Household’s vegetable gardens booming

It is always shady and fresh on the terrace of Nguyen Thi Thanh Nguyet, who lives in district 7 in HCM City, thanks to the vegetable garden verdant all year round.

Five trellises with aluminum frame and plastic lean-to installed for growing vegetables cover the whole area of the terrace. Each of the trellis comprises of five layers for growing vegetable under the mode of tank farming. Nguyet said with the vegetable garden, her family can have 110 kilos of vegetables a month.

Le Quang Luan from the Saigon Hydroponic Joint Stock Companyaffirmed that it is very easy to grow vegetables this way. One just needs to add nutrient to the tanks once a week and change the nutrients once in every three months.

Meanwhile, he does not take care about watering, because the water supply can be controlled by timer pumps. With the machines, nutrients would be automatically pumped into the system 5-7 times a day, 15 minutes each time.

There are a lot of nutrient products for hydroponic planting available on the market with the prices at between 700-2000 dong per liter.

According to Luan, a vegetable trellis would need 200,000 dong worth of nutrient and coconut fiber, and will produce 15-20 kilos of vegetables. In a larger investment scale, the investment cost would decrease by 15-30 percent.

“I am growing 15 types of vegetables. I feel secure when eating the self-grown vegetables, because they are clean and safe,” Nguyet said.

Tran Thi Hong in Tan Binh district has also been growing vegetable herself for the last year. She said it’s easier to grow vegetables under hydroponic method than to grow on soil.

“The only thing you need to do is to make nutrient water in accordance with the proportions you are told,” she said, adding that her small garden can produce the amount of vegetables big enough for her family, while the production cost is “reasonable.”

Scientists say the families in HCM City have successfully developed some 30 leaf vegetables and ten fruit vegetables under thehydroponic method.

The increasingly high demand has led to the boom of the establishment of the centers that provide hydroponic vegetable growing solutions and nutrients. Especially, the centers can also provide the service package of installing vegetable gardens for clients.

Self-sufficient vegetables are really clean?

While urban dwellers believe that self-sufficient vegetables are the best and the safest food for their families, scientists still have doubts about the quality of the vegetables.

Professor Nguyen Quoc Vong from the Hanoi Agriculture University said the nutritious water for vegetables are, by the nature, considered a kind of fertilizer. Therefore, if the fertilizer cannot be provided in the right way, this would badly affect the vegetables, while the substance residues may harm users.

Dam Van Hoat, Director of Vietfarm, also said that growers need to buy nutrients from prestigious suppliers and control the nutrients provided during the plantation.

Though hydroponic planting does not require pesticide, the polluted environment in urban areas would still affect the vegetables, because the trees would absorb the polluting substances from air and rain.

However, Dr Duong Hoa Xo from the HCM City Biology Center has affirmed that the majority of hydroponic vegetables are safe to human.

(Theo Talkvietnam.com )