower Garden's state-of-the-art aeroponic vertical garden system uses both water and air to produce more colorful, better tasting and incredibly nutritious fruits, vegetables and herbs. Tower Garden has a 20 gallon reservoir at its base that stores the Tower Tonic nutrient solution. Developed by experts in plant and human nutrition, Tower Tonic mineral blend enables superior plant growth and better nutrition from your Tower Garden produce. The process begins once the seedlings have been placed in your Tower Garden. Here they will be nourished with Tower Tonic nutrient solution. Inside the reservoir is a small low wattage submersible pump. The pump pushes the nutrient solution up through the tower to the top. From there, the nutrient solution drips through the central tower using a special device that evenly cascades the solution over the exposed plant roots. On the journey down the tower, the nutrient solution feeds the roots and becomes highly oxygenated as it cascades gently down the reservoir. This process is continuous, providing fresh oxygen, water and nutrients to the roots of the plants. This patented aeroponic process enables food crops to grow faster than they would in soil so they can be harvested more often. And it makes Tower Garden the healthier, easier, smarter way to grow your produce. Wow, so is that simple or what? And that's why I love my Tower Garden so much because it's very simple. And I want to share with you as well, the Tower Garden itself is all food grade. It's not made of PVC plastics. It's all food grade. So there's no toxins that will leach into the water, into the roots, into the plants, into our bodies. Number one, they are UV protected twice. My towers have been sitting on my balcony for the last seven years. There's no cracking or chipping and it looks, I mean, yeah, it'll yellow a little bit because of the sun but it won't crack or chip like most PVC planters and plant pots. So that's another great thing because I want to know that this is going to last me a while. It is an investment. So it's lasted me seven and I expected to last the rest of my life that I will be passing it down to my children that they will continue growing. And it takes about 95% less water which is an excellent bonus. And it uses about 95% land space. So in a three-diameter feet, I can grow up to 52 plants in my home and commercially I can grow 52 plus plants on a commercial-sized tower. So there's a lot of advantages because real estate is costly, water as well, but the most important is the space. So I know this makes a lot of sense and I'm hoping that you'll see the positiveness of what we can offer with this tower garden. Right now I'm going to take it to a break and when we come back, I'll have more pictures of Tower Gardens and I'll introduce to you Tim Blang, the designer of the Tower Garden, Aloha. Hi, I'm Rusty Komori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. My show is based on my book, also titled Beyond the Lines and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence, leadership and finding greatness. I interview guests who are successful in business, sports and life, which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness. Join me every Monday as we go Beyond the Lines at 11 a.m., Aloha. Aloha, I'm Yukari Kunisue, the host of Konnichiwa, Hawaii, Japanese talk show on Think Tech, Hawaii. Konnichiwa, Hawaii is all Japanese broadcast show and it's streamed live on Think Tech at 2 p.m., every other Monday. Thank you so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then. I'm Yukari Kunisue, mahalo. Aloha, I'm Wendy Loh and I'm your host and your guest as we take your health back. So today I'm so excited to share with you all my knowledge about the Tower Garden, the importance of having a Tower Garden here in Hawaii and why it makes so much sense. As we take our health back, part of it is being excited about it and for me, I never grew any vegetables. I never farmed. We did experiments in high school and grade school. We put the little lima bean seed in there. We saw it sprout and then it came up this high and then we took it home and poops, it died. And that was the end of the experiment. But now I get to take it a few steps further where I actually sprout and grow my own food in this Tower Garden and I'm so, so excited that we get to launch it and share it and just share all the knowledge about the simplicity of this Tower Garden. Earlier I mentioned that the Tower Garden does take 95% less water. It does use 95% less land. It's made of food grade plastic versus PVC plastic so it doesn't leach toxins into the plants, in the water and the plants into our bodies and it's also ultraviolet protected twice. So that will prevent it from chipping and cracking in the dead of the heat. In fact, we have a friend, he has a Tower Garden farm, about 300 Tower Gardens commercial ones in the heart of Mesa, Arizona. The last time I was there was 120 degrees so it sits there in the heat and no problems. We have Tower Garden farms in Dubai and right in the middle of a desert where they formulate the largest greenhouses so they've concocted this large community. It's a walking community, no cars, golf carts only, walking and bicycles and they want to make it a sustainable community right smack in the desert and they've chosen the Tower Gardens to be the vehicle to produce their greens and so we're so excited about that as well. But here locally in Hawaii, we've got over a thousand Tower Gardens already in use. This year, Keokua spoke to my heart and he said, 2019 is a year of the great harvest. Continue being obedient. People will understand your message and they will see the value to what you're doing and so right now we're popping Tower Garden farms up with the Kupuna Centers, with the Vet Centers, Culinary Institutes of the Pacific is going to be engaging into this Tower Garden use because of the produce that we can get from it. They're so excited. So the next slide I want to share with you is just simply how simple this is. Those are babies, they're kikis. They're about just going into two weeks old of sprouting and this is Wendy. I brought a bunch of seedlings to show you but since we're shooting on a green screen, I brought those seedlings and you wouldn't be able to see them. So the blessing is that I have that little slide there that you can see that's about a two week growth of seedling and from this point, you'll take it out of this little black container and that little square, you simply put it into the Tower Garden. When you put it into the Tower Garden, you put it there and it'll stay there for the next about three weeks. At that point, you can start cutting, harvesting and consuming. So two weeks to germinate, about three weeks in the Tower, you'll be able to eat arugula, mescaline, lettuce, manoa, butter crunch and simply you want to just take around the edges and the heart continues to grow. Or if it's mescaline, arugula, just cut the whole head off and leave the root system behind, eat the leaves like we usually do and after about two weeks, that top that you took away will now become another head of arugula or another head of mescaline. And I would say after about the third cutting, I would then advise you to pull the root system out and then you can replan and have more cakeys ready to go, put it in and start the cycle again. So I want to just share with you, I've been growing on my balcony for the last seven years. I consume at least $100 and $120 worth of produce per month from my Tower and to manage a Tower to maintain it, it cost me about $15 a month. So basically I'm investing $15, $2.50 for electricity, $8 for the tonic and a few dollars for water, $15 investment into my Tower per month and I'm consuming $120 plus worth of produce and herbs. So you out there, you do the math. I'm Chinese, I get it. You don't have to be Chinese, it's very clear. You're gonna understand what I'm trying to say, but the best thing when you purchase and when you work with the Tower Garden, peace of mind, peace of mind that you're getting chemical free non-GMO produce cut on demand into my body five minutes old. The freshest you'll get unless living on a farm when you go out to your backyard and you cut. For me, living in urban environment, it's the best thing for me. I don't care if the farmer just cut it to get to the market, it's still a few hours old. Mine is five minutes old, cut into my body and that's what I like the best. Our company is really forward-minded. We believe in giving back and so what started this whole concept of giving back is, this next slide is about the Boys and Girls Clubs. So the Boys and Girls Clubs in inner city Memphis, they were one of the first right there by our headquarters that we gave a Tower Garden farm to and they just went crazier on it. I think they had just about 50 students in the programs. So these students started to learn how to grow and as you know, the Boys and Girls Clubs are after-school programs and then the dynamic ones meet on weekends and in lunch breaks but this one met after school. They started finding ceilings, growing it and then the next step was they also had a culinary program. So these students would grow the herbs, the basil, the tomatoes, the cilantro, all of the above. They would grow it and now they were picking the basil, chopping it up, blending it up with pine nuts and olive oil, blending it up and making pesto. They would cut the tomatoes, chop it up, they would buy onions, cut up the onions with the cilantro and they were making salsa. All right, so then they got another forward-minded idea. They said, why don't we start selling all this? So they went to the open market and they started standing behind their table with their banner in the front and they would make these items, they would make herb breads and things and then all the pastors by would take samples and like, sir, young man, this pesto, this salsa is incredible. What chef made this? And the young man would say, sir, I made it. No, no, no, son, who is the chef behind this great recipe and this great product? Sir, I made it. I even grew the tomatoes and that's how they would respond. Now these kids grew their integrity, their self-dignity, everything, their pride, it grew within themselves and they started learning marketing skills, PR skills, everything behind what they were producing on the tower, taking it from seed to growth, to production in the kitchen, to marketing and getting good results and then income generating to help other programs. I know that this Boys and Girls Club boasts 100% job placement after they finish high school and that's powerful, job placement or college placement and that's powerful because those were not the results in the past. Because of the success of this Boys and Girls Club, our president, Jay Martin, decided that he made a commitment to all the Boys and Girls Clubs in the nation. So if you're a Boys and Girls Club somewhere out there and you don't have a tower garden, our company is able to sponsor one tower garden in your Boys and Girls Club. So your members, your students can learn on this one tower and I know for a fact that we have them in Nanakuli, we have them in Kailua and we have them in Eva and we are soon to deliver one into Waianae and actually there's one more Boys and Girls Club in Nanakuli, so we're gonna be delivering that to them as well as long as we have the heart behind working with the students, helping them to produce, that's exactly what we want. So again, there are over 4,000 Boys and Girls Clubs throughout the nation and our heart is to make sure that each one of those Boys and Girls Clubs gets a tower garden and some heart behind it to help them succeed with it. Now the next story I wanna share with you is about this young man, he's Chef Muni and he's a dear friend, he is right in the heart of New York in Manhattan. On a rooftop, six stories up, he has a restaurant on the basement called Bell Book and Candle, but he believes in the towers so much, on the sixth floor, he has 30 towers and that's some of the one tower that I'm showing you there, but he produces his tomatoes, his strawberries, all of his different greens that he uses downstairs in the basement. All he does is he harvests his every day, hoists it down a dumb waiter down to the basement floor and then he prepares it for his lunches and his dinners, everything coming from the sixth floor rooftop. The neat part is when Hurricane Sandy came through, all you gotta do is take the water out of the 20 gallons, take it downstairs, put it under cover. Hurricane blows over, damages all the, whatever it does damage to, the crops in the fields, et cetera, when the storm blows over, walks it back upstairs, puts the water back in, still producing. That's the neat thing about the tower garden as well, so we're very excited. For the last, I wanna say seven going on eight years, we've had tower gardens in the O'Hare Airport and here you see about 30 towers lined up, producing produce for the restaurants within O'Hare Airport terminal one and two, it's right there in the Rotunda area and they've been producing for the last almost eight years and they actually are overproducing, so what they're doing is they're harvesting, putting them in containers and selling them at a Kia. So the next time you go through the airport and your friends say, hey, Wendy, before you get out of the airport, run to that kiosk and grab me some lettuce, it's the best because it's just harvested, no chemicals and pest free. So it's also creating better quality of air within that airport terminal, so that's so exciting as well. And now I wanna introduce to you the gentleman behind it all, he's a very dear friend, he's fallen in love with Hawaii, he just wants this for Hawaii more than life itself, his name is Tim Blank. Tim Blank was just with us about two months ago and talking his heart out about the Tower Gardens and the value of it for Hawaii, because we all know when we have a disaster, when something happens to our island, within three days our shelves are empty. If it's a hurricane or if it's bad weather, our fields will be damaged, we've got to wait a while before more fresh produce comes in, so this is just another little part of a solution to some of the problem that we have here, that we face here as an island state. So growing healthy means growing your own food, being prepared, being more food sovereign, that we can take care of ourselves in disasters or even in good times. And that's what we're wanting to encourage, people not just think after the fact, let's be in preparedness mode. With this weather today and the last few months, it's very cold for Hawaii, it's a lot of wind for Hawaii, and it's out of control sometimes. But I've got my tower, as you can see in this next slide, I have one tower right there in my living room. That's my living room and that's growing indoors with my LED grow lights. So I want to encourage others that, yeah, I can put 20 Tower Gardens on my balcony, but why not have it in my living room? It takes three diameter feet, it's right there. Again, I'm cutting kale, I made some smoothies before I got, as I got up this morning, I had meetings last night, I supplied them with smoothies so that they would stay up and alert. And I'm just so excited, can you tell? So the missing component to this all is a company that we formulated is called Tower It Up. So if you are so busy that you can manage and do what you need to maintain your tower, we've created a company called Tower It Up and Tower It Up will be just that. Your go-to person, they'll answer questions, they'll supply your cakey, your seedlings, and they'll help you to manage and maintain it. So if you are needing any questions answered, just give us a call, call us at Think Tech, go online and see where we're to be found and we'll be right there to answer any of your questions. So for Hawaii, let's grow healthy together. I mean growing healthy together. When you're ready, we're ready. Just take that first step. Aloha for now.