Welcome to the website!  I am Josh Fitzhugh, the owner of Josh’s Jungle.  I start all of the plants, grow all of the peppers, and make all of the products.  Before starting Josh’s Jungle, I knew that there were a few industries in the world that I would like to be part of and hopefully unify in the future.  These were Food, Energy, Water, and Biological Waste.  After research and a few classes, I found that agriculture was my passion.  The United States has large areas of cheap land, so we grow most of our food in large fields.  While it’s easy and inexpensive to do this, it uses more water than necessary, and during rain falls, nutrient runoff into rivers will happen.  This runoff is what is causing algae blooms all over the country.  Both organic and conventional farming suffer from this problem.

For this reason and multiple others, I chose growing in a greenhouse in pots.  This year I am going one step further and growing with a closed loop hydroponics system, which will allow us to use as little as 1/10th of the water used in conventional farming for the same crops.  There will be 3360 square feet of greenhouses with over 600 pepper plants grown hydroponically this year.

Why did I choose peppers?  So many hydroponic startups all around the country grow greens.  They make a lot of money doing it too.  They are easy to start with and are in high demand.  Peppers are different.  As a fruit, they contain nutrition, flavor, and spice that greens cannot.  I have grown to love the chili community and I love the adventure of satisfying their need for true heat and flavor.  The passion of this community makes me want to grow the highest quality produce possible as well as provide as much variation as possible.

I hope you enjoyed this short synopsis of how Josh’s Jungle started.  There is so much more that I would love to share, but that has to be for a later day…..