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How to grow food in strange places, by the experts - How to make a 
difference - The Ecologist
http://www.theecologist.org/how_to_make_a_difference/food_and_gardening/613710/how_to_grow_food_in_strange_places_by_the_experts.html
Food & farming | farming | urban agriculture | self-sufficiency | How to 
make a difference

How to grow food in strange places - by the experts

Helen Babbs

29th September 2010

You don't need a garden to grow your own fruit and veg. If you're a 
budding horticulturalist with no space to swing a trowel, here are some 
creative - and sometimes bizarre - ideas from around the world

Mushrooms in disused railway tunnels and strawberries in drainpipes... 
perhaps it's silly but I find food growing in strange places both 
bizarre and romantic. Horticulture can be so creative. It can involve 
melons growing on net curtains and rice growing on pavements. Introduce 
an against-the-odds element - like doing it in Tokyo, that seething, 
steely metropolis - and it's somehow all the more exciting.

My love of the bizarre and the romantic - and of vegetables - has led me 
on a journey, albeit it an armchair one. I've found people growing food 
in some unlikely places, for fun and from necessity, and on a personal 
and a commercial scale.

Rowena and Philip Mansfield farm fruit, herbs and fish in Anglesey, 
North Wales. I was drawn to this Welsh couple, who have swapped urban 
life for something very rural, because they've been growing strawberries 
in a drainpipe.

From sections of humble pipe, and employing less humble hydroponics, 
they've harvested 75lb of berries. They're dismissive of my delight. 
'Nothing original about drainpipes,' says Philip. 'We look at all pipes 
and see them sprouting food. Just pass water along the tube and let the 
plant roots touch the liquid - they'll take up whatever nutrients they 
need.'

The couple have branched out into aquaponics and now sell rainbow trout 
and carp to a small but committed circle of customers. Aquaponics is an 
integrated system that centres around the natural life cycle of a fish. 
Philip explains: 'Fish produce ammonia in their normal breathing, the 
ammonia is converted by bacteria in growbeds to produce nitrates that 
feed the plants. The returned water has been cleansed ready for the fish 
to utilise it again.

'I think we should all be aware of the need to grow food by whatever 
means. There are thousands of empty buildings that could be used to grow 
food to feed the local community.'

I ask them whether it would be fair to call their way of life idyllic. 
'Absolutely. The hours are long, the money scarce, but there's no 
travelling, no crowds on buses or Tube. You learn to live alongside 
nature and it rewards you generously. We breathe the growing grass.'

Grown in darkness

From old Wales to New South Wales then, to talk to an Australian 
microbiologist who has been growing exotic fungi in disused railway 
tunnels for more than 20 years. I send Dr Noel Arrold some questions by 
email. He isn't a fan of typing so sends me photographs of his 
handwritten notes in reply. They're a joy to decipher.

It turns out that Australians have been growing mushrooms in this way 
since the 1930s, when old railway tunnels around Sydney Harbour were 
used to produce them for canning. Faced with a flood of cheap canned 
mushrooms from Asia, the industry turned towards fresh market production 
and the tunnels fell out of use. But in 1987 Dr Arrold realised tunnels 
would be a perfect place to grow exotic fungi.

'Varieties like shiitake, oyster, wood ear and enoki grow naturally in 
the cool, dim and humid forests of Asia. Cultivators had developed ways 
of growing these mushrooms on sawdust. I discovered it was possible to 
grow them on Australian eucalyptus sawdust, while the tunnel environment 
resembled conditions that occur in the forests,' explains Dr Arrold.

'Our farm produces approximately 1,500kg of mushrooms a week, small 
compared to white button mushroom farms, which produce 20 tonnes a week. 
But ours is a high-value crop. Exotic mushrooms are attractive because 
the production process is chemical-free, low-energy and uses waste 
material.'