Getting into homemade hydroponics is a game of pleasing plants, giving them exactly what they need to become the best they can be. Horticulturalists agree, the plants will let you know as soon as something is wrong.
I recently caught up with a good friend over the weekend, we decided on one of our short hikes up into the hills to a place I'd often go to reset. Our way up the river led us into an expanse of paddocks. Groups of cows wafted back and forth across the fields below us in the valley. Something about the area gave me a clear head and I could focus a little better there, plus the dogs would love the walk. It was a place that forced me to think.
I had to think about how these cows would end up being cut up into packable pieces. I had to think about how the farmer there would use the polite excuse of 'dangerous bulls' to get us off the land. I had to wonder why J felt like he had to scuff up a patch of mushroom and leave them lying there, torn and purple. It bugged me, senseless death had always bugged me.
In school I distinctly remember a day in the library when I watched a group of boys squish moths against the window overlooking a group of girls. I couldn't understand it or why it was necessary, this confusion never left me. Call me overly sensitive, but the pointless death of the mushrooms provoked something in me to try and get an answer out of him. I didn't find any meaning in his words that day and I'm sure if I had asked if there was something annoying him personally then I'd have been better received, plus I wouldn't have sounded like some hippy space cadet moaning about how the mushrooms probably didn't appreciate the boot. The short talk with him kicked off a series of thoughts on how plants feel and communicate.
I reserve doubts about the awareness of individual plants and their ability to project feelings and emotions but some research into the awareness of groups of plants makes the concept easy to entertain.
Dr. Suzanne Simard from the University of British Columbia investigates the factors influencing a robust and diverse ecosystem. She understands how different species seemingly communicate with each other through the fungi in the soil, passing nitrogen, carbon and water along subterranean networks of mycelium, the vegetative superhighway of fungi that helps build a strong and resilient forest above.
Many forget that those small outcrops of mushrooms that can be seen populating many grassy pastures are merely the tips of the proverbial icebergs below. Beyond what we see lies some of the largest, oldest and most forgotten organisms on earth.
It has been estimated that a single specimen of fungi in Oregon could be up to 2, 400 years old and covering nearly nine square kilometers, making it the largest organism on earth. It is also known that the genetic and cellular features of fungi and the way it stores and processes food makes their structure closer to that of an animal than a plant, some species capable of laying down tiny lasso traps in the soil to lure in and snare nematodes and other microscopic animals. On top of this is the very probable event that radiation hardened fungi spores may well have traversed deep space to land on earth, a theory called 'panspermia'.
Granted, a plant isn't going to comment on whether your shoes match you coat or whether you should kick your smoking habits and it won't weigh in on whether or not you should tell your parents about your obsessive-compulsive 'starcraft' affliction. As far as I know they don't have the capacity to pass judgment on the colour of your Reeboks, your yellow smoking stained fingers and whether or not they compliment your green lima bean jacket. Yet maybe your peace lily just doesn't feel like giving you its opinion on the finer details of a Protos build order.
Formally, literature supports the conclusion that many plants strategically exchange signals between each other chemically, the lima bean in fact, when under attack from a particular mite will produce a chemical that invites in that mites natural predator, another species of mite. Plants will also respond to and interact significantly differently with different coloured surfaces, frequencies of sound (beyond the human voice) and physical contact. The concept of a plant having 'feelings' does begin to get a little slippery when we challenge the premise itself, namely that our human feelings come as a result of our ability to empathise with one another, an ability somewhat lost on plants.
If our growing scientific understanding of flora-fungi-talk is any indication of the sentience of mushrooms and plants, I am erred to think that we are playing host to a game long conquered by the plants. Our clumsy mouth noises are yet to fend of an assault of lima bean mites. I'm still not sure if plants 'feel', It's probably more an argument from semantics to decide. The one thing that I will be sure of is that when J did decide to kick over those mushrooms, I felt it.
Tom White is a hydroponics designer and open source proponent. He wants to help people get the most out of their homemade hydroponic system and writes about the many dynamics in growing a smart and healthy source of food in the home.
For more brill info on plants visit:
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/plants/news-feeling-plants-how-sensitive-flora
http://www.diyhomemadehydroponics.com/
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