Viva Brighton April 2015 Issue #26

the lowdown on...
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Hydroponics
Growing without soil
Plants don’t actually need soil
to grow. In fact, they grow
much faster without soil, in
the right conditions. Supplying
those conditions is the art
of hydroponics, an increasingly
popular way of growing
various plants, including,
allegedly, cannabis.
Dave, manager of the
Brighton branch of hydroponics
shop UK Groworks, says “there are three
basic methods of growing plants”: in soil, in
coconut fibre, or in a water-based system. “Soil is
the easiest, it’s the most forgiving, it’s the slowest.”
It’s also fairly self-regulating; you don’t need
to do much.
But if you switch to one of the other two, you
have to carefully monitor the pH and the amount
of food the plant’s getting, as well as the humidity,
light levels and temperature. Explaining
why in detail, Dave made it sound like a delicate
balancing act, in which a plant is basically looking
for any excuse to stop growing and turn a
funny colour.
He admits there’s “a lot more effort required”
with hydroponics, though actually it’s easy “if you
know what you’re doing. Some people struggle
with it, but it isn’t rocket science.”
Dave talks me through the hydroponic systems
the shop’s got on display. The first involves
a bucket part-filled with water, in which the
plant’s nutrients are dissolved, with an air pump
submerged in it. The plant is suspended above
the water line, but “as the bubbles come to the
surface, it splashes the roots. They get lots of
oxygen, and they’ll grow approximately five times
faster than in soil.”
Another method involves
planting the seed in clay
pellets in a bucket, which
floods on a timer, periodically
soaking the plant with a
nutrient-and-water mix. “This
will grow maybe three times
faster than in soil.”
It’s been said that the Hanging
Gardens of Babylon used
hydroponics; more recently, scientists had been
using it as a way to study the roots of plants while
they were growing. “Then some bright spark
went: ‘Oh, I know what you could use that for!’
What could you use it for? Dave pulls up pictures
on his computer of Thanet Earth, a huge hydroponic
vegetable factory that “provides, I think, a
fifth of all the salad crop in the UK”. Hobbyists
can grow veg indoors this way, though “artificial
lights are expensive to run for producing food.
“There are high-yielding crops like wasabi,
which you can’t get fresh in this country; it’s a
premium product. And there’s a massive thing for
chillies. A guy came in recently saying he was setting
up a shop in London that just sells chillies,
and bought all sorts of equipment to do it.”
And how about cannabis? Well, Dave points out,
there’s not much he can do. “My motorbike can
do 160mph. That would be breaking the law, on
a public highway. I have that piece of equipment;
how I use it is not the responsibility of the shop
that sold it to me. I have no control over what
people do with the equipment we sell. Who
knows what people use it for?” Steve Ramsey
UK Groworks, Unit 4, Belltower Industrial Estate,
Whitehawk, 01273 624327
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