Natural pools, hydroponics and fertiliser – a reader responds

Let me start by saying that I enjoyed your publication so much when I stumbled across it at a play centre in Tauranga that I went home and subscribed, and have even continued – despite moving back to the UK for a while!

It’s one of the few things I bother to subscribe to because it’s so consistently good and I also like that I can read it cover to cover and almost never feel like skipping an article. Keep up the good work!

As you could say that ‘green ideas’ are also my area of expertise, I felt moved to take the (rather unusual for me) step of writing in to you after reading the Feb-Mar 2015 issue.

There were three things that I wanted to comment on:

1. The 'natural swimming pool’ in Grey Lynn

Very cool what they’ve done but I thought I should point out that usually natural swimming pools are actually ’natural’ (ie. cleaned by nature, rushes, sedges etc), with only good design and a water pump necessary to circulate the water and keep it clean. In a magazine that is all about green ideas, an opportunity was possibly missed to point out that while having UV and ozone treatment is great, there are more ‘natural’ pool designs out there that are cheaper and (arguably) greener, that people might like to know about.

2. Home hydroponics

While I agree that getting people to grow their own is commendable (and without being an ‘evangelical greenie’ – heaven forbid... hehe), I felt that the promotion of hydroponics misses a few important considerations, namely:

1. While it might cut down food miles and save on packaging, the same could be said of growing in soil.
2. Where do all the chemicals required to grow this food come from? How are they made? What is their embodied energy? What are their ‘food miles’?
3. If you are not connecting fish into the system (ie. aquaponics), then I find it hard to justify why you would go to the extra effort to set up hydroponics when (with a little bit of knowledge) growing in soil is (arguably) easier, cheaper, possibly healthier (I can’t verify this yet) and just as easy to fit into small spaces.
4. The overriding point I would like to make, however, is that by promoting hydroponics we are missing a chance to talk about soil. Is that important? Hell yeah. We need to inform, educate and raise awareness of the current soil crisis all over the world – including in NZ. We all need to care about this – as it is the key to our existence on this earth, and sits at the centre of the other main crises we often hear about : climate change, the food crisis, water crisis, peak oil etc etc. I could give a four-day seminar on it, but will attempt to keep this short! ;) NOTE: George Monbiot wrote a good article on it recently that goes into a little more detail if you are interested... but my point is that we need to look after soil, understand it better and rather than encourage people to take the message away that we don’t need it/it’s just dirt/something to hold the plants up etc, I would like to see them fascinated by something new they didn’t realise about the brown stuff under their feet that allows them an existence. The rich biology, carbon sequestration, soil food web etc. There isn’t much that matters more.

3. Eco-friendly fertilisers – written by the fertiliser salesman!

Okay just kidding. The guy is a (soil?) chemist and sounds passionate in his bio about doing good so I’m not knocking him... but I was a bit disappointed that only half the products you mentioned were certified organic (BTW how do you certify seaweed as organic?), but mostly because the article failed to highlight that the best thing you can put on your garden is good (preferably homemade) organic compost and/or worm castings/juice. Additionally, the article has a very ‘chemical’ approach – which I can’t blame you or Andreas for, because I was the same until recently and it is the dominant point of view. What I have begun to learn a lot more about over recent months, however, is that it’s all about biology. Soil, human health, both – and the research is all heading this way too. It’s not about the chemicals, it’s about the biological living systems. When it comes to soil, if you get the biology right, the chemistry takes care of itself. To back this up I highly recommend you watch (the entertaining) Soil Microbiologist Elaine Ingham talk from the recent Oxford Real Farming conference. I had a brilliant meeting at Landcare Research NZ before I left that was fascinating and I would be happy to share... but the video above will convey lots of great information much quicker.

Okay, so my recap is: The pool was good but wasn’t very natural (as far as they go); the hydroponics are fine but a bit of an environmental 'red herring' (in my view); and the fertilisers are entirely unnecessary as (according to the latest research by experts) you a) don’t deplete the soil when you harvest, b) lose most of what you put on anyway, and c) drop yourself into a cycle of dependence/addiction to products that nature can provide for free if just allowed/encouraged.

So that was two cents given repeatedly to a total of about $47.50 but anyway…

I felt compelled to share.

Thanks for reading and keep up the good work. The latest edition just arrived here in my letterbox today, so am looking forwards to reading it.

Kind regards,
Shane Ward
Leaf Green Productive Landscapes