The beneficial bugs found in our gardens vastly outweigh garden pests, so it pays to adopt a nature-friendly approach to gardening. Scour the bushes, look among the vegetables or dig down into the soil and you’ll discover a myriad of beneficials. My personal favourite? The ladybird, whose jazzy wing markings are always a delight to see.

And ladybirds are one of our biggest allies – as we’re about to find out…

Here at Eco Apartment Gardens we always get our Spotted ladybirds from Bugs for Bugs. They specialise in breeds beneficial insects and mites (good bugs to control bad bugs). View their range for your garden here… 

Encouraging Ladybirds Into Your Garden

As well as leaving some nettles be, avoid spraying pesticides, which will have a knock-on effect on predators such as ladybirds. It’s tempting to panic at the first sign of aphids, but a little restraint often pays off with a visit from these hungry bugs.

Ladybirds can also be attracted into your garden with pollen-rich blooms. Flat-topped flowers such as yarrow, angelica, fennel and dill are great, along with common companion plants like calendula, sweet alyssum and marigold.

Offer ladybirds somewhere to overwinter too. They usually hibernate in hollow stems and other nooks and crannies, so delay cutting back old stems till spring. Or why not make your own ladybird hotel by stuffing straw and a bundle of wide bamboo sections into an old pot, tied together to keep them all in place. Stuff more straw around the sides for insulation, and position the ladybird house one to three feet above the ground, in a sheltered, sunny spot.

Identifying Ladybirds

There are many different species of ladybirds, often named according to the number of spots on their wing cases. For example, the two-spot ladybird, the seven-spot ladybird, the 14-spot, and the seriously funky-looking 22-spot ladybird!

The harlequin ladybird is invasive in both Europe and North America and will eat the eggs and larvae of other ladybirds when food is scarce. But they’re not all bad –they eat lots of pests too!

Ladybird Lifecycle

The ladybird lifecycle consists of four distinct phases.

Eggs:

Below are the tiny eggs, typically laid on the undersides of leaves in batches of anything from five to 40 eggs. Nettles are a firm favourite for egg laying, so it’s worth leaving a few patches of nettles to keep these aphid-munching beetles close by.

Larval Stage:

And ladybirds eat lots of aphids. As soon as the eggs hatch, the formidable-looking, spiky larvae begin gorging on any aphids they can find. Their voracious appetites will see them devour up to 50 aphids a day, or 5,000 during their lifetime. They eat other soft-bodied pests too, including whitefly, mites and scale insects, making them one of the long-suffering gardener’s very best friends!

Pupal Stage:

After a series of molts the larva pupates. Often yellow or orange and with black markings, this pupal stage lasts for around one to two weeks during which time the magical transformation from larva to adult beetle occurs.

Written by Benedict Vanheems.
Source: growveg.com.au

When NASA sends humans to Mars, the astronauts are going to need lots of food for the trip. But freeze-dried prepackaged meals for a 2.5-year mission to the Red Planet can take up a lot of weight and room on an interplanetary vehicle. When we go to Mars, weight will be precious. The less we carry with us, the better. Plus, not all of that food is going to be super tasty — or fresh.

That’s why NASA is interested in figuring out ways to supplement astronauts’ diets with plants that can be grown in space or on other worlds. Seeds are much less weighty and spacious than already-prepared food. So scientists at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center have been experimenting with how to grow plants and vegetables in simulated space environments. Those include the microgravity environment of the International Space Station and worlds with less gravity than Earth, like the Moon and Mars.

At Kennedy, scientists experiment with different lighting and temperatures to see which environment is best for growing plants. They also simulate the conditions on the ISS to see which plants could thrive in low Earth orbit. Ultimately, NASA is trying to figure out how to grow plants with as little soil as possible, through methods like hydroponics and aeroponics. Hydroponics involves delivering water and nutrients to plant roots using liquid solutions, and with aeroponics, plants are grown in a misty air environment. Both of these methods negate the need for too much dirt, which is also heavy and takes up precious room on a rocket.

Water does behave differently in low-gravity environments. It clumps together in weird ways that it wouldn’t on Earth, making it tricky to water root plants. However, NASA has had success with growing vegetables on the International Space Station with the space agency’s Veggie experiment. Through that research, astronauts have been able to grow — and eat — plants on the ISS. The first experiment entailed growing red romaine lettuce in pillows of clay instead of soil.

Scientists are interested in potentially using interplanetary soil someday to grow plants. However, the “soil” found on the Moon and Mars isn’t really soil; it’s regolith, or loose, rocky material made from volcanic ash that doesn’t have an abundance of organic materials. And the regolith on Mars isn’t exactly clean. Rovers on Mars have detected a type of salt known as perchlorates in the dirt, which can be toxic for humans if consumed in high enough quantities. It’s possible that astronauts could clean the regolith with chemical solutions or certain kinds of bacteria, but that method hasn’t been fully fleshed-out yet.

Mastering plant growth in space and on other worlds will be important to future crews traveling on long-duration missions off our planet. Not only is plant-based food important for nutrition, but supplementing a prepackaged diet with vegetables and greens could be important for stressed-out astronauts who are missing home. “We’ve heard from a lot of astronauts who comment to the effect of, ‘I thought that I’d miss the cheeseburger or pizza the most when I came back, but what I really wanted was a fresh salad,’” Gioia Massa, a NASA scientist studying food production in space at the Kennedy Space Center, tells The Verge. “So, we think having that fresh, juicy, crunchy texture in their diet can be really important.”

Source: TheVerge.com

In the year 600 B.C.E., the climate was arid and dry along the Euphrates River in Western Asia, but there were lush gardens climbing up the walls of the metropolis, Babylon. It is believed that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were surviving through a pulley-system of water from the river, a technique of agricultural that today is known as hydroponics. More specifically, hydroponics is the method of farming where plants can be grown in nutrient-fortified water, instead of in soil. Given concerns of feeding a growing human population in a changing climate, scientists believe hydroponic technology may be able to mitigate impending food shortages.

The need for innovative agriculture 

The United Nations (UN) has projected the global population to reach nearly 10 billion people by 2050, with “roughly 83 million people being added to the world’s population each year until then.” In 2019 alone, an estimated 124 million people faced acute food shortages from climate-related events such as flooding, irregular rains, droughts, and high temperatures. Given that hydroponics can grow food in a controlled environment, with less water and in higher yields, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has been implementing hydroponic farming in areas of the world that suffer from food shortages. There are currently ongoing projects to establish large hydroponic farms in  Latin American and African countries.

The technology used in hydroponic systems being implemented in developing countries around the world are largely based off hydroponic systems that were designed at NASA. In the late 20th century, physicists and biologists got together to figure out a way to grow food in one of the starkest climate known to humans: space. Aerospace plant physiologists at NASA began experimenting with growing plants on the International Space Station using hydroponics technology because it requires less space and less resources than conventional farming. After extensive tests, astronauts ate the first space-grown leafy vegetables in 2015. How did NASA get the idea to use this technology in space? It was from a century of work by scientists who found that plants were surviving–and thriving–while being grown in water.

Invention of modern day hydroponics

In the 19th century, a German botanist at the University of Wurzburg, Julius Sachs, dedicated his career to understanding the essential elements that plants need to survive. By examining differences between plants grown in soil and those grown in water, Sachs found that plants did not need to grow in soil but only needed the nutrients that are derived from microorganisms that live in the soil. In 1860, Sachs published the “nutrient solution” formula for growing plants in water, which set the foundation for modern day hydroponic technology (Figure 1).

In 1937, an American scientist, Dr. W.E. Gericke described how this method of growing plants could be used for agricultural purposes to produce large amounts of crops. Gericke and others demonstrated that the fluid dynamics of water changed the architecture of plant roots, which allowed them to uptake nutrients more efficiently than plants grown in soil, causing them to grow larger in a shorter amount of time. Since then, scientists have optimized the nutrient solution, a total of 13 macronutrients and micronutrients, that are added to water for hydroponic farming (Figure 1).

Hydroponic systems today are very sophisticated; there are systems that will monitor the level of nutrients pH, and temperature of the water, and even the amount of light the plants are receiving. There are three main types of hydroponic systems: a nutrient film technique, an Ebb and Flow System, and a Wick system (Figure 2). A nutrient film hydroponic technique involves plants being grown in a grow tray that it slightly angled and positioned above a reservoir filled with the water-nutrient mix. This allows a thin stream of water to flow across plant roots, allowing the plants to have sufficient water, nutrients and aeration, and then drained back into the reservoir. The nutrient film technique is the most common hydroponic system used today. Plenty and Bowery, two of the largest hydroponic farms in the US, use nutrient film techniques to grow lettuce, spinach and other leafy greens. The Ebb and Flow technique allows plants to be flooded with the nutrient-rich water, and after the plant roots uptake nutrients, water is actively drained back into a reservoir to be reused. Finally, a hydroponic wick system is the simplest of all, as nutrients are passively given to the plant from a wick or piece of string running up to the plant from the water reservoir. In this system, plants are grown in an inert growing medium such as sand, rock, wool or clay balls that help anchor the plant roots. These different systems are interchangeable, but some systems may be better for growing different types of plants.

The advantages of using any of these hydroponic systems are manifold. First, since there is no soil, there is no need to worry about having a plot of land, weeds, pathogens living in dirt, or treating the crops with pesticides. Water is also greatly conserved due to the nutrient reservoir because the same water can be reused over and over. Moreover, as most of these hydroponics farms are indoors, food can be produced all year round and even in the middle of a large city, like New York City. Given all of these benefits, we may begin to see more hydroponic farms sprouting up  across the US and around the world because this method of farming holds much promise to revolutionize agriculture by using less water and other resources. 

Hydroponics for a sustainable future.

Given the need for more sustainable agriculture, there has been a rise in eco-friendly start-up companies around the world that are using hydroponic technology to produce crops on a large scale with a technique known as “Vertical Farming” (Figure 3). 

Vertical farms are buildings filled with countless levels of hydroponic systems (or nutrient film style planters), growing different crops in an indoor, controlled temperature environment (Figure 3). The largest vertical farm is being built in Dubai, covering 130,000 square feet of land and aiming to produce 6,000 pounds of food per day, “using 1/2500th the amount of water as an equivalent soil operation”. For a city that imports 85% of their food, this will greatly revolutionize the way the city eats. 

While vertical farms hold a lot of promise, they are expensive to implement, technically difficult on a large scale, and the food produced from these systems is generally more expensive than equivalent soil grown food because of the high-energy costs of maintaining the systems. Even so, the Associated Press estimates that food produced by hydroponic technology in 2019 is worth $32 billion USD, and this is projected to grow at a rate of 5% per year until 2025.

While hydroponic technology may never replace conventional farming, it is breaking the paradigm of food production; we may see a new generation of modern farmers building green walls inside their houses or community centers to feed families with fresh produce grown all year round. 

by Valentina Lagomarsino
figures by Rebecca Senft