“MOST NATURAL sand has silt particles
and some organic matter (sandy loam),
making it one of the cheapest grow
mediums because it can be washed
easily and recharged with nutrients.”
Jensen eschews the classic deep flow hydroponic system,
where plants are supported while their roots hang in a
nutrient solution, as well as nutrient film technique and
the concept of aeroponics. Instead, he likes aggregate
hydroponics where a solid, inert medium such as sand,
coconut coir, sawdust, or variations involving peat,
vermiculite, perlite, stone wool, or polystyrene beads provide
support for the plant while nutrient solution is delivered
directly to the plant root.
“Sand is an anchor and if you make it plant-friendly, it
does extremely well,” says Jensen. Although his comment
is a contemporary one, he initially made it back in 1973,
the year he supervised building The Land Pavilion for
Disney’s Epcot Center, when he prophesied “an exciting
future for sand culture.”
Also, while sand in its pure state is not an ideal medium
for plant culture because of an inability to retain water and
nutrients, most natural sand has silt particles and some
organic matter (sandy loam), making it one of the cheapest
grow mediums because it can be washed easily and
recharged with nutrients.
Jensen proved his point with experiments that integrated
the production of vegetables, electricity, and desalinized
water in the soil-poor deserts of the United Arab Emirates.
He called his growing of food on Saadiyat—a sandy, essen-
tially barren, uninhabited island—his version of sand culture
and proved it could work in an area
buffeted by strong prevailing
winds and rainfall of less than
two inches a year. A previ-
ous prototype in Puerto
Penasco, Mexico, where
plants were seeded into
plots of beach sand or
peat moss/vermicu-
lite and drip-irrigated,
also proved the effi-
cacy of the concept.
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