Recently I wrote about growing your own food at home.  This is an option to break out of society’s assumption that your role is to sell your time to earn money and spending it, without being able to produce anything yourself.

Sure, you can grow food in a pot full of soil, but aeroponics is a way of growing that allows you to get the most rapid growing vegetables in the smallest possible space.  With aeroponics, you can grow all your vegetables, even if you have a small home or apartment.  Read on to find out more.

Aeroponics is a variant of hydroponics in that it doesn’t use soil, but instead of the roots of the plant being in an inert medium, they hang in air, in 100% humidity.  They receive nutrients by being sprayed with misters and oxygen by being open to the air.  Plants actually require oxygen to be healthy, and take it in through the roots, but water can absorb very little oxygen by itself.  The optimal combination of nutrients and oxygen provided through aeroponics accelerates the plant’s growth well above growing in soil, or conventional hydroponics.

NASA researched aeroponics and concluded that it was the most efficient way of raising fresh vegetables for astronauts.  It minimises water consumption, the plants grow more quickly than any other way, and there is no heavy growing medium or soil.

Aeroponics allows to you raise food in about 1/7 of the space of growing in soil.  Even a fairly small setup will keep your family going with salad greens.  You need not refrigerate them – you can just pick what you need fresh off from your interior garden.  Where I live, the soil is extremely infertile (in fact it is just sand), so aeroponics is the best way of raising food.

The most exciting innovation that affects aeroponics is in grow lights.  You could of course grow your plants outside in the sun, but how about if you live in a harsh environment, have little sun, or want to avoid insect pests?  Grow lights let you raise your crop inside.  They also allow you to stack up your plants to minimise floor area and still make sure that they get enough light.  Grow lights allow you to extend the growing cycle.  For example, lettuce likes up to 18 hours per day of light.

Previously, the only option were wimpy fluorescent lights or power guzzling metal halide lights.  Interestingly enough, plants don’t use the full spectrum that we can see.  They mainly use red and blue light, and essentially no yellow or green light (plants actually reflect green light, that’s why they appear green).  So rather than using energy to produce the full light spectrum, you need only produce blue and red.  The most efficient way to do this is using LED technology.  LED grow lights combine blue and green LEDs and produce the light needed and nothing else, while using about 30 times less power.

You also need the aeroponic setup with the pumps and misters, and the nutrient solution which is commercially available.  You can also increase carbon dioxide levels to increase plant growth.  Plants grow well with up to 1500 ppm of carbon dioxide, and one quite elegant solution is to capture carbon dioxide emissions and put them into your sealed growing booth.

Aeroponics is a real option to help achieve food self sufficiency, even if you don’t have a lot of space.

I am not an expert in growing plants or aeroponics – if you can contribute, please leave your comments.  I value your feedback.

Tags: independence, producer, self sufficiency, subversive

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2010 at 9:11 pm and is filed under Daily subversive tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.