UBC AMS Sustainability Projects Fund – Final Report

Grant recipients are required to submit this report to sustainadmin@ams.ubc.ca within one month of project completion.

Primary Contact Person: Ning Yan (Botany Enthusiasts Club Treasurer)

Contact email: yanningny@gmail.com

Project name: Introductory Hydroponics Workshop

Part One: What the grant achieved:

I often look to community gardening as an example of an activity that both promotes sustainability and serves as a gateway to get people more involved with sustainability through interest, engagement, and education. Gardening is popular among our club members, yet many (especially ones that live on campus) lack their own plots, or at least ones that are conveniently located near their homes.

Our project, the Introductory Hydroponics Workshop, was designed to address both this desire for convenient gardening space and to educate our members about a form of gardening that is, to many people, shrouded in mystique and technical jargon.

The workshop series consisted of 4 workshop modules that introduced a different aspect of hydroponics, such as basic principles, types of systems, or commercial use. Each module consisted of a brief lecture section, discussion section, and then activity section. For example, the 4th workshop discussed the impact of hydroponics in global agriculture, such as in arid regions of Spain, then followed that up with a tour of the Horticulture Greenhouse.

Figure 1: Workshop participants in the greenhouse. Pictured in the back (in white) is Melina Biron, the Greenhouse Manager.

We classified this project as a sustainability project because it teaches participants a sustainable and resource-efficient method of food production and because it encourages participants to produce food at home, reducing the carbon footprint created by driving food home. Our goals were to educate and engage students by introducing them to hydroponics, which is a major method of food production in BC, and to show them that it was possible to grow food in the same way at home.

During the workshop, we made a DIY hydroponic kit out of a rubber tote bin, which is compact, tidy, and largely self-contained, something that appeals to students living in small apartments or rooms. Two of our workshop participants built one for themselves with the rest of the group, while several others expressed interest in building one, especially after we successfully grew herbs, lettuce, and microgreens in the shared DIY kit.

The final workshop module, which asked participants to grow cucumbers in our commercial hobbyist kit, was also well received. The participants volunteered their own time in order to visit the hydroponics lab where our plants were growing and did various maintenance tasks to check in on them. Participants learned various skills, such as measuring the concentration of nutrients in the hydroponics system and crop work skills such as pruning the cucumbers and training them to a single vine.

Figure 2: The hobbyist kit (Aeroflo 2 20) in the lab. The workshop participant pictured has just finished monitoring plant growth.

As part of our proposal, we intended to collaborate with several other sustainability clubs in order broaden our audience and engage more of the UBC student population. As this is the pilot year of this workshop series, we intended to open registration to club members first (who would hopefully be more forgiving of mistakes and mishaps) before extending invitations to other clubs. However, due to overwhelming demand, the workshop’s 20 slots (and 5 spots on the waiting list) filled up in less than a week.

While this can be construed as a mark of success in its own right, the success of the workshop series this year promises fruitful collaborations with other clubs. In fact, inter-club collaboration may be the most effective way for this workshop to educate UBC students in the future.

We learned during the course of this workshop that delivering all 4 modules AND the 3-month growing period is a very involved process that requires a great deal of scheduling, logistics, and workshop facilitator labour. The workshop series covers quite a lot of material (more than we expected!) and provides opportunities to learn a myriad of technical skills.

However, satisfying our key goals (providing an indoor gardening kit and a basic understanding of hydroponics) can potentially be done in a single workshop instead of four.

Figure 3: Our DIY kit in the lab. Currently growing is lettuce (ready for harvest) and basil.

The DIY kit was a particular success with our participants and can be cheaply run as a single standalone workshop without straining our most limiting resource, growing space for plants. While it doesn’t provide participants with the opportunity to actually grow plants and learn those associated skills, it can teach them enough to operate the kit in a single workshop, which is perfect for small collaborations with other clubs. This also circumvents our other problems, such as the length of our 4-module workshop series and its limited registration slots, by simply holding enough workshops to accommodate anybody interested at any time possible.

In the future, the club will be able to offer both a ‘comprehensive’ introductory hydroponics series (as contradictory as that sounds) and a ‘basic’ hydroponics workshop that can conducted more flexibly, allowing it to be shared with other clubs, sustainability groups, or simply conducted as demand and popularity dictate.

We will also be able to offer these workshops quite cheaply. Consumables (nutrients, grow cubes, and other small things) amounted to around $80 this year with quite a lot of materials left. Assuming that each workshop series registers 20 people again, we will be able to cover the cost of replacing consumables for only $40, or $2 per participant. A DIY kit workshop (assuming that a new kit is built every workshop) will cost around $30 for the base components, $80 with a full complement of nutrients, and $120 with a grow light.

4 executives from the Botany Enthusiasts Club attended the Introductory Hydroponics Workshop series, so we will likely be able to continue offering this workshop series even if the current facilitator team is unavailable. Additionally, all of the teaching materials are available on the club Google Drive, so new facilitators will be able to offer the same quality of workshop without significant time investment.

The workshop series proceeded as planned, bar a slight hitch in purchasing materials. The hydroponic kit we aimed to purchase, the Aeroflo 18, was out of stock at the vendor we had selected and we were unable to find an alternate source for the same price. Luckily, we were able to negotiate a deal with the owner of the store to purchase a similar system, the Aeroflo 20, for a reduced price, as well as adding in 3 bottles of nutrients. Using the savings from this deal, we were able to buy additional supplies that were unplanned for, such as a PPM meter (essential, but we forgot to budget for it in the initial proposal), a bucket, additional pH buffering supplies, a light timer (also essential but forgotten), and tomato clips. Due to the unexpected savings and expenses, our project was completed roughly $35 under its requested funding.

The most difficult resource that we had to manage was space. Although the DIY kit is rather small, the hobbyist kit (Aeroflo 20) is roughly 6 feet long by 2 feet wide and 6 feet tall (including lights). The cultivation part of our workshop series requires access to a room to house this kit for 3 months, on top of regular access to workshop participants daily for maintenance. Most classrooms and labs are booked on a daily basis, so finding a room was quite difficult.

The Horticulture Greenhouse manager, Melina Biron, allowed us to use the Micropropagation lab as our workspace, but that required her to unlock the lab door every day for us, as it is not usually open to the public. While she was happy to accommodate our project, we would prefer not to burden faculty with additional responsibilities and thus will seek alternate

arrangements for room space next year. Ideally, if the Botany Enthusiasts Club’s request for an AMS clubroom is approved, we will be able to use the clubroom to run this part of our workshop.

Securing funding for this workshop from AMS Sustainability was a simple process. In fact, the workshop facilitator team was surprised at how fast we got a response once we submitted our proposal. The Botany Enthusiasts Club has worked with AMS Sustainability in the past, notably in setting up our Seed Library project, and has always had a positive experience.

Overall, the Introductory Hydroponics Workshop Series was very successful this semester. We delivered the workshop modules as planned, successfully grew our hydroponic plants, and completed the project under budget. More importantly, we learned enough from the experience to solve our initial problems (limited seats) and identify the most successful parts of the workshop series. We are confident that we will be able to successfully collaborate with other sustainability groups on campus and continue to educate students.

Part Two: Sharing your story:

We request that you also provide us with a blog post about your project and experience. We ask that you write a short story (accompanied by a photo) describing the impact of your project, so that we can share it with the UBC community, on our blog http://amssustainability.ca/category/blog/.

We are the Botany Enthusiasts Club and our members are, well, enthusiastic about plants. They love gardening, houseplants, farming, botanical gardens, nature walks, or really any excuse to obsess over plants. But too often, we hear from our members that “I’d love to plant some veggies, but I don’t have a garden” or “I don’t think this houseplant will survive; I don’t have any light”. Unfortunately, that’s just the realities of life for a lot of university students. So in the fall of last year, we put together a plan to teach our members about a way of growing plants that doesn’t require a garden, can thrive quite happily in a basement suite without windows, and is compact enough to fit in a crowded student residence.

The Introductory Hydroponics Workshop Series is a 4-part series of workshops where we teach participants all about what hydroponics is (growing plants in water), build hydroponics systems, and grow vegetables in those systems. During the course of our workshop series, we tried our hand at growing herbs out of a bottle, converting a Rubbermaid bin into an apartment-sized indoor garden, toured the UBC Horticulture Greenhouse, and watched as our hydroponic cucumbers grew as tall as us.

The goal of our workshops is to educate and engage students. For a lot of people (even plant enthusiasts) the world of hydroponics is a mysterious one filled with technical jargon and vague associations with grow-ops. However, hydroponics is a major part of our food system, especially in BC where our tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers are grown in hydroponic greenhouses. Sustainability requires a thorough understanding of our impact on the world and learning about our local agriculture is a very good place to start.

We also hoped to empower our club members and encourage them to try growing plants at home. One of our workshops focused on building a Do-It-Yourself hydroponic system out of some simple supplies that you can buy at a hardware store. The goal was to end up with something that could fit nicely into somebody’s crowded home, supply its own light so that it could be set up anywhere, and produce a decent amount of food.

The result worked out pretty well for us! During peak growth time, our basil plants produced more leaves than our workshop participants could take home, prompting us to attempt to learn how to dry herbs in the club microwave.

In fact, the idea of a hydroponic herb garden is so popular, IKEA is releasing their own home hydroponics kit this May! Their model is pretty slick (tough to beat that Scandinavian minimalism), but we prefer the rugged charm of our home-made kit.

Our hydroponics workshop series has been a great success and we are incredibly grateful to the AMS Sustainability Projects Fund for giving us the opportunity to do this. With the equipment that they funded, we will be able to run these workshops for years without having to charge our participants more than a few dollars to replace the cost of seeds and fertilizer.

If you’d like to find out when our next workshop is running, or just connect with a community of botanically-minded friends, check us out at our:

Website: http://bec.sites.olt.ubc.ca/

Page: https://www.facebook.com/ubcbotanyclub

Email: ubcbotanyclub@gmail.com