Weed is not a word often associated with the immaculate gardens of the Chelsea flower show. But with hydroponics and urban farming making grand appearances at this year’s event, it will be on a lot of visitors’ lips.
“With the right lights you can grow whatever you like, even if you’re inside a dark, north-facing flat in London or Birmingham,” said Jody Lidgard, one of Chelsea’s most decorated designers. “It’s almost like marijuana,” he chuckled. “It’s funny, but it’s true. They’ve been leading the way.”
The plants being grown in Lidgard’s Montessori Centenary Children’s Garden as well as the Ikea and Tom Dixon “Gardening Will Save The World” show garden are all entirely legal, of course. However, both have embraced similar themes: using technology and maximising space to bring gardening to people who don’t have gardens.
The Montessori garden features a small shipping container with simple hydroponic trays in which children can grow salad leaves and small vegetables without soil. The Ikea garden, conceived by designer Tom Dixon, is in two layers – the top is covered with greenery, mostly edible, while below is a horticultural laboratory, featuring hydroponics, aeroponics and beds of mushrooms growing in soil sculptures created by a 3D printer.
While the antiseptic feel of soil-free hydroponic units, where the plants suck nutrients out of reservoirs under an array of lights, may seem anathema to traditional gardeners, for Lidgard and his colleagues the system plays an important role in promoting sustainable urban farming.
“It shows you don’t have to have an allotment and you don’t have to have your whole garden given over to growing vegetables,” Lidgard said. “If you only eat one or two meals a year that you’ve grown yourself then that has an impact.”
Commercial attempts at urban farming are unproven on a large scale although some farms, such as Clapham’s Growing Underground, have had success. For Toni Pavić, the designer realising the technological element of Tom Dixon’s garden, urban farming by individuals and families remains a vital part of the response to soil degradation, the erosion of top soil and the reduction in soil nutrients by intensive agriculture.
“In the next few years we could have a situation where we can’t really grow anything because the soil is being destroyed,” Pavić said. “I see this [hydroponics] as a bit like the Jamie Oliver of gardening. He brought a simplicity to food. This is doing the same for gardening – we want to make it approachable and affordable.” Pavić has been overseeing the efforts of academics from University College London and Innsbruck University, Austria, who have created volcanic-style sculptures from 3D printed soil hardened with agar gel. “We asked ‘what if a garden was designed by artificial intelligence?’” Professor Marjan Colletti said. “We thought of soil that resembled the aesthetic of a volcano. It’s a blend of architecture and gardening.” The 3D printed soil is host to a mini mushroom farm, harvested by robots. “It is entirely biodegradable,” Colletti said. “When it’s exposed to the weather, it will break down a bit like a tree trunk. But it will last for at least a season, maybe two.”
Although the project was conceived by academics, he believes garden designers or garden centres could create similar bespoke soil sculptures. “Plenty of people are 3D printer enthusiasts,” he said. “Why not?”
The move at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea show, which starts on Tuesday, towards urban farming involves other new technologies that are less obvious. The Campaign for Female Education’s “Giving Girls in Africa a Space to Grow” features the event’s first biofortified crops. The sorghum, maize and beans growing in the show garden’s red soil (from Herefordshire) have been bred through schemes backed by the Department of International Development for farmers in Zimbabwe, whose techniques inspired designer Jilayne Rickards.
The garden features underground irrigation pipes feeding a two-metre square growing sorghum, peanuts, kale and zinc-enriched beans on a rotation arrangement. “In Zimbabwe they claim this can feed a family of four for a year,” Rickards said.
