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The Out And About Gallery - This page may take a while to
load as there are many photo's.
On this page you can view some Photos I've taken which are
related to Hydroponic growing or fancy growing systems I've seen on my travels,
The photos are taken from both the UK and around the world.
Eden
Project, Cornwall England..
Below is a panoramic photo I took
during our recent visit to the Eden Project in Cornwall, England.
The photo
was created with 9 individual digital camera photos, which were joined together
automatically with a program called AutoStitch, You can find a link to this
program on my useful links page if you would like to give it a go yourself. I
think you'll agree the effect is very effective.
Eden project was built to try and teach people
about how much we depend upon plants. Whether it's for food / clothes / shelter
or medicine.
Eden project was built in a disused slate quarry,
revitalising the surrounding area and becoming one of the UK's most popular
tourism attractions.
The part of the Eden Project which most people go
to see and experience are the huge biomes, you can see these dominating the
photo above.
One of the biomes is temperature and humidity controlled to be
a copy of a warm temperate climate, and the other biome is controlled to be a
humid tropics climate, If you go into the humid biome make sure you have some
water with you as it's very hot and humid as you would expect and it's quite a
trek to see it all.
It's tricky to try and give you some of the effect of
being inside the biomes but below you can see a few small photo's taken while
we were in the biomes.
The previous time we had visited the Eden Project
there were no signs of Hydroponics being in use, But this time they appear to
have gone overboard on it.
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Here you can see a couple of photo's of
systems they are demonstrating in the warm temperate biome. The systems are all
simple passive systems which are fed from large green nutrient containers which
you can see in the photos.
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I'm sure quite a few people are seeing hydroponic
growing for the first time when they visit the Eden Project.
As well as
these simple systems, inside the new educational building called the Core is a
very large self contained example of hydroponic growing. The system itself
contains lots of plants which appear to be sweetcorn and are growing in clay
pebbles within large pots.
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The system itself is an example of a flood
and drain system, which you can see described on my 'Methods' page.
The
system contains several large HID (high intensity discharge) lamps to provide
the light needs for the plants, several fans to allow the air to recirculate
and also large nutrient reservoirs. I'm also pretty sure a CO2 system is in
place to supplement the natural CO2 available to the plants.
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If you enjoy plants like I do the Eden Project is
definately worth a visit.
Epcot,
Walt Disney World Resort Florida.
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To the right you can see a Photo from an area within
Epcot called The Land. I took the photo during a recent holiday to Florida.
The photo shows the large scale aeroponic system they
are using within the large greenhouses they have there, The plants are fastened
from above to a track system which moves the plants continously through the
aeroponic system. You can see on the photo one of the plants start to emerge
from the aeroponic spraying system. Note the huge roots dangling from te
system.
The size of the roots is the first thing you notice
from a system like this, Even in the aeroponic propagator which I am trying I'm
amazed at the size of the roots which the system allows to grow and the speed
at which they grow.
If you are visiting Epcot anytime soon, I would
definitely advise a visit to The Land area. You can take a boat ride around the
growing areas or even better have a guided tour around the areas. They do
charge for the guided tour but the cost is minimal and they even give you a few
seeds for free for you to try yourself. (The pumpkin seeds I received are just
starting to grow into healthy plants.) |
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To the left is another photo from a recent visit to
Epcot, This time it's of their huge Water Culture system. Massive compared with
my own system but it works on the same principle.
The lettuce is placed on floating boards so the roots
dangle into the nutrients below.
The nutrients are then aerated by bubbler systems to
oxygenate the nutrients and keep the plants healthy. |
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This final picture from Epcot shows a system which I
found intriguing, The system is made to optimize the growing area
available.
It looks great and would be an ideal system to have on
a deck or patio area, I may even try the system myself one day.
The plants are placed into standard styrofoam type
containers which work like hanging baskets, The nutrients are pumped to the top
basked where it flows down through the other containers into the drain at the
bottom, It's then pumped back up to the top and the cycle starts again.
Presumably the baskets are filled with a neutral
growing medium such as perlite but I didn't see inside any of the containers so
I can't confirm this. |
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All Images and content
Copyright Paul Ellams ©2003 |
