What's more, nearly 50 percent of last year's gardeners decided not to plant a crop this year because Newark could offer them no guarantees that their lots would not be sold for development, according to the program's director. Victor Chico of the Rutgers Urban Gardening Program, with his hydroponic plants. The 1 -acre site is full of collards, cabbage, tomatoes, mustard greens, zucchini, eggplant, summer squash, peppers, and even a few rows of corn planted the traditional way. Simply put, hydroponics is the growing of plants in a nutrient solution using soil-less media. In the Rutgers Urban Gardening hydroponic system, a nutrient solution is pushed by a pump through hoses that circulate a nutrient-rich solution that drips slowly and continuously from a smaller hose into each plant's growing medium.
Rock wool is the media used in the demonstration garden.
The plant's roots can grow rapidly in the nutrient-rich medium, often much faster than in soil. In the United States, hydroponics is used on a commercial basis to grow many vegetables purchased in grocery stores and supermarkets. NASA even used hydroponics on the space station for crop production and to recycle carbon dioxide into oxygen. But for Patel and Chico, hydroponics offers one possibility to explore if the city lots keep disappearing to development. Patel, a county agricultural agent and program director since 1987, said that in a traditional garden often 90 percent of applied fertilizer is wasted once it moves below the plant root zone.