My Go-To Hydroponic Crops

How does a kitchen gardener choose what to grow? It’s about balancing quite a complex set of variables, which include the space and time available, the local climate and soil, the gardener’s skill level and what they like to eat. That last one is, itself, quite a complicated topic as culture plays a significant role. There are many thousands of edible plants on the planet; most people only eat a small number and grow fewer still.

Briardo Llorente, Macquarie University

Most vegetable gardeners lucky enough to have the use of a greenhouse use it for raising seeds early in the year, extending the season into the autumn, and of course growing tomatoes and cucumbers in the height of the summer. If you’d like to find something a little more exciting when you open the greenhouse door, these unusual crops will appreciate the extra heat.

I have always been an organic gardener, so the fact that my hydroponic kits are currently fuelled by chemical fertilisers irks me somewhat. The main problems with chemical fertilisers (from my perspective) are the pollution they cause once they’re out in the world, and the energy required to make them. While the former is not an issue in my indoor garden (I give any wastewater to houseplants or plants in the garden), the latter most certainly is. So I would like to move to a more sustainable fertiliser solution in the future.

Astronaut Steven Swanson tending to the Veggie garden on the International Space Station. Image credit: NASA

Over the last few years there has been increasing interest in unusual edible plants. One of the big advantages in having an allotment or a large garden is that it gives you the space to experiment with new tastes without having to sacrifice any old favourites, but some of the exotic specimens can be very tricky to grow.

In this NASA image from January 2020, you can see Lashelle Spencer taking measurements on ‘Red Robin’ dwarf tomato plants. Lashelle is a plant scientist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and this photo was taken inside the Plant Processing Area in the spaceport’s Space Station Processing Facility.

A couple of weeks ago I started a fertiliser trial in the hydroponicum, pitting Hexafly frass against my regular Ikea feed. Today the plants look like this:

One of the things I look forward to each December is the new Heritage Seed Library Catalogue. The HSL is Garden Organic’s project to conserve vegetable varieties that are not widely available, and it includes old favourites that have disappeared from commercial catalogues as well as more unusual vegetables. It was through the HSL that I originally encountered achocha.

Ryan and I have had a couple of spaced out days – we went to visit the Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank and came home via the National Space Centre in Leicester. Of the two, the Space Centre is more interesting for adults, but both destinations suffer from being a popular choice for school trips.

In December 2019, I had the idea that I would like to try growing heritage salad leaf varieties in the Hydroponicum. Looking through the Heritage Seed Library Catalogue, I chose:

Last summer, Ryan and I popped on our face masks, slathered our hands in sanitiser and braved a trip to pandemic-era Ikea. There were a few things we needed, and I wanted to stock up on consumables for my Hydroponicum.