Luckily, in addition to being very relaxing, entertaining and all around fantastic, the Electric Forest Festival is also green-minded; they feature many sustainable options, lots of healthy food and great eco-friendly vendors including…us! That’s right: you can come play and dance in the forest and stop by to visit your favorite hydroponics supplier. General Hydroponics will be there for the entire festival- June 30th-July 3rd. We will have samples of many of our nutrients and hydroponic systems on display for you to check out and drool over. Come see all the amazing, healthy plants that we’ve grown with our GO series.

Additionally, we’ll have a new shirt design to give away, as we usually do. You won’t want to miss this year’s design!

Come visit us during the day to see our products in action and talk to the folks behind the products. Then hang around to dance with us! Summer is here and it’s time to enjoy it!

Created in 2004 to raise funds for charity and recognize talented, local, up-and-coming musical acts, The 2010 Muddy River Jam Festival was a 2-day festival where over 80 bands and electronic acts performed. Beyond just music, the event creates a family-like community by encouraging overnight camping onsite at the Salem County Fairgrounds outside of Philadelphia.

The lineup for 2010 was incredible. Multiple stages went off all weekend and featured great performances by The Join, Perpetual Groove, and many others. General Hydroponics was proud to sponsor the event alongside Vitamin Water. GH gave out tons of the General Organics Sample Boxes, and Chill and Randall were on hand to talk with everyone about music and growing. We are also especially proud to say that much of the entire Muddy River festy was coordinated by GH’s own Andy Troutman. Andy and his team pulled off a wonderful weekend!

Everyone on the east coast, be on the lookout for next summer’s 7th year of the MRJF, bigger and better than ever! Head to muddyriverjamfestival.com for all the details, press information and sponsorship opportunities. Be sure to check out their videos too! See you next year!

For many summers, General Hydroponics has been a major sponsor of the world’s largest reggae festival, in Humboldt, California. In the beginning, it was known as Reggae on the River, and in recent years was called Reggae Rising. The festival was the highlight of our events calendar. “Reggae” was the perfect party. Endless music and 20,000 of the nicest people you could ever meet. We stoked the crowd with free samples, gave away limited edition t-shirts, and partied non-stop all weekend. But, structural shifts have once again rocked the foundations of the festival.

In 2010, for the first time in 5 years, GH is not going to be up on the Eel River for a summer Reggae festival. Instead, we are going to branch out in new venues. We are still going to support all the festival fans as Reggae reworks it’s programming, by continuing with our sponorships. We will be making a return to Earthdance, heading to the East Coast for the Muddy River Jam Festival and we are very excited to announce a new event to our lineup, Power to the Peaceful. It is a unique, lively event unlike any other, held September 11 and 12th in Golden Gate Park. Like Reggae, it’s got great, consciousness raising music acts, but it has something Reggae never had, a skate ramp!!! We can’t wait to get the vans loaded and get out on the road! See you there!

Power to the Peaceful 2009 photo by Paul Devoto

Gen Hydro was promoting their new General Organics line, which is organic and vegan and works in soil, coco, and hydro.  They also had their traditional nutrient lines and supplements on hand to talk about.

The whole crew was really involved with customers and anyone that just wanted to hang out and talk about gardening.

The booth was really chill and was covered in the new art from the General Organics line.  GH reminds you, “Don’t just be seaweed, garden with seaweed“.

Here you see some more GH murals and the awesome annual Reggae Rising t-shirt, or lack thereof.

There were plenty of samples given out to customers on Sunday.  GH recommends Azamax for pests in your garden.

The music was off the hook.  Here is Lutan Fyah.  There were other world-renowned bands like Capleton, the Original Wailers, and Luciano.

This year’s Reggae Rising was amazing.  Be sure to get your tickets next year and stop by the Gen Hydro booth.  If you want to see more pics of Reggae Rising, be sure to check out the General Hydroponics Flickr stream.

The whole thing goes down in Hopland, at the Real Goods Solar Living Institute. It is an amazing campus, dedicated to a fully sustainable lifestyle. The premise of the event is one of teaching and learning. This isn’t just a hippie dance fest, it’s a place to gather knowledge from people on the bleeding edge of ecology. Speakers this year included Paul Staments, Caroline Casey and Ed Begley Jr, and preformers included New Monsoon and Maria Muldar.

But the focus at Sol Fest is always on the participatory workshops. Just reading the titles of these examples inspires me: Carbon Sequestration and Soil Managment; Convert Your Motorcycle to Electric; Reconnect to the Water Cycle with Greywater, Rainwater and Composting Toilets; Introduction to Micro-Inverters; and Community Based Farming- A Path to Creating a Viable Local Food System. Those are a small sampling of the 75+ workshops that are offered.

Here is a quickie Q&A with GH business manager Luc:

Q: Sol Fest happens right between Reggae Rising and Earthdance. How is Sol Fest different from those festivals?

A: The only commonality between these festivals and Sol Fest is that they are local. At Sol Fest, the musical scene clearly comes second; the priority is clearly given to educate on sustainability via numerous quality workshops but also companies that show how their business makes a difference in the renewable energy world. In other words Sol Fest tends to reflect the integrated sustainable solution available with our technology that could and should make a difference in our economy in the near future.

Q: Sol Fest is all about sustainability. What does GH bring to the table?

A: To start with, GH brings hydroponics on the table. Hydroponics is the tool for Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA). CEA is more sustainable than the current industrial agriculture economy for the following reasons:

1-There is no interference between our ecosystems and CEA; it means that CEA production doesn’t emit toxic waste to our soils and waters as the current system does. The other way around is also true: via CEA the crop is more protected from diseases and  natural disasters like flooding

2-By using hydroponics technology the use of energy in CEA is more optimized for water and nutrient cycles.

To sum up, using hydroponics gives us the advantage of using fewer resources that do less damage to our environment. It is thus sustainable. In addition to watching the amount of energy we use for the same output and what we do with this energy we need to carefully look at the way we get this energy. This an area where GH makes a difference in the hydroponics world by featuring some high technology systems that run on solar power. Check out our eco grower, rain forest, or power grower ecos.

Q: SolFest is very cutting edge, can you list some emerging technologies that you learned about, perhaps that you had never heard of before?

A: Sol Fest is very cutting edge! The technology they feature is all at the top what we do for every sector of the economy (transportation, food, construction etc.) I haven’t really discovered any technology I hadn’t heard about before but I learned a lot on how to use this technology. A few examples are the workshops that I attended on:
-how to select and set a solar installation in your house
-how to deal with compliance issues for home made waste water systems and wet lands
-how to build a bamboo structure
Photo Credit Thanks: mary jane watson and sunshine curtis

One of my favorite acts to play the event is the Goddess Alchemy Project. They combine dance and ritual with hip-hop beats and world music. The bird costume in the photo below is so cool! 

As usual, GH sent its crew and set up a huge booth. Not only does GH put together a beautiful booth, but GH provides the prettiest, most vibrant plants for the main stage. This really contributes to the green vibe, and the mother-earth appeal of the event. At the booth, we set up all kinds of information and samples. Our team of Adam, Jessica and Ivan met with all kinds of General Hydroponics users, from hobbyists to true professionals. Everyone loves grabbing the latest nutrients and supplements. Not to mention the Earthdance 2008 GH T-shirt. 

Next week, SolFest!

Summertime and the Livin’s Easy. In August the GH crew headed into the heart of NorCal for the world’s largest reggae festival and I tagged along and captured the whole experience. Reggae Rising is an amazing weekend, and General Hydroponics has generously sponsored the event for 4 years now. We put up a huge booth in the concert bowl, and hold it down with friends and family.

The booth looks like some kind of paradise in the dead center of 20,000 reggae fans. It is a major chill out spot, with cushy couches and the best water misters. They really keep the heat from getting to you. The booth has a perfect view of the stage, and the music from the performers fills up the whole space.

This year our reps and consultants Jessica, Luc, Adam and Ivan met with hundreds and hundreds of customers. So many people learned about products and got samples. We gave away tons of loot, including free FloraNova, Floralicous, and FloraBlend. Meeting people and hearing all the positive feedback from our customers is totally fun, and helps us know what your garden’s needs are. It is such a good way to get to know people year after year.

And everyone who comes by the booth wants to score the famous reggae t-shirt that GH releases each year. The shirts are limited editons, and they feature the Lion of Judah. All the proceeds went to a really cutting edge charity that promotes myco-remediation of toxic lands.

Reggae Rising is just one of the festivals we sponsor. I’ll continue the summer festy wrapup next week with stories from Earthdance.