Would You Eat a Salad Grown in a Bomb Shelter? | Hacker News Reader

Would You Eat a Salad Grown in a Bomb Shelter?

smithsonianmag.com

18 pointsMz16 comments

I've been experimenting with home hydro/aeroponics the last few months and learnt a lot. It is amazing when you bite into your first self-grown tomato[0].

I am however surprised that grow lamps, even if LED based, are economical for these guys. The retail price for one of those Valoya B100 [1] LED bar is around £700. Plus around 100 Watt running for 16 hours a day. This might make sense if you're growing weed in your basement[2], but probably not for veggies. Perhaps London's crazy prices and lack of space to put a greenhouse in make it economical though.

[0] Picture: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-YD-C9M32TbI/UvFqtQg6TYI/A...

[1] http://valoya.com/products/33-b-series

[2] Apparently the most popular use of home hydroponics, and if you research anything about it, you will inevitably come across a huge gray market around this. Also a lot of gardening advice ranging from useful to mythological.

The critical thing that makes this affordable is only using light for 3 days. Growing full-sized veggies would probably be cost-prohibitive.

I agree. I don't have the exact numbers, but I'm sure that in the first 3 days most of the energy comes from the cotyledons in the seed and not from the light.

If you got some extra ducts to the surface you could probably use one of these http://www.solatube.com (removing some of the screening).

Yes these are perfectly well economical if you grow pot. you can also get some good wattage/$ on aliexpress, but i dont know how these panels perform.

It is a great idea - it reduces one of the hardest things in produce sales - the farm to table transportation.

A few points: Author shows a picture of a 25-day old bibb lettuce plant under this text (not caption): "The seedlings stay in darkness for around five days, allowing them to propogate. Once that happens, the LEDs are switched on, and within three days, micro herbs are ready for harvest."

Micro herbs are useful for garnish or a fancy-pants restaurant $15 appetizer. There isnt much solving the worlds food problem with some magical plants that grow 3" tall in 5 days (the bottom picture is microgreens in a container).

Nothing in the article says how much room they have in London for this. How many bomb shelters are there in London?

It is good for leafy greens. Don't think you're growing tomatoes and peppers and avacados down there - the energy required for temp and lighting for fruiting plants is much higher (lets say 4x the wattage compared to leafy greens/lettuce).

While I'm really excited that people are finally starting to use these types of structures, I'm very skeptical of this catching on and being a trend.

Think of all the unused potential space from the Cold War -- missile silos, underground bunkers, submarine pens, etc. All could be reused in some form, but most are completely abandoned or not for sale.

Any ideas out there on how we could use some of these? Or how you would even go about doing that?

I'd like to see adapted shipping containers (with similar grow spaces) become more affordable for home use.

I live in a house on a 750sqm or so block. A decent portion of my back yard is devoted to growing - I have seven raised beds* (2.4m x 1.2m) plus trellis up against fences nearby. There are also citrus trees and herbs elsewhere. But having this dedicated space means I had to sacrifice playing space for my child and any future children; there is 55-60sqm of lawn but I'd have preferred more and there is no paved area for a basketball ring.

I wonder if future homes could explore underground growing spaces as well as water storage. Underground rainwater "bladders" are becoming a bit more popular in Australia already.

We could, at the time a house is being built, dig down as though for a swimming pool and embed 2-3 shipping containers. There are companies selling quite expensive set-ups with automated watering and lighting, remote monitoring and so on. If a cellar was dug at the same time, access to underground grow space could be through an interior cellar to avoid dealing with hatches and ladders outdoors?

One issue would be that this might preclude anything requiring pollination from insects, but there are ways around many cases (manual pollination, air circulation, self-pollinating plants, etc).

* Some of the raised beds: http://instagram.com/p/UuNB2JD1vk/

Produce: http://instagram.com/p/cTSjSuj1hy/

Cleaning out a bed to sow seeds last weekend: http://instagram.com/p/lTOGElD1ug/

Another shot from last Winter: http://instagram.com/p/cTQKhYj1vC/

If you have a chance to dig down like that, why not just make your living space underground and devote the upper surface to sunny growing/playing space? And then of course you automatically have a cellar for storm purposes, and are more likely to already be in it in case of disaster and will lose less if the above-ground portion is blown away.

I'd rather get the natural light and grow plants in unnatural light (double standard!).

We don't get storms where I live. Heat is more of a problem actually; I routinely have to shade or lose some plants through heatwaves in Summer. I think growing plants in a more controlled situation could also control pest problems. Right now I have to bait rodents or snails/slugs and protect things like brassicas with netting to stop them being destroyed by moths/caterpillars.

Years ago I read about a Japanese supermarket that had a hydroponic room to the side and they had lettuce growing on a conveyor belt timed so lettuce reached the store as the become mature. Customers would literally pick their lettuce off the conveyor belt as they were growing. That's as fresh as you can get.

I wonder if someone could take this further to a whole range of vegetables that could be grown on conveyor belts under/over a supermarket and timed to reach the 'public shelf' as they hit the right maturity.

There are currently efforts to implement something similar for farmers around Fukushima - radiation-free vegetables grown "inside" in hydroponic farms.

See for example: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-10/fukushima-seeks-rev...

Personally, I would eat both the bomb shelter food and the hydroponics food.

>If cities keep expanding, how are we going to feed everyone?

They vastly underestimate the amount of land on Earth.

Plenty of land but transport and water concerns probably play a role in that.

It looks like there's some cress labelled broccoli?

Likely broccoli seedlings?

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