Now, you'd think that from watching Gardening Australia
growing healthy plants is all about good soil,
adding a little bit of compost, a dash of water and sunshine,
and giving it a good stir.
Yes, that's true,
but the pathways into gardening are many and varied,
and today, I'm going to introduce you to a couple
who are using not so traditional methods.
Hello!
Tammy, welcome. Welcome to our place. Thank you.
Good to see you. Come on in. Come on in.
Thank you.
So, Tammy, this our dining room/ hydroponics test space, I suppose.
This is amazing!
Nige Rannard and Alicia Qian
are growers with a flair for the extraordinary.
They've brought a touch of the tropics
to their slice slice of suburbia in south-west Sydney.
This is just one of your tents.
Yeah. There's another one here.
Wow!
So this is all growing without any soil?
That's correct. Everything in here is hydroponic and automated.
This is all flourishing!
Yeah, it used to be our lounge room. (LAUGHS)
Well, I'd like to pull a chair and take a seat in here.
But there's more to our place as well.
Filling the inside of their home
and spilling out into the greenhouse at the back,
the couple are growing wild and wonderful tropical plants
powered by hydroponic systems.
The jungle's inside, and what would you call this outside?
More jungle. (ALL LAUGH)
So, tell me, how did you two meet?
Well, we met on Instagram
as individually very plant-obsessed
collectors and growers.
And then we got plant swapping
and then started to, you know, be friends
and was friends for a while before...
Yeah, built a friendship that slowly evolved over time.
Alicia has a background in science and research.
And Nige is technically minded.
I do most of the infrastructural building of systems,
maintaining of systems.
I sort of focus mostly on genetics and breeding,
and then experimenting with making hybrids.
It's a great team you guys make.
So can you tell me more about what you guys do now?
This is predominantly a large collection of plants
we look after,
and we've had to incorporate a business aspect to it
to allow us to spend a full-time work life looking after plants.
Who are your customers?
It seems like there is avid collectors around Australia
who are really interested
in the quirky or the collectable unique kind of hybrids
that we create,
and they also, in turn, share with us their growing of our hybrids
in different environments - hydro, non-hydro.
Oh, that's fabulous!
All your plants, you package them in boxes
and ship them off to wherever they need to be?
Yes, it's a very modern way for plants to be uprooted
and then to travel and see the world, right?
The tropical foliage
that's captured Alicia and Nige's and everyone's attention
are the plants in the aroid family,
in particular, they love anthuriums and philodendrons.
So what it is about aroids that you guys love?
Ah, I love large foliage.
I love tall-growing plants, big leaves,
juicy green is my favourite sort of thing.
For me, I love anthuriums.
I love all the different textures that they have.
Maybe when you're obsessed with something,
you can sort of spot all the differences
and there's just such diversity.
So, many aroids like anthuriums and philodendrons,
they love a free-draining mix,
and that's what they're traditionally grown in,
like chunky orchid bark or perlite.
Why does growing philodendrons and anthuriums suit hydroponics so well?
Well, many species suit hydroponics,
but particularly a lot of the aroids we grow
come from jungles where they're epiphytes,
and so they're growing on bark naturally without needing soil.
And we can mimic the natural occurrence
of a very strong wet-and-dry cycle.
Powering the majority of the plants in their collection
is what's called the flood and drain hydroponic system.
And inside, there's an example of how it works.
This one is normally on a timer,
but I'll override it with an app on the phone that we have connected.
I'll show you how it operates.
Firstly, there's an aquarium pump in the reservoir below.
The reservoir's holding a nutrient solution.
The pump forces water up through this little drainage port here.
The tray fills up to a predetermined height.
Is there nutrients that you have to add to it or...
Yes, when we initiate the system, which is once a month,
we add nutrients and a bit of pH-adjusting chemical
to create the perfect nutrient and pH balance.
Yep.
And then that all feeds up and sits there for about a couple of minutes.
Yep.
And then once that's all done, it will just flow back down?
Goes back down, the pots empty out.
So there'll be no water left in there?
No. That's...that's what we're aiming for -
to have absolutely zero water left in there
so that the roots aren't sitting in puddles.
And how often do you have to run this cycle?
We're running this tray five times a day for five minutes,
and we just run it during the daylight hours.
And what are the plants all growing in?
So these are all growing in an expanded clay aggregate.
It's circular clay balls, essentially fired rock-hard.
They have a very high amount of drainage,
so they hold moisture inside them,
but they allow any moisture that's held between the balls
to just release and allow air into the root zone.
That's really cool.
So that system is flood and drain.
What have we got here?
So this is an experimental system.
Down the bottom we have essentially a deep-water culture hydroponic set-up,
but it also includes a large pump
which pumps the nutrient solution
up to the top of the clay-ball-filled poles,
irrigating the aerial roots of the climbing plants.
The plants on these poles have also put roots down
into that water reservoir at the base
and are living in and amongst the aerated water down there.
We keep the reservoir highly oxygenated and highly aerated
'cause it's very important in a deep-water culture system
to supply extra oxygen to the roots.
Ahhh.
So would we end up with then rot of something if they were sitting in...
Yes.
That's the main concern with hydroponics
is keeping the rot at bay.
And how have you made this system?
The unit itself is cobbled together from a bunch of different parts.
The overall frame of it is an industrial shelving system.
All the plumbing and stuff is available at local hardware stores
and is quite easy to come by.
And tell me about the lights that you're using in this system.
They're just simple floodlights. Nothing too fancy about them.
30-watt floodlights.
And what have you got growing here?
Uh, the main plant that's growing in here is philodendron 'Glorius',
which has gotten huge in this system.
We've had to cut it back a few times.
We also have an old epipremnum 'Manjula'
which has recently been beheaded
because it got to the very ceiling of the house.
So all these philodendrons and epipremnums, they love to climb.
Are they regularly hitting the ceiling?
It happens very quickly and very regularly.
(LAUGHS) It's a constant problem.
In fact, we try and keep this one a little bit underlit
to stop it from just exploding through the top of our system.
And the hydroponic heart of this operation is out of this world.
I feel like I'm in a spaceship.
There are some similarities to a spaceship.
This is basically a fully sealed envelope
within the lounge room of our house.
It's climate-controlled
and the walls are essentially a non-permeable membrane
that keeps all the humidity locked into this space.
And the air within this tent
is exchanged with the air outside of the house,
so we have absolute control over the airflow
without flooding our house with humidity.
Brilliant.
And do you leave these lights on 24/7?
These lights are on 14 hours on, 10 hours off.
The plants need to absolutely have a rest period
as part of their photosynthesis cycle.
These are horticultural-specific grow lights.
This has a full spectrum of light,
including ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths.
It brings out more colour, it brings out better health in the plant.
And what have you got growing in these greenhouses?
Well, that house has got all our parent plants
and this one's filled with seedlings of hybrids that we created.
What started out as a hobby for Nige and Alicia
has flourished into a full-time obsession.
Creating new hybrids using the plants in their collection is a big focus.
So how does all the hydroponics help
with what you're trying to achieve with hybridising?
For me, you know, hydroponics
provide the optimum condition
for plants to go through more life cycles more quickly.
They reach maturity faster, they flower more,
and therefore have more opportunities
to create more hybrids.
Which is like nature's artwork, right?
(LAUGHS)
(UPLIFTING MUSIC)
So you've got all the hybrids in here.
Yeah.
So a hybrid is created when there's a cross between
two genetically different parents.
The parent could be the same species
but slightly different variation, colour and size,
or they could be completely different species,
which is what you guys are doing here,
creating completely new plants, right?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
What we want to do is create a bigger gene pool.
But also, when you mix species
or just different parents of the same species,
you get more variation for different sizes, leaves, colour, shapes.
If it hasn't been done before, we want to try it.
(TAMMY LAUGHS)
So can you cross any and throw them with any other?
Oh, I wish!
What happens is a big part of what crosses with what
is dependent on their genetics.
Also, what researchers have found and we're finding
is if they're from similar regions, they're also more likely to cross.
It's really still trial and error, though,
which is part of the fun and the experimentation, right?
Well, the experimentation is going really well.
Thank you! That's so encouraging. (TAMMY LAUGHS)
So, Alicia, to create a lot of these wonderful hybrids,
I'm guessing you spend a lot of time with flowers and pollinating.
I do.
Alright, let's go!
We're heading indoors to the grow tent, to where the action happens.
And to cross one anthurium with another, it can be a little tricky
as they have quite complex flowers.
So most people would probably think this whole thing is a flower,
but what are the parts?
So an inflorescence isn't a single flower
but it's actually a cluster of many, many, many flowers
along this long thing called a spadix.
You can probably see it all better on this particular inflorescence.
You can see that there are lots of little diamonds
and each diamond is a complete flower
which has both female and male parts.
But they don't happen at the same time.
Ah!
First, it goes through the female phase,
which is all wet and sticky.
That's when it's receptive.
Only after a few days, when it's no longer receptive,
it will go through the male phase right after that
and produce pollen,
so they don't happen at the same time.
Ah! And why is it important that they don't happen at the same time?
So by having the phases separately,
the flower usually cannot pollinate itself.
Most anthuriums and plants,
for sexual reproduction,
they wanna swap genes with another party.
(LAUGHS) That makes sense.
Alicia, how do you go about crossing anthuriums?
So when the anthurium is at the male phase,
I will get a brush and collect the pollen into tin foil.
Then I will put it in a ziplock bag,
label it, date it and freeze it into our sperm bank.
And then when I notice a plant is ready in the female stage,
I will go to our sperm bank freezer
and choose a suitable mating partner
and then I will hand-pollinate it - again, with a brush.
(DELICATE MUSIC)
If I were to try this at home,
how do I know if pollination was successful?
Ah, so it will start to get bumpy and green
where the sticky wet droplets were and then become a berry,
and you can see them here and here.
And how do you know when they're ready for harvesting?
They literally just pop out of the spadix
and you can see that they're dangling
and hanging by a little filament like an umbilical cord.
So once we've harvested the seeds,
we clean them, select the best ones
and then we germinate them in wet paper towel like this.
Then they're ready to be planted
in a series of mini greenhouses which are temperature controlled.
And that way, using a variety of media,
whether it's perlite or vermiculite,
they start to grow. (LAUGHS)
And then the cycle just starts all over again.
Yep, the cycle of life.
The results of Alicia's experiments are dazzling.
Yeah, I really, really love some of the crystallinum-type hybrids,
because just look at how shiny
and shimmery they are.
They're like the name, crystallinum.
And I love some of the forgetii hybrids that we've made.
You know, this was one of my first forgetii hybrids.
And you can see that it's kind of got
that really bumpy, topographical,
Earth texture happening.
Yeah, lots of little valleys and hills and, well, mountains, really.
Because we make quite a number of hybrid batches,
we try to track their progress
and we identify them with names for each batch.
We assigned a batch ID hashtag to this one called #DarkBullet.
The reason is, at the time, we anticipated this would be very dark.
And also the feature of that bumpy texture,
the botanical term is 'bullate'.
So it's a pun. You know, 'dark' and 'bullate'.
'Dark Bullet'.
(LAUGHS)
People who've bought these
as seeds from us
have been using that hashtag
to share their growth
and track their progress
and sending us updates on how it's going.
Here we've also got another forgetii hybrid we made.
Batch ID hashtag #HungryUncle. (LAUGHS) What a name!
Yeah, it's a little bit of fun that Nige thought up.
And people have been re-sharing their progress pictures online
with the variations and how it's going for them.
So far it seems to be...
..the general feedback is
it's a very fast grower.
It seems to be super robust.
Very dominant forgetii traits
and some of them are having a really cute red centre nose.
We call it the snoot. (LAUGHS) Pink snoot.
Well, it's a great feedback system.
It's sort of crowd-sourcing scientific data
in a...in a new... new, modern way, I suppose.
This all started with a love of plants.
Is that still the case?
Oh, absolutely. Totally.
Absolutely. We live for this.
What is it that you love with hydroponics?
Why grow your plants in hydroponics?
So much of it's the automation and the ease of growing things.
But I do enjoy the technical, building side of it as well.
Would you say the same, Alicia?
Well, I just love the foundation Nige has created.
He's kind of creating the paint and I can then paint with it.
Abstract art style.
(LAUGHS)
Yeah. I'm the engine. She steers the ship.
Aw! It's a good partnership. (LAUGHS)
There really are so many new and different ways to grow plants.
If you've caught the indoor plant bug,
be careful where it might take you.
You might just need to quit your day job.