I think we will be seeing a lot more hydro stuff in the coming years and hopefully it'll shed it's image as being used for growing pot. It's a much more efficient way of growing than soil, often yielding 3x as much.
There's quite an active group over on reddit who discuss hydro issues /r/hydro.
You can actually build a pretty decent home brew set up with minimal cost with some careful planning.
I've seen folks using the Space Buckets (http://www.spacebuckets.com/) technique to grow tomatoes and other edibles - I think that the pot growing industry definitely innovates and pushes the curve forward for these sorts of techniques, so I hope the derogatory nature of associating with that crowd doesn't prejudice someone against looking into the techniques. I could imagine a lot of good things coming from homegrow/DIY hydro gardening - although I have a huge normal garden which provides a family of 4 with more than enough high-grade food, I'd still like to set things up for the non-growing season every year. There's nothing quite like consuming food one produced oneself.
By "non-growing season" I'm assuming you mean winter. If you don't live in the Arctic Circle, or have temperatures to match, it's quite possible (I've seen it done anyway) to grow some vegetables under glass even in pretty unfavorable climates. Modern greenhouse materials are amazing.
With short days or chronically overcast skies, daylight still gives adequate blue light such that supplementary high-pressure Na (reddish spectrum) lighting can provide good enough conditions at low-moderate cost.
It wouldn't duplicate the lovely garden you describe, but might be better than nothing at all.
> If you don't live in the Arctic Circle, or have temperatures to match, it's quite possible (I've seen it done anyway) to grow some vegetables under glass even in pretty unfavorable climates.
I live 60 degrees northern latitude (still 1000 km to arctic circle). It is not possible to grow vegetables in gardens like this (indoors, in warm, with artificial light next to a floor to ceiling window wall). It is barely possible to grow herbs and greens, as long as they have been germinated earlier in the fall. Trying to start a seedling or a cloned cutting no longer works when the length of day goes around six hours or so.
Of course, you can put in a huge amount of grow lights but that's no longer practical to do in your kitchen.
I was referring to an outdoor greenhouse, set up on a plot of land where a large garden was mentioned. Oriented in a north-south direction natural light is still plentiful even in winter, and supplementing with artificial light can be effective.
You are right though, even a large south-facing window doesn't provide as much illumination as a proper greenhouse, sharply limiting what can be grown.
BTW if you get 6 hours of daylight at 60 deg latitude, that's impressive. My location is ~46 deg, but because of surrounding hills, and frequent thick cloud cover, we effectively get barely 6 hours of daylight at the start of winter, maybe less.
In the off season, we're relegated to getting what produce we can from the grocery store, taste-free as it may be...
> BTW if you get 6 hours of daylight at 60 deg latitude
6 hours was a guesstimate figure for when plants stop growing. That's for the actual lit period, not sunrise-sunset times.
At the darkest period of the year, the sunrise is after 9am and sunset is somewhere around 3 pm. Looking at the exact figures, it's 5 hours 49 minutes on the shortest day of the year. If you work a regular day job, you'll never see the sun for several months.
But effectively, that's pretty much perpetual darkness. During the midday, there's a brief period of "daylight", but most of the time is just twilight because the sun doesn't rise very high. The weather tends to be cloudy for the whole period, last year there was 20 minutes of unoccluded sunlight in December and one or two clear nights.
You learn to manage with the darkness in the winter and the light in the summer but coping with the rapid change in spring/fall is the worst. Humans are photosensitive animals, it really fucks up your mind.
All of that sounds very familiar. Astronomical sunrise/sunset times aren't an accurate guide to actual perceieved day length. Topological obstructions, like nearby hills, and in our climate, overcast skies block or decrease sunlight penetration.
Near my office, I've measured daytime illumination. At the least obstructed spot, midday it was 40K lux in the sunny summer, but late fall 9K was as good as it got when moderately cloudy.
In late fall it's identifiably daylight (if barely) at 9:00 and getting dark by 15:00 even though sunrise/sunset times promise 8.75 daytime hours in early December.
A couple of notable consequences are a high rate of seasonal depression, and widespread vitamin D insufficiency. Light is a cue for circadian rhythm, and people sensitive to fall/winter darkness often benefit with phototherapy. I'd make sure to take vitamin D supplements too, usually 2K IU is a standard recommendation.
The problem with this is that the grove will not be able to grow enough to sustain (or come close to sustaining) even a single person. By the very, very most optimistic calculations (best recorded growth in tropical greenhouses) you need at a minimum 300 sq ft of space. But more realistically a 1000 sq ft or more are required to sustain a person.
Then there's actually a ton of labor that goes into growing, picking and correcting the plants. Just ask someone who has worked in a garden, tried aquaponics or grown something hydroponically (weed or otherwise). Automation can still only do so much, especially when it isn't at scale.
This relegates their grove to growing single types of plants very well. Growing fruits requires more light than vegetables, but either way you're looking at at least 40 watts per sq ft of space, usually much more (especially since the light needs to penetrate down through the leaves). For even a small setup of 8 sq ft you're looking at something that pulls 4 kwh of electricity a day at minimum (around a half a dollar). Taking between 3 and 6 months to grow some fruits you're look at a minimum of $75 a yield but probably closer to $400-$500 or even more after you calculate the costs of HVAC (big), water pumping and heating/cooling costs and chemicals (which are on the order of a dollar-per-day expensive). And then a lot of the equipment needs to be replaced and is very expensive, especially if you are running lights. Most of those have a shelf life of around a half year, unless you do LEDs which are extremely expensive investments. Of course this needs to be compared to the yield but generally economies of scale, even organic ones, can produce goods much cheaper. And hydro isn't organic...
The reason hydroponics is associated with weed is because you need to grow something that costs more than your inputs.
Won't we eventually have rooftop solar and domestic batteries that mean that power costs (heating and air cycling, for example) are no longer as much of an issue?
I don't care about organic. I'd be happy to see contained growing that means I'm not losing large amounts of my plants to slugs/snails and caterpillars as I am now. Also the extreme heat in Australian summers troubles my garden too.
Batteries really suck; it's only when you compare the energy density to actual fuels that you realize quite how bad they are. And the energy efficiency of collecting sunlight, turning it into electricity and then back again is likely to remain poor; you're looking at what, 20% at best from solar panels? (and that's after a lot of work has gone into optimizing them). And at absolute best with optimized LEDs you're looking at 30% on the lighting side, for a combined efficiency of 6%. You might remember that a few years ago there was a big environmentalist fuss about light pipes - weird as they are, they can do much much better than solar-powered lighting if they're practical for the building in question.
Definitely. The only instance I can think of would be if you were at a high latitude and wanted lots of light in the winter. Some sort of solar concentrator mirror seems more practical though.
Blue and red light are best for photosynthesis, so if efficiencies are/were high enough, it could make sense to build a roof with solar panels over your plants, and then use red and blue LEDs for lighting the plants.
Having had experience with hydroponic horticulture, I believe you are correct. Successful hydroponic farming is much harder than it seems it would be.
The amount of light energy required to grow plants properly is very large and hard to supply with artificial light sources. Fruiting plants, like tomatoes, have much higher requirements than leafy crops, like lettuce. Lamps are rather inefficient converting electricity into light.
A 1000 Watt metal halide or high-pressure Na lamp is barely adequate to cover a square meter (if the only light source). Calculate the energy cost of running it 16hr/day for a month and it gives new respect for Mother Nature.
Another headache is plant nutrition. Vegetables grow fast and suck nutrients out of their environment at an alarming rate. There are many systems but the short version is reusing nutrient fluids requires constant chemical monitoring to assure proper pH, mineral content. Automated equipment is out of the question, and a home farmer very likely won't have the knowledge and lab equipment to do it optimally by hand.
There are a whole bunch of other constraints, but the above is enough said. Doing experiments is fun, but apartment-scale production of edibles is definitely no more than a pipe dream.
> A 1000 Watt metal halide or high-pressure Na lamp is barely adequate to cover a square meter (if the only light source).
1000 Watts of metal halide or HPNa? Per square meter? That's huge! You don't need anywhere near that kind of figures for growing salad in your kitchen. If you're working in a commercial gardening operation, then it's a different deal. But then you're either growing weed and/or have a huge area so the W/m^2 figure goes down.
A single fluorescent tube in addition to natural light and your usual kitchen lighting goes a long way.
Most plants are not very sensitive to pH figures nor do they suck up nutrients like crazy. Automated pH and EC measurement would be nice, though. Even better if this garden could automatically add in nutrients and acid if necessary.
Lessons from growing weed are not necessarily valid for food production.
we have been running an indoor aquaponic system as an expriment for a year now and you are right, it is a pipe dream mostly. Lots of fun to be had, but its not a cheap hobby.
It certainly isn't enough to sustain a single person but it's still nice to supplement your diet with fresh herbs and greens.
It's not viable for growing fruit or vegetables, though. That just doesn't make any sense economically.
We have a very similar hydroponic garden at our office and it's not a lot of work to maintain it. Basically adding a few buckets of water every week is enough. Every few months it needs an hour of maintenance, though (planting new seedlings or cuttings).
There are also organic hydroponic nutrients available. A dollar per day for nutrients is way too much if you're growing salad. Your basic plant food from the supermarket is a few bucks and lasts for months. You can spend as much money on expensive weed nutrients but that isn't necessary.
Hydroponics are used a lot outside of growing weed. Commercial production of herbs, salads and other greens is almost exclusively done with hydroponics, at least here in northern Europe, where light and heat are at a premium half of the year. Maintaining a greenhouse is expensive so maximizing the production per area per time is required for a viable commercial operation.
Running an aquaponic system is not easy. We have been running one for a year now inside our house under growlights (as an experiment - no way it is economical). a lot is automated with the arduino, but if my wife was not a microbiologist we would have failed totally. Super interesting however.
> unless you do LEDs which are extremely expensive investments
Not sure it's that expensive. DIY solutions are very affordable and I believe LEDs are getting cheaper and cheaper. They don't consume much energy and you can select their frequencies to approach an optimal spectrum for your plants.
With traditional technology you need more than 300square foot to support a single person.
But with hydroponic + vertical farming you could need a lot less (±1meter square).
You can with today technology have a production (versus traditional farming) gain of :
- 2x improvement by controlling light cycle to trick plant into growing faster
- 4x improvement by controlling season (in temperate climate you can just growth 6 months a year)
- 5x for hydroponic vs. soil growing.
- 15x production by stacking cultivation box in top of one other.
Using this technique you should be able to attain 600x production over traditional farming for the same surface.
That's funny because reading Unexotic Underclass, I immediately wondered if people could eventually dedicate areas of their property to growing food or insects automatically. Energy may become cheap enough, and time is the same for all of us.
Yes indeed. In the discussion following that thread, I pointed out people don't need money as much as they need land on which to grow, fish, hunt, etc.
This is a decent example of this, although the style that it's being implemented is more for bourgeous effect than helping everyday families.
We have a similar but smaller flood'n'drain type hydroponic garden at our office (it's a brand called Zengrow, but that particular model is discontinued). It's rather nice but not really a viable source of food.
Similar indoor garden products are very popular here in northern Europe because the price of salad and veggies is outrageous during the winter months. And also it's a nice aesthetic element when there's very little light or green in the winter.
This garden looks nice but it's way too big and probably too expensive. It will never be able to pay back its price in the food it produces.
So if the guys of this startup are listening, you should go smaller, at least initially.
Apart from that, this kind of gardens are very nice and low maintenance. But it's just a nice supplement, not something that feeds your family.
To be economically feasible, I think that light tubes, which capture sunlight and route the light indoors, would be necessary.
I grow food in two ways.
I use "earth boxes" (very water efficient) to grow veggies on our deck - where the wild pigs and other wild animals can't eat the plants.
I have about a 25x30 square foot area in a community garden. In return for doing a lot of volunteer work keeping a 1 mile irrigation ditch free and running (that supplies water to both the garden and a park) I get free water and use of the land, for non-commercial use. In other words, I can just grow food for my family and friends. Really hard physical work, but fun!
Considering the water, fuel and labour required in normal food production and delivery, growing under LEDs at home could easily be economically feasible. Especially since you don't have to beat the cost of production, but only match the store price.
37 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadThere's quite an active group over on reddit who discuss hydro issues /r/hydro.
You can actually build a pretty decent home brew set up with minimal cost with some careful planning.
With short days or chronically overcast skies, daylight still gives adequate blue light such that supplementary high-pressure Na (reddish spectrum) lighting can provide good enough conditions at low-moderate cost.
It wouldn't duplicate the lovely garden you describe, but might be better than nothing at all.
I live 60 degrees northern latitude (still 1000 km to arctic circle). It is not possible to grow vegetables in gardens like this (indoors, in warm, with artificial light next to a floor to ceiling window wall). It is barely possible to grow herbs and greens, as long as they have been germinated earlier in the fall. Trying to start a seedling or a cloned cutting no longer works when the length of day goes around six hours or so.
Of course, you can put in a huge amount of grow lights but that's no longer practical to do in your kitchen.
You are right though, even a large south-facing window doesn't provide as much illumination as a proper greenhouse, sharply limiting what can be grown.
BTW if you get 6 hours of daylight at 60 deg latitude, that's impressive. My location is ~46 deg, but because of surrounding hills, and frequent thick cloud cover, we effectively get barely 6 hours of daylight at the start of winter, maybe less.
In the off season, we're relegated to getting what produce we can from the grocery store, taste-free as it may be...
6 hours was a guesstimate figure for when plants stop growing. That's for the actual lit period, not sunrise-sunset times.
At the darkest period of the year, the sunrise is after 9am and sunset is somewhere around 3 pm. Looking at the exact figures, it's 5 hours 49 minutes on the shortest day of the year. If you work a regular day job, you'll never see the sun for several months.
But effectively, that's pretty much perpetual darkness. During the midday, there's a brief period of "daylight", but most of the time is just twilight because the sun doesn't rise very high. The weather tends to be cloudy for the whole period, last year there was 20 minutes of unoccluded sunlight in December and one or two clear nights.
You learn to manage with the darkness in the winter and the light in the summer but coping with the rapid change in spring/fall is the worst. Humans are photosensitive animals, it really fucks up your mind.
Near my office, I've measured daytime illumination. At the least obstructed spot, midday it was 40K lux in the sunny summer, but late fall 9K was as good as it got when moderately cloudy.
In late fall it's identifiably daylight (if barely) at 9:00 and getting dark by 15:00 even though sunrise/sunset times promise 8.75 daytime hours in early December.
A couple of notable consequences are a high rate of seasonal depression, and widespread vitamin D insufficiency. Light is a cue for circadian rhythm, and people sensitive to fall/winter darkness often benefit with phototherapy. I'd make sure to take vitamin D supplements too, usually 2K IU is a standard recommendation.
Then there's actually a ton of labor that goes into growing, picking and correcting the plants. Just ask someone who has worked in a garden, tried aquaponics or grown something hydroponically (weed or otherwise). Automation can still only do so much, especially when it isn't at scale.
This relegates their grove to growing single types of plants very well. Growing fruits requires more light than vegetables, but either way you're looking at at least 40 watts per sq ft of space, usually much more (especially since the light needs to penetrate down through the leaves). For even a small setup of 8 sq ft you're looking at something that pulls 4 kwh of electricity a day at minimum (around a half a dollar). Taking between 3 and 6 months to grow some fruits you're look at a minimum of $75 a yield but probably closer to $400-$500 or even more after you calculate the costs of HVAC (big), water pumping and heating/cooling costs and chemicals (which are on the order of a dollar-per-day expensive). And then a lot of the equipment needs to be replaced and is very expensive, especially if you are running lights. Most of those have a shelf life of around a half year, unless you do LEDs which are extremely expensive investments. Of course this needs to be compared to the yield but generally economies of scale, even organic ones, can produce goods much cheaper. And hydro isn't organic...
The reason hydroponics is associated with weed is because you need to grow something that costs more than your inputs.
I don't care about organic. I'd be happy to see contained growing that means I'm not losing large amounts of my plants to slugs/snails and caterpillars as I am now. Also the extreme heat in Australian summers troubles my garden too.
Google "blue light in greenhouses" for research in that area; an image search gives several examples. And yes, they do look weird, for example the alien world on page 3 in http://www.lemnislighting.com/pdf/65259%20Lemnis%20Folder%20...
The amount of light energy required to grow plants properly is very large and hard to supply with artificial light sources. Fruiting plants, like tomatoes, have much higher requirements than leafy crops, like lettuce. Lamps are rather inefficient converting electricity into light.
A 1000 Watt metal halide or high-pressure Na lamp is barely adequate to cover a square meter (if the only light source). Calculate the energy cost of running it 16hr/day for a month and it gives new respect for Mother Nature.
Another headache is plant nutrition. Vegetables grow fast and suck nutrients out of their environment at an alarming rate. There are many systems but the short version is reusing nutrient fluids requires constant chemical monitoring to assure proper pH, mineral content. Automated equipment is out of the question, and a home farmer very likely won't have the knowledge and lab equipment to do it optimally by hand.
There are a whole bunch of other constraints, but the above is enough said. Doing experiments is fun, but apartment-scale production of edibles is definitely no more than a pipe dream.
1000 Watts of metal halide or HPNa? Per square meter? That's huge! You don't need anywhere near that kind of figures for growing salad in your kitchen. If you're working in a commercial gardening operation, then it's a different deal. But then you're either growing weed and/or have a huge area so the W/m^2 figure goes down.
A single fluorescent tube in addition to natural light and your usual kitchen lighting goes a long way.
Most plants are not very sensitive to pH figures nor do they suck up nutrients like crazy. Automated pH and EC measurement would be nice, though. Even better if this garden could automatically add in nutrients and acid if necessary.
Lessons from growing weed are not necessarily valid for food production.
It's not viable for growing fruit or vegetables, though. That just doesn't make any sense economically.
We have a very similar hydroponic garden at our office and it's not a lot of work to maintain it. Basically adding a few buckets of water every week is enough. Every few months it needs an hour of maintenance, though (planting new seedlings or cuttings).
There are also organic hydroponic nutrients available. A dollar per day for nutrients is way too much if you're growing salad. Your basic plant food from the supermarket is a few bucks and lasts for months. You can spend as much money on expensive weed nutrients but that isn't necessary.
Hydroponics are used a lot outside of growing weed. Commercial production of herbs, salads and other greens is almost exclusively done with hydroponics, at least here in northern Europe, where light and heat are at a premium half of the year. Maintaining a greenhouse is expensive so maximizing the production per area per time is required for a viable commercial operation.
Perhaps what one needs to do is use the hydroponics to grow an environment for insects to live in and feed off the insects instead?
Not sure it's that expensive. DIY solutions are very affordable and I believe LEDs are getting cheaper and cheaper. They don't consume much energy and you can select their frequencies to approach an optimal spectrum for your plants.
But with hydroponic + vertical farming you could need a lot less (±1meter square).
You can with today technology have a production (versus traditional farming) gain of : - 2x improvement by controlling light cycle to trick plant into growing faster - 4x improvement by controlling season (in temperate climate you can just growth 6 months a year) - 5x for hydroponic vs. soil growing. - 15x production by stacking cultivation box in top of one other.
Using this technique you should be able to attain 600x production over traditional farming for the same surface.
Some are already doing it for cabbage in Japan (see Mirai : http://www.fieldrobotics.org/~ssingh/VF/Challenges_in_Vertic..., who sell itself to GE and who produce 5000kg of cabbage / day in a 1200m2 farm).
What make this technology viable now is the availability of cheap and energy efficient LEDs.
lets solve some real problems?
Currently this is being marketed at people with money, but research into indoor / vertical farming is definitely attacking a real problem.
Do you think there might be funding available?
This is a decent example of this, although the style that it's being implemented is more for bourgeous effect than helping everyday families.
Similar indoor garden products are very popular here in northern Europe because the price of salad and veggies is outrageous during the winter months. And also it's a nice aesthetic element when there's very little light or green in the winter.
This garden looks nice but it's way too big and probably too expensive. It will never be able to pay back its price in the food it produces.
So if the guys of this startup are listening, you should go smaller, at least initially.
Apart from that, this kind of gardens are very nice and low maintenance. But it's just a nice supplement, not something that feeds your family.
I grow food in two ways.
I use "earth boxes" (very water efficient) to grow veggies on our deck - where the wild pigs and other wild animals can't eat the plants.
I have about a 25x30 square foot area in a community garden. In return for doing a lot of volunteer work keeping a 1 mile irrigation ditch free and running (that supplies water to both the garden and a park) I get free water and use of the land, for non-commercial use. In other words, I can just grow food for my family and friends. Really hard physical work, but fun!
Also, I don't think these people would be expanding their operations if growing under artificial lights was uneconomic. - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/07/140717-japan...