No-Hoe Gardens

Hydroponics is taking root

A house plant can be a thing of joy and beauty until that point at which no prescription--talking to it, feeding it vitamins, watering it with Perrier or soothing it with Brahms--can rescue it from terminal dropsy. The green thumb turns down, the plant goes out, and the home horticulturist invests hope and dollars in yet another persnickety sprig. For more and more lovers of greenery, and indeed of year-round fresh vegetables, the answer is hydroponics, or water gardening.

This method of growing plants without soil has long been known to scientists but has only recently begun to attract amateurs' attention. In the simplest hydroponic systems, the plant roots are anchored in gravel or perlite, through which the gardener periodically shoots water and inorganic nutrient solutions. Thus for outdoor hydroponicists there is no digging, weeding, composting or spraying. The indoor gardener is spared the necessity of messing with loam in the home and, if careful, can avoid the danger of bacterial infection around his plants.

Indoors or out, growing plants in water permits far more intensive cultivation than geoponics, or earth gardening. Since the roots do not spread out in search of nourishment, six times as many plants can be raised in the same space needed for earth farming. Ralph Prince, an agricultural engineer at the University of Connecticut's Storrs campus, has run laboratory experiments that indicate that an acre producing only ten tons of lettuce by conventional farming can grow more than 700 tons by hydroponic methods. Chicago's Brookfield and Lincoln Park zoos raise much of their mammal fodder hydroponically and claim that their greens are particularly nutritious.

Hydroponically grown vegetables taste about the same as those grown in soil. But most of them are bigger; water-borne tomatoes, for instance, may be 20% larger than earth-borne ones. The vegetables also mature much faster. The Lincoln Park Zoo maintains continuous production of fresh barley grass for the animals by "planting" two 50-lb. bags or so of seed every day; each new crop of grass is ready for harvesting in a week, compared with the six to eight weeks required for soil-grown barley.

Such advantages have persuaded businesses to try commercial hydroponics. General Mills, for example, is building a plant in De Kalb, Ill., whose first big crops of lettuce and spinach will be on the market this spring. But it is among home gardeners, particularly in urban and arid areas, that soilless growing is rising fastest. Predicts Raymond Bridwell, a Californian whose 1972 book Hydroponic Gardening has sold some 120,000 copies: "Hydroponics has grown ten times in the past 18 months, and it will grow 100 times in the next 18 months."

No-earth gardening will never, of course, replace the spade-and-hoe variety. For many people, getting dirt under the fingernails is part of the fun. Also, despite its high yields and relative immunity to disease, hydroponics can be expensive: sophisticated home systems retail for $150 and up. However, starter kits are available for as little as $12.50, which may be the scale at which water gardening will become most immediately popular. The day may not be distant when the indolent, ubiquitous office Whatsitnotum viridens will be replaced with water-fed vines yielding a luscious tomato crop every six weeks. Just order in the mayonnaise.

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