Terraponics Bags

When watching volcanic eruptions on the TV news are you ever struck by how many people chose and still choose to live on the sides of such a fire-spitting mountain? They live and work there because the soil consists mostly of lava from previous eruptions, and offers the ultimate in fertility, guaranteeing high crop yields year after year.

The Egyptians had things a bit easier; no volcanoes and resulting casualties, and yet they still got to enjoy the benefits of volcanic activity. The Nile constantly carried all kinds of minerals and other nutrients with it, including quite regularly lava from the interior of Africa. Already in the distant past the Egyptians planted their crops along the banks of the great, nourishing river. By using an ingenious irrigation system people were able to control the Nile and water their crops with an ebb-and-flow system. At each annual flood the water deposited a layer of fertile silt on the fields. Over the centuries, in this way various mineralbearing layers were laid down in the soil, with varying compositions. Even today these fields along the Nile are still known as one of the most fertile areas on earth. Terraponics has had specialised laboratories analyse these layers one by one, and with the knowledge they gathered developed the Terrapot .

The Terrapot is actually not a pot but a bag, that is filled with various layers of lava mixed with baked earth granulates. Each layer also has its own mineral composition, just as is found in nature. In addition to the extensive range of minerals, there are also two sorts of diatomic earth in it, three different sorts of calcium, Leonardite, humusrich and naturally acid, hormones and enzymes, organic carbons, volcanic rock, vermiculite and perlite, nutritional vitamin B1 and other vitamins.

In other words, it promises a very rich growth, containing all the right nutrients for a healthy start and development of our plant, thanks to the division into various layers that mean the plant is always able to get hold of all the various nutrients that she needs at each particular moment in the various stages of her development.

By creating their own system of nutrients that work in cooperation with the growth medium the natural way that the plant feeds itself is completely optimised. At the same time the exchange of gases that occurs at the root tips is strongly increased. By giving nutrients via a dish system or via an ingenious ebb and flood system from Terraponics itself, there is a sort combination of hydroponic and organic growing methods created. Limiting factors, such as in hydropnics for example, where in the plant roots are robbed both of their natural transpiration process as well as their uptake of colloids (or substances that are finely distributed in a fluid, whereby the particles are larger than a molecule and smaller than those found in a suspension), fall away. Nor do the bags contain any acidic clumps of peat, such as can be found in many soils, so the plants are in no way hindered in their growth.

The layered design of the contents maximises the uptake of nutrients by the way that the lowest roots, which are normally made for going in search of ground water, can get their nutrients out of the perlite at the bottom of the bag. The uppermost roots have to grate along the soil in order to be able to take up the finest particles. On top of that, the medium is so loose that it is hard to give too much water or to over-feed.

Terraponics has attempted to bring stability and balance together in a natural earth/lava medium that has the property of being able to absorb water-soluble nutrients and then male these available to the plant when the conditions dry out. This hybrid approach combining traditional and hydro-growing is not only capable of bringing plants to maturity more quickly, but to raise eventual yields too. In addition to this, you also get to keep the natural organic taste and nutritional value of the original soil-grown crop.

The importer claims even more advantages than just those of unsurpassed results. So the system lowers the production costs, lowers the risks of salt damage, breaks down over-sized nutrients in the medium and prevents poor reproduction. The overlygenerous use of nutrients in traditional methods is something that can retard root growth and raise the sensitivity to salt stress. It can also interrupt the bloom and ripening stage if the concentrations of nutrients such as zinc and calcium are thrown out of balance. The increased root growth in the bags helps the plants to withstand the stress of drought and heat, along with the potential shock of being re-potted.

The importer further claims that thanks to the plants’ strong, healthy leaf cover and stem, spint mites leave them alone, and even that plants already ravaged by spint recover fully when they are transferred into the Terraponics system. Sick plants will recover rapidly and can still go on to succeed in making great end results.

We have not (yet) been able to check these health claims, but we are provisionally prepared to give the importer the benefit of the doubt. We are also nice and busy with a different way or working with the “wonder” bags from Terraponics. We basically wanted to try once again to grow in the old fashioned (and in the Netherlands, legal) way: with just a couple of plants on our balcony, and saw in the grow method an outstanding way of starting off our weed with a sort of supercharge. Because the system is basically designed for indoor growing with a one-to-two week growth period and we were looking at a Summer with a vegetative growth of 13 weeks, from mid-may to mid-August, it was necessary to drastically alter the feeding scheme. We of course would have had to phone the importer for larger bags (they come in 5, 20 and 30 litre sizes, and we had the 5 litre size) and / or for more nutrient, but in the end we decided to postpone this project until next year.

For this season we got hold of some of the huge 60-litre bags of pre-fertilized organic soil from Bio Henkie. We also planned to go on holiday and the neighbour, who seems to only know anything about insurance and is capable of, at best, giving water. That’s why…

At the time this article was written - 17 August 2006 – we had just wrapped three 1.75 metre-high giant bushes, all topped, in black agricultural plastic in order to bring them in to bloom in four days. If the end of the Summer is a lovely as it was last year then we are sitting pretty.

The hot Summer and the Terrapot bags have in any case already given us a very good base on which to work!