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Welcome to Thanet Earth: The Biggest Greenhouse in Britain Unveiled (Evening Standard) |
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The Hydroponic Garden--A Guide to Hydroponics
Hydroponics allows us to grow the plants, fruits and vegetables of our choice--even in limited space--without using soil. It's an amazing way to produce perfect specimens and offers TONS of advantages that traditional gardening can't come close to touching!
Author: thisislondon.co.uk
June 11, 2008
You've heard of the factory chicken. Now meet the factory vegetable. Grown in their millions in trays of nutrient-enriched water inside a heated, artificially-lit greenhouse large enough to house ten football pitches, they are as far as you can get from 'natural' home-grown food.
But this week, workers are putting the finishing touches to Britain's largest hydroponic greenhouse - an astonishing construction in white steel and glass.
By the time the site is complete in 2010, another six massive greenhouses will have been constructed, providing a home to more than 1.3million tomato, pepper and cucumber plants - grown hydroponically, without soil.
Kent is often called the Garden of England. When this village of glass is complete, it will be more like England's factory.
At a time when people are increasingly concerned about industrial-scale farming, this latest, monumental step in the steady, insidious creep of factory farming is a controversial one.
Fresca, the company building the complex on the Isle of Thanet with a consortium of Dutch growers, argues that the new site - called Thanet Earth - will help meet the demand for homegrown food all year round.
But real food campaigners say nothing can replace the taste of vegetables and fruit grown outside in proper soil.
The scale of the £80 million project is mind-boggling. When complete, its seven greenhouses will sprawl across 220 acres of Kent countryside, occupying the same area as six London Zoos.
Each greenhouse will be 1,240ft long, centrally heated and fed by its own private reservoir.
Conditions will be monitored and controlled by computers. Plants will be grown year round, suspended in vast rows from the 26ft-high ceiling.
A staggering 2.5 million tomatoes will be cropped every week of the year; 560,000 peppers and 700,000 cucumbers will be picked weekly during a shorter season between February and October.
This massive harvest will boost Britain's salad crop production by 15 per cent - reducing reliance on imports.
To enable production on this industrial scale, the science of hydroponics is utilised.
Similar techniques were used to create the ancient Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the floating gardens of the Aztecs in Mexico.
But the scale of these modern factories is unprecedented. Indeed, this is the closest that farming gets to assembly-line agriculture.
Steve McVickers, chief executive officer of Thanet Earth, said: 'Vegetables have been grown without soil in water before. What's new here is the scale. This is the biggest greenhouse site of its kind in Britain.
'The advantage is that it gives you a clean growing medium. You get no soil-borne diseases . . . and you can exactly control the nutrients, light and temperatures the plants get.'
Given the right conditions, the produce grows two to four times faster than normal. The plants will be grown in beds, on mats of rock wool - a natural, absorbent fibre made by melting rock and blowing air through it, a process much like making candyfloss.
The beds will then be placed in a system of guttering suspended from the greenhouse ceiling on metal cables and hanging at waist height to allow easy harvesting.
A cable drip will feed each plant with water, and nitrogen, phosphate, potassium and magnesium.
In the greenhouse, every inch of metal is painted white to reflect as much light as possible. The floor is covered with white plastic to reflect sunlight.
The plants receive the same amount of light and are kept at 28C throughout the year.
In winter, the greenhouses are warmed and illuminated artificially. In summer, shades block out the sun if temperatures get too high.
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