Published September 26, 2004

Floating a new idea

A northeast Iowa man says his method of growing produce could change farming. He just needs a ride south.

By JERRY PERKINS
REGISTER FARM EDITOR

Guttenberg, Ia. - A roped-together raft of vegetables, flowers and trees floats on a city-owned pond here.

The "Farm Pond Produce Floatilla ," as inveterate inventor William Skaife calls his brainchild, desperately needs $25,000 to pay for a tow down the Mississippi River so it can escape the inevitable arrival of frost in northeast Iowa.

Skaife hopes that by riding out winter in a warmer clime, his project can keep producing its vine-ripened tomatoes, rosy red peppers and other assorted fruits, vegetables and tree crops.

Although the tomatoes have been hit hard by mold, the raspberries, peaches, nectarines, avocados, flowers, herbs, swiss chard, eggplant and other crops growing on the floating garden are doing well, Skaife said.

So well, in fact, that he wants to save them from Jack Frost.

"We wanted to prove you could put those plants on the river and they could thrive," Skaife said.

Mission accomplished, he believes.

Now, he just has to show that the plants can be sent south and then brought back here in the spring when they would be put on farm ponds in Iowa.

"Inevitably, produce will be grown in ponds, vine-ripened and sold locally," Skaife predicts.

The problem is, Skaife and his wife, Margaret, have sunk $75,000 into the project over the past 16 months and don't have the money to send the floatilla south for the winter.

The produce project is one in a long progression of inventions Skaife has come up with over the years in what he calls his "obsession with discovery and inventions."

Born in Davenport 73 years ago, Skaife graduated from the University of Iowa's College of Law in 1955, but he never wanted to practice law. Instead, he went into the Christmas tree business, franchising 250 "Santa's Forest" operations all over the country, where locally grown Christmas trees were raised and sold.

"It was a successful business, but I had a lousy marriage," Skaife recounted recently.

He escaped both the marriage and the successful business by jumping on a motorcycle, trying to shake off the depression that would revisit him from time to time throughout his life.

When Skaife wheeled through Georgia on his way to nowhere in particular, he met Margaret, now 64, and they were married a month later. They have been together 31 years.

His depression lifted, and Skaife started over with a potted plant he called the "Love Tree." After some initial success, that business went bad. But one day, another idea popped into his head.

"It just came to me - taking a telescoping Boy Scout drinking glass and using it to make a pop-up planter," he said.

He perfected the idea at his Aunt Minnie's greenhouse in Dubuque, using telescoping planters with slits in the side to allow air to circulate among the roots.

"What the system did was eliminate the human element in the watering of plants," Skaife explained. "I had stumbled onto a way to grow plants in soil in continuous contact with water. In effect, the plants do cafeteria feeding, taking up the nutrients in the soil that they need to grow."

He dubbed the system "Anything Groes ." Iowa State University researchers tested the system in 1978, he said, and those tests showed the superiority of his approach to growing.

The successful tests opened Skaife's eyes to the possibilities of growing plants with the system, but health problems intervened in the summer of 1979 when he developed Hodgkin's disease and another episode of depression ensued.

Treatment ended the depression, and the Hodgkin's disease went into remission. Skaife emerged with a growing resolve to perfect Anything Groes as a way to grow vegetables.

He tried to get some California farmers to adapt the system, but, Skaife said, they did not want to do the labor, and the experiment failed. Nevertheless, his prolific mind kept racing ahead.

"I kept coming up with one invention after another, but I made a lot of mistakes. My inventiveness has caused me numerous problems at times," said Skaife, shrugging off his lifelong dilemma of matching his ideas with a monetary payoff.

Through all the failures, Skaife kept growing his plants in Iowa, North Carolina and Florida.

"It really, really worked," he said. Skaife said he grew "fantastic tomatoes" for $2 a pound in leased greenhouses and had people standing in line for the vine-ripened produce. Everything was going well, he said, except he could not grow enough.

That brings us to his floating garden that is sitting on a pond in Guttenberg, waiting to hitch a ride down the mighty Mississippi before a killing freeze comes.