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.'
[permaculture] How to grow food in strange places, by the experts - How to make a difference - The Ecologist,
Lawrence F. London, Jr., 01/06/2011