Off the coast of Noli in northwest Italy lies a revolutionary project that looks straight out of a science fiction movie. Nemo’s Garden is located 30 feet underwater and is composed of a cluster of pods or biospheres. These pods serve as the next frontier in gardening, the Guardian reports.
Nemo’s Garden is currently made up of seven pods that host a variety of plants. At the moment, basil, strawberries, and lettuce serve as the first successful produce grown completely underwater. The technology is so simple, efficient, and sustainable that it really deserves attention on a global scale.
Each pod has eight to ten trays (or around 22 pots) of plants which are cultivated using natural sunlight. The pods are suspended shallow enough to allow sunlight to penetrate. The pods are completely surrounded by water and a desalinating hydroponics system is used to nourish the plants.
It works by evaporating seawater from within the pod and condensing fresh water on the underside of the roof which trickles down to the plant trays. Other hydroponics systems use heating and cooling systems but Nemo’s Garden does not. The very location of the pods provides a suitable and stable environment for its hydroponics to work.
The pods, then, require very little maintenance work. One of the more problematic points that Sergio Gamberini, president of Ocean Reef Group and brains behind the project, has encountered is the need for qualified divers to access the pods. Other than that, Gamberini believes that underwater greenhouses could solve food problems.
Since many nations that struggle with food supply are surrounded by seawater, Nemo’s Garden could potentially eradicate this problem. There are still many questions about the viability of these underwater pods as a commercial stable food supply option. With the help of other pioneers, like Jon Old of The Wasabi Company, they aim to go deeper and larger in time.
Old says, “certain aspects are very appealing, like the sealed environment, no pests to wander in, no disease spores to blow in on the wind, and no slugs. If we assume the underwater [farm] is structurally sound, I think it would be fantastic. It’d be like working in a huge, dry aquarium all day.”
See the video below:
