The Hydroponic Harvest
To newly migrated Indians in North America, huge hardware stores like HomeDepot, Lowes etc can feel daunting at first. But it doesn’t take too long for hobbyists, tinkerers and serious builders alike, who have some inclination to get their hands dirty and their feet wet, to figure their way around these stores. And in no time at all, with a favorite DIY project plan tucked under their arm, these stores can make one feel like a kid in a candy store!
My cousin Rahul moved with his family to Canada recently. For most of his adult life I had seen him focussed on his career in the software industry. Other than his passion for building electronics projects as a teenager, I would not have characterized him as a handy guy around the house. So it was a pleasant surprise to see a batch of fresh vegetables and herbs from his “kitchen garden” in the middle of Toronto winter, not too many days after his move to the new country. There was radish, spinach, three varieties of lettuce, basil, dill, Chinese coriander. “We have this largish space in the basement of the house in Toronto that I didn’t have the luxury of in our apartment in Gurgaon”, he says about his drive to grow vegetables in his basement. Well, I have seen game rooms and entertainment rooms and utility rooms in basements. To hear about this creative use of the basement to grow healthy produce was a breath of fresh air.
Rahul built two kinds of hydroponics systems. He says, the first one, called the Deep Water Culture, is great for beginners. He got large 55 liter storage containers and filled them with nutrient solutions of NPK (Two Nitrogen-Phosphorous-Potassium solutions in the right proportion). After growing the vegetable and herb seeds in rockwool or peat moss or coco fiber, he immersed the seedings in a netcup into this solution. A simple pH meter helps him maintain the pH of the solution. Tap water in Canada is usually alkaline, and usually slightly acidic at 6.5 has been enough to get a good yield. He has an aerator connected to this system, which is programmed to aerate for 40 minutes, then off for 20 minutes, around the clock. As the system is in his basement, he has connected a light source, which runs for thirteen hours and leaves the rest 11 hours for the plants to take a breather. The plants sit in the nutrients, get unlimited oxygen through the aeration and grow like crazy. They grow around twice as fast as in soil due to the controlled environment. So much so, that he had to get rid of the tomato plants as they needed too much vertical space. Ebb & Tide in this setup grows even faster than DWC according to Rahul.
In the second system, the nutrient solution is pumped into channels that hold plants with a smaller root system. Rahul built this from scratch. He bought a set of 3"10ft PVC drain pipes from HomeDepot, drilled two inch diameter holes to hold the small plants with roots and the roots found their way out of the netcup and into the drip stream. He has a submersible water pump to circulate the nutrient solution to supply the nutrients and oxygen through the pipes. By altering the outflow, inflow (using valves), it is possible to have the plant roots soaking in the nutrient solution in a 20 min soak/40 min aeration cycle. It was quite a feat accomplished considering he had never built anything of this magnitude from scratch before.
Rahul experimented with different kinds of light sources, trying the reddish spectrum (6500 K warm lights) for tomatoes. However at the end of the day he feels the white light sources (cheaper 6000K LED tubes work as well as more expensive panels) work just as good. With the lights, pumps and the aerators in the basement, the system has smart sensors, like an IP camera and smoke detectors to monitor the health and safety of the system. He has automated the system enough that the only manual intervention it needs is to refill water once in two weeks. To keep the cost down, he figured out that packing sponge works as well to grow seeds and as a wick for nutrients - just as good as the store bought rockwool, which can get expensive pretty fast. For the Deep Water plants, he noticed the roots grow so fast, they don’t need any additional support with rocks or pebbles.
Over the years I encountered some very inspiring sustainable vegetable gardens. I came across a sophisticated sustainable terrace garden that Dipali Parekh Shahlot in this video, whom I knew during my school days, has developed. In this fascinating example of resourcefulness, Dipali, a gardening enthusiast, has made use of terrace space to grow organic vegetables and fruits for the past 20 years. Another first of its kind endeavor is Boston Medical Center’s rooftop hospital farming with 25 different varieties and 2 bee hives to organically pollinate plants over 2658 sq ft of terrace area. The produce is used in the hospital food pantry, affordable farmer’s market, teaching hospital, cafeteria and patient plates. Yet another sustainability initiative is the George Washington University GroW Garden where student volunteers work a community organic garden, and donate the produce from this sustainable garden to Miriam’s Kitchen, an organization that feeds homeless people in the DC area.
While I understand the year-round viability of outdoor gardens in tropical countries like India, I had wondered about options in colder countries during the frost and snow season. Rahul’s vegetable garden sounds like a promising year-round “basement to table'' sustainable alternative in cold countries. Rahul’s family has enjoyed new recipes like radish greens pesto and is ready to try the exotic flavor of Chinese coriander from the variety of produce in his hydroponic harvest. With all the motivation from these sustainable gardens, my plan is to start with a cilantro-in-a-jar.
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