High Summer, Big News
It's late July, the demo beds are roaring, and we have the announcement we've been working toward all year: you can now preorder a Greenway Drip kit.
This issue is a garden report card — the wins, the one very instructive failure, and what a dry stretch taught us about barrel capacity. Plus: Jasper's big deadline, a manufacturing update we promised to give you honestly, and where to find us at the market.
Preorders Are Open
You can now preorder a Greenway Drip kit. A $50 deposit reserves your spot and gets applied to the $250 kit price.
The first shipment is real: our production order is placed, and the first kits arrive in mid-August. We're giving the folks who told us early that they wanted a kit first dibs on those first ten — but preorders are open to everyone right now. And if you don't make it into the first order, don't sweat it: the next one is coming shortly after.
(Or find the Preorder button at greenwaydrip.com. Shipping is calculated separately when your kit ships.)
The Demo Bed Report Card
We promised you honest dispatches from our front-yard beds, so here's the full grade book:
The stars. The zucchinis are enormous — the kind you stop measuring in inches and start measuring in regrets. Tomatoes and eggplants are thriving on the drip system, drinking rainwater at the roots on schedule, rain or shine (well — mostly shine lately, more on that below).
The honest failure. Our radishes failed. Here's the thing: the radish bed isn't hooked up to the drip system, and that's on purpose. With a root crop, the part you eat is sitting right in the soil the water goes into — so per the same safety rule that keeps rain barrel water off our lettuce, radishes get tap water by hand instead. The trouble is that hand-watered beds depend on the hands, and the hands went camping. The drip-irrigated beds sailed on without us; the bed that relied on humans did not. We accidentally ran a controlled experiment on our own product. The product won. D'oh.
The bumper crop. Lettuce and herbs went absolutely bananas this year — we are still eating our way through the lettuce. Salad diplomacy with the neighbors has commenced.
The Barrel Math
Here's something this dry July taught us firsthand: one barrel might not be enough.
We haven't had much rain in the last couple of weeks, and our single 55-gallon barrel has been running the tank low. A drip system is wonderfully efficient — but it can only deliver what the sky deposits. So we're doing what we'd tell any neighbor to do: adding another barrel or two for a bigger reserve.
The back-of-the-envelope math, if you're wondering about your own setup:
- A drip system watering a full garden bed sips something like 5–15 gallons per watering day, depending on plant count and schedule.
- That means a full 55-gallon barrel is only about four days to a week and a half of watering with zero rain — less than most people guess.
- Minnesota summers reliably serve up dry stretches longer than that. (Ask us how we know.)
- The fix is cheap: barrels link together with a short hose between overflows, and every barrel you add roughly doubles your buffer. (A half-inch of rain refills a 55-gallon barrel off a modest roof section — so even a small storm resets the clock.)
If you're planning your kit setup for this fall or next spring: think about your longest likely dry spell, not your average week. We'll report back on our own expansion.
Cheer for Jasper: MN Cup Update
Jasper's Minnesota Cup materials are in — pitch deck, business plan, and a one-minute video, all submitted for the semifinal round of the Student Division. (Greenway Drip is a 2026 Semifinalist, which we're still grinning about.) He did a fantastic job pulling it all together, and now it's up to the judges. Proud-of-my-co-founder disclosure: the co-founder writing this sentence is his mom.
Finalists are announced in August, and the MN Cup Grand Finale is September 14 in Minneapolis. So sometime in the next few weeks we'll learn whether Jasper is pitching on the big stage. Fingers crossed, trellises tied.
The Manufacturing Update (The Honest One)
In Issue No. 2 we told you our goal is to bring manufacturing home to Minnesota, that it would be a multi-year project, and that we'd tell you honestly how it's going. Here's the honest part: our first attempt didn't work. The components we need — the pre-wired controller unit, the pump — simply aren't manufactured here, so there was nothing local to assemble from.
We're not giving up; we're re-sequencing. The realistic path is assembly first — bringing final kit assembly to Minneapolis while components are still imported — and then growing the domestic share of parts over time as volume makes it viable. Slower than we'd like. Still the plan.
What picking a supplier actually looked like. We knew going in that nobody had a ready-to-order product sitting on a shelf — that's the whole reason we had to DIY our own system last year. But knowing it and living it are different things. Getting to a real sample meant working with each factory's engineers to blueprint and design our kit from spec — drawings, revisions, revisions of the revisions, and a volume of back-and-forth we can only describe as: a LOT.
And a plot twist. One of the samples we ordered arrived with another company's name on a piece inside the prototype — which is how we discovered we do, in fact, have one real competitor: an actual garden-scale system, not one of the little porch-pot kits that make up the rest of the market. (Where was it when we searched last summer? We looked. Hard.) We'll admit that shook us for a minute. Then we got hands on their product: two thumbs down. And it sells for more than $100 above ours. Meanwhile, the supplier we did choose sent a prototype and four testing-and-demo samples that are fantastic. Better parts, a hundred-plus dollars less — we're pretty happy with where we landed on value to you.
The Cabin Test
We've been up at the cabin and out camping a lot this month, and here's the quiet magic of this whole thing: the garden watered itself the entire time. No neighbor with a key, no hose timer anxiety, no coming home to crispy tomatoes. The sun charged the battery, the timer ran the pump, the beds drank on schedule.
We did, however, come home to weeds. The kit waters your garden; it does not, as yet, weed it.
Out and About This Summer
- Uptown Farmers Market — we're there every other Thursday, with the next one Thursday, July 30. Live system on the table, puns at no extra charge.
- The demo beds — across from Jackson Square Park, adjacent to the Holland basin. If you're in Northeast, come by and poke around. The zucchinis will be visible from the sidewalk at this rate.
If you made it this far — thank you, as always. Reply and tell us: how's your garden handling the dry stretch? And if you've got a favorite way to use an alarming quantity of lettuce, we are taking submissions.