Plant Gardens 101

We’ve all heard about community gardens, but in the city like New York there is so little space for serious farmers that the sustainable urban foods seems next to impossible. Now imagine creating a farm in the middle of a highly urbanized city.Serious urban farming with the aid of hydroponics systems and taking this it into the roof tops of buildings is a viable way for a city to become sustainable. Roughly speaking, there is something like 5,000 hectares of unused roof top space in New York City. If we were to grow vegetables using hydroponics in all those 5,000 of those hectares we could grow enough vegetables to feed something like 15 million people. Imagine a city like New York with a huge catering industry of food that would really impact greatly the sustainable urban food in the city. The secret to this ultra modern farming is hydroponics system that runs in greenhouses which nourishes the plants without wasting any resources. Also having a weather station in the city is of great advantage in using hydroponics farming in the city. Weather stations give out wind speeds, wind direction, temperature, solar radiation, and precipitation. So that data will be used to our advantage in order to decide on what to do with out hydroponic garden and how to customize it inline with the weather condition in the city. With the help of weather stations, hydroponic gardens really manages the climate to what it really should be for the plants and for what the plants want. In urban farming you can use a lot of different kinds of hydroponics system. In one hydroponic system called NFT which is also known as Nutrient Film Technique where you just have a thin film of water traveling at the bottom the trays. You can grow leaves plants and herbs with this kind of hydroponics system. In this type of hydroponics system water is recaptured and reused that is why only a fraction of fertilizer and less water is being used compared to conventional field agriculture. Also there is less space use which is why there is more production with hydroponics system technique. Another hydroponics system is a Dutch Bucket System where you can grow plants like tomato and cucumber. The same water system is used – to capture and reuse. Now the high productivity and having plants that are so healthy are because of how we can manage the nutrition. That is the real advantage of using hydroponics being able to control how much nitrogen, calcium, magnesium and how much of all these elements that a plant needs to grow. Another way of maximizing productivity using hydroponics system is by using vertical space. In this case you will be able to expand your square foot of growing area. As more people move in to the cities, we are greatly concerned at reducing CO2 emissions. It is simply unsustainable to consume a food that is produced thousands of miles away from the city. One way of solving this problem is by actually and practically installing some gardens and growing edible plants using hydroponics systems.

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