Hydroponics starter kit

This wiki page is a result of an idea submitted by Alex Stovell who wrote about Hydroponics starter kits here.

Background
Hydroponics is the practice of growing plants in non-soil, mineral-rich media. Hydroponics are already used around the world for food production and have some significant advantages over other traditional food production methods such as; greater yields (e.g. rice yields are quoted as being 12x higher vs traditional methods), lower water costs and lower environmental impact ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics ). If it was cheap and easy to do, individual households, especially in high density urban environments, could start supplementing their diets with home-grown produce. If they were also taught the basics, they could then scale up production if they wanted to, potentially producing excess which could then be sold or bartered for other things. Also, if different plants were grown by different people, a community could work together to ensure a balanced diet was achieved across the community.

Scope/constraints

 * Ideas/solutions should aim to use as much locally available material/resources as possible


 * Solutions must be as cheap as possible


 * Should be easily portable to make them easy to use and easy to distribute


 * Should be low-tech / as simple as possible


 * Should focus on growing nutritionally valuable plants which are, ideally, quick to mature


 * Should aim to educate and enable users to scale-up or repeat, ideally without the need for a further kit



Next steps

 * If you can add any relevant local knowledge or insights (e.g. first hand experience of existing urban food production methods), that would be really appreciated – I’m working from a quite limited understanding of the reality of doing something like this, so any insights would be very useful in refining the scope of this brief. (If you post them in a blog and link to and from this post, I can also give you a +1 for Local Insight!)


 * Immerse yourself in the world of hydroponics and urban-farming via other EVOKE posts, the internet, books, experts etc, then post an idea or ideas – tag them HydroponicsStarterKit and add a link in your post(s) back to this page. Try and add as much depth and detail as possible to your ideas.


 * If there are any hydroponics experts out there, please jump in with any builds!

Hydroponics Agents @ EVOKE

 * Alex Stovell


 * Lim Zhen Jiang - he also posted a blog entry where he states he will explore the issue further in Singapore
 * ... add your name here if you are interested

Hydroponics Research Locations

 * London: Alex Stovell


 * Oslo: [AN] Raymond M. Kristiansen


 * Singapore: Lim Zhen Jiang