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Ferns in Hydroponics: From Victorian Mania to Modern Houseplant Gold · Hydroponics Daily

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Hello there and welcome back to
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Hydroponics Daily, your go-to podcast for everything soilless cultivation.
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I'm your host, Dr. Russell Sharp, the founder of Eutrema, where we make interesting
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fertilisers, novel biostimulants and organic biopesticides.
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And today I wanted to talk about a potential hydroponic crop and that is ferns.
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Should you be growing ferns hydroponically? Well, they're not a big edible crop.
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They're a very, very niche edible crop.
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In fact, I think they're only eaten in Japan and some small cultures around the world.
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Small cultures? That's a derogatory term. I'm going to have another derogatory term later on.
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The reason why is because they tend to contain a lot of poisonous,
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toxic chemicals, some potentially carcinogenic ones.
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So even in Japan where they eat ferns, they only eat the young fronds.
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It's not something I would recommend.
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So why would you grow them hydroponically? I would just set up
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a business growing them well they're very expensive houseplants
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a lot of the time lots of different species of ferns can be grown houseplants the
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obvious example was back in the Victorian times in Britain where people went
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fern crazy fern mania where they tried to collect as many different ferns as
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possible and that was the ultimate status symbol forget Ferraris and Lambos
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it was ferns that were the status symbol and that led to actually reductions
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in the natural fern population here in the Great Britain and
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the British Isles, and they still haven't recovered to this day because of the
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fern mania in the Victorian times.
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So just as things like monstrous and orchids might be popular at certain times
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of year, at certain times, then ferns were big back then.
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So, you know, like COVID lockdown, houseplants collection went mad back in the
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Victorian times, fern collection went mad.
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And then for outdoor cultivation, tree ferns are a really popular plant in jungle style gardens.
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And in the uk here we can really only grow one species
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of tree fern and that's dicksonia antarctica great
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species i've got one in my conservatory but there are
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lots of other different species of tree ferns that
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tend to grow in the southern hemisphere i don't think there's i
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think there might be one species that grows slightly in the
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northern hemisphere but that'd be like in indonesia barely across
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the to the northern hemisphere they tend to grow
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south america i think but mainly like new zealand new
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zealand's famous for them and take a long time to
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grow and so you have to be careful to sustainably harvest
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them and they should have a little tag on to say they're sustainably harvested because
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the un controls the export and
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trade in rare plant species and rare animals as
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well and tree ferns are one of those listed so you have
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to be careful so and also you want to reduce the
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carbon footprint of horticulture then growing ferns
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and not exporting them around the world would be good because today i listened
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to a podcast from an australian company that were looking to reduce the amount
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of ornamental plants that were and cut flowers that were imported into australia
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and they were they thought they'd have a great name for their company and it
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was grown not flown and they spent.
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Quite a lot of money investing in apps and networks
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and databases and systems and websites for grown
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not flown and put a lot of effort into this new startup company
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and then they started wearing the t-shirts advertising the
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company around their towns and cities in australia
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and loads of people came up to them shouting at them talking they
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were scum and fascists and all this and then
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turns out grown not flown it has another
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meaning and in the
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sort of left-wing society should we
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say where it talks about you know immigration and
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things like that so yeah grown not flown but
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yeah if you can grow in-house plants and not fly them in then that can potentially
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reduce their carbon footprint and ferns could be one of those a tree fern weighs
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a lot and so importing that via ship or plane takes a lot of carbon and so could you grow them.
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Hydroponically and that's the question we're going to look at today so yeah
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let's look at tree ferns so tree ferns the first thing
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we have to realize is that they are ferns like mosses and
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liveworts they reproduce by spores mainly some
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species you can do like offsets so like pups that perform at the bottom or from
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root cuttings would be a good one to try with these as well but you're not going
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to produce a lot of plants from them you really if you're going to have a big
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operation and you want to get them clean away from the soil then you're going to look at sort of,
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getting plants to reproduce by spores. You're going to have to collect the spores
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and you're going to have to understand the life cycle.
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So the ability for plants to reproduce by spores evolved long before the cones
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and flowers and seeds and fruits found on what we call higher plants.
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The spore-producing plants still around on Earth have similar anatomy to those
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found in the fossil records and have an anatomy much less complicated than higher plants.
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So you can find ferns and things like lycopods or mosses in fossils and they
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look pretty much identical to the ones around today so they haven't evolved much since then.
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So this is why scientists often refer to spore producing plants as primitive
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plants but for some time many of the scientists who have studied these plants
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consider the term primitive as derogatory for what are very complex and interest in plants.
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Recent studies on the genetics seem to indicate that their genes have remained
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largely unchanged for many millions of years.
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Hence, the ones in the garden today are very similar to those that existed in
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the fossils. So the primitive cat tag might be justified.
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So mosses, liverworts, horsetails, lycopods, which you find online.
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Nowadays, lycopods you find on Small plants on bogs and moorland But back in
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prehistoric times, Jurassic times They were massive trees with massive stems.
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Really could make use of the
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elevated co2 levels existed back then so
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maybe with increased man-made co2 levels maybe the lycopods will be will have
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a rejuvenation and we'll start to see them appearing moving off the moorland
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and things like that interesting to know so that they are amongst the most unusual
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and obscure plants that can be cultivated in the garden or indoors hence why people.
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They're popular for both houseplants and gardens.
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As I say, tree ferns give a good jungle garden feel.
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That's why I've got a few in my garden alongside things like tetrapanix rex
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with massive leaves or paulonia trees, really big leaves that give you that
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sort of jungle feel in my back garden.
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Not so good in the winter because something like a tree fern will lose its leaves
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if you don't wrap it up so it can look a bit bare.
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But despite the wonderful form and intriguing growth strategies.
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There are actually very few large collections of ferns in botanical gardens.
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They tend to only have a few species, which is a bit of a shame, really.
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When they do have them, they're normally located in what's called a fernary,
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although there aren't many botanical gardens with fernaries.
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Ones I've seen are really good. The University of California Botanical Gardens
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at Berkeley has a great fernary.
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Q, I think, has got a fernary as well, but the one of berkeley is
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the dogs it's really good berkeley university berkeley
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baton gardens is one of my favorites if not my favorite worldwide they'll have
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staff there that are experts in fern taxonomy as well as places like the natural
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history museum in london they've got fern experts there as well the beauty of
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berkeley is it's got coastal fog and a warm climate which is ideal for fern
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cultivation if you're going indoors you need to mimic those sorts of conditions,
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You'll find that a lot of rare ferns grow in coastal regions with very high moisture levels.
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Is it the Burren in Ireland? I've never been, but that's got a number of what
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are termed filmy ferns, filmy ferns, which are very rare and only grow there in the British Isles.
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How many people are aware of that?
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So there you go. Some gardeners consider ferns and other primitive plants to
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be all much of a muchness,
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but a connoisseur of primitive plants will be able to appreciate
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the varied shape and features of the 20 000
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different species and their hybrids for home
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gardeners fern collections in particular are actually fairly easy
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to incorporate into planting schemes and they can be
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placed under benches as well so you can grow them under
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the bench where you're growing other plants that need lots of
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light so they can make up use of dead space the
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problem is that difficulties with propagating primitive plants have led
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in the past to wild collections and this
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sort of fern mania in the victorian times the division of plants already in
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your collection is one possible method of propagation for many species although
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it's not always possible depending on species and you could just kill your plant
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by doing it so you need to really research it and root cuttings and say are
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an option as well but if you want lots of plants you need to understand the.
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The spore production and and
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make sure that they can grow into new plants shakespeare once
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when in shakespeare's time people thought that ferns did
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produce seeds but they were invisible so in some of his play in one of his plays
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i think he refers to somebody as like a fern seed in that they were invisible
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so that's an interesting useless fact for you spores are not just small seeds
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though okay the key difference comparing spores to seeds other than just their
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smaller size, they're often microscopic,
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is that when they germinate, they do not develop into an adult of the species they came from.
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Instead, when the spores germinate, they first develop into a green structure called a gametophyte.
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And this has one copy of the chromosomes, haploid, a bit like pollen.
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That they're the same chromosomes that are present in the adults,
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what we call the sporophyte.
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This is comparable to the gametophyte
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in sea plants which are the pollen grains as they say on
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the anthers and the ovules in the ovary okay
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in ferns and other primitive plants the gametophyte still looks like a miniature
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plant and can crucially photosynthesize but they don't grow into very big or
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normally look like the adult plants but once established the gametophyte It
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produces eggs and motile sperm,
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just like the sperm in you if you're a man or in a, you know.
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A pig or a dog once they
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fuse once the the sperm has swum to
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the egg in a very obviously that needs water hence the humidity and
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the moisture required they fuse to form a zygote do
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you remember that word from high school biology and
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then once you've got a zygote that can develop into an adult plant
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and so you can see why that complicated
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life cycle means that ferns aren't often grown from spores
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commercially and i guess it could have its
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advantages if you're in a very humid environment that the gametophyte can photosynthesize
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as well so but yeah you have to understand that the spores will germinate into
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a small little plant called a gametophyte and then only once they've reproduced
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sexually will they form into adults and so you could get lots of.
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Fern plants from one gametophyte so
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not one seed producing one plant unlike fungi
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the spores of primitive plants are not clones as
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they always go through the process of meiosis which
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is the swapping of genes between the chromosomes mixes up
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the genetic material passed on to the progeny this means that
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if you don't if you do want to keep the exact features of
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the plant you will need to propagate it using one of the vegetated techniques
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like division or removing some of the pups and
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things like that so imagine you had a variegated fern
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you couldn't propagate them from spores so there
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are estimated 12 000 species of ferns worldwide with
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many different growth forms and cultivation requirements of all the different
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types of primitive plants ferns are the most popular the leaves of ferns are
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termed fronds why don't we just call them leaves and that's because they have
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spore they produce spores on the underside of the leaves so if you wanted to To harvest the spores,
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you would need to leave a leaf on a surface, maybe on a piece of paper,
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overnight and collect the black spores that come from it.
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I think the spores of ferns are also used in...
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Show business as an explosive so they
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blow spore they blow fern spores into
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the air and then light them and they're gonna give a big flash and it's
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a safe way of producing an explosion or or a
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less dangerous way of producing an explosion let me
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just google that see if i'm not talking absolute nonsense or if
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that's true oh it's half right so it's lycopod spores
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which are fern like instead of having fronds
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where the spores are produced on the
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back of the leaf in lycopods they're produced on special structures
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i think are called strobilla i'm not going to google it but yeah you
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can collect the spores a lot easier from them so yeah it is used or traditionally
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used for that reason so that's interesting so the actual little structure that
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the spores come from is called a sorry the reproductive organ that contains
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the spores sometimes the leaves of palms and cycads are also called ferns.
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And fronds but botanists normally restrict the
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term frond to to ferns in so
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yeah there's this in mosses and liverworts they're produced
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in sporangia and or they can even
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be in in in horsetails that look like a little primitive
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cone called a strobili so horsetails club
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mosses you get some the strobili can be
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mistaken for pests such as scale insects as
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well this on the back color ferns you have
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to be careful you don't be inhaling loads of spores if you're growing these
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indoors or hydroponically make sure the spores are not flying around or if they
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are that you wear a mask and protection because obviously any spore whether
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it's a fungus or a fern if you get it in your lungs even if they're non-toxic
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they can cause farmer's lung which is a debilitating.
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Condition which is hard to cure if incurable and
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also as i say some ferns contain toxic or carcinogenic compounds you don't have
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been inhaling carcinogens so there you can get ferns from specialist fern nurseries
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they're an ideal place to source them but you could also source a pest common
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pest and disease from them as well so be careful there's a there's a chili nursery,
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near me and you go in there and you get covered in pest and disease whenever
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you go in there so i don't go in there anymore i always get my buy my seeds
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from online for that reason as i say in Australia, New Zealand,
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tree ferns can grow to 18 metres tall.
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You don't get to many of them in the UK currently at that height.
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That is a massive height.
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Some people are wary of growing ferns due to the occurrence of bracken.
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Bracken is a dreaded weed. Even though it's a native plant, it's invasive on
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pastures and it's toxic to livestock.
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And so people think that all ferns are bracken. A bit like people think all
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rhododendrons are bad because of rhododendron ponticum, which is an invasive
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weed people have to be educated that not all ferns are bracken not all rhododendrons are invasive,
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Some people are just absolute idiots. Another invasive fern is a zola,
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but we've talked about that in the past.
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It can actually be a hydroponic crop because it produces massive amounts of biomass.
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And put it in watercourses, especially when there's too much fertilizer coming
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in off the fields, it can block sunlight transmitted into the water and kill
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off aquatic plants and animals.
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So there's a grass-like fern called the pillwort,
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and that's an aquatic fern that is increasingly popular as a margin plant in
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garden ponds where it thrives in wet soils especially acidic soils and can be
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used to hide the edges of plastic pond liners pillwort is not considered invasive,
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and could be grown as a hydropanic crop as an alternative to a zola so think about that.
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Let's have a look at some other options for ferns there is one massive exception
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to the rule that ferns love moist and wet conditions and that's salaginella
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lepidophylla otherwise known as the resurrection fern,
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which I remember seeing as a kid in a garden center and I was amazed by.
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And it was all dead and folded up. And my dad told me that if you take it home
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and you re-wet it, it will grow again.
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And I thought that was amazing that you could have a plant that could just look completely dead.
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I might get one for my kids to have a look at. Sorry, if they still got them,
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still selling them. That was really interesting. That will just...
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Goes into complete dormancy and only recovers when there's water and greens
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up really quickly as well, I seem to remember.
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You'll hear a lot in horticulture about foliar uptake of nutrients and foliar sprays.
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Plants can't actually absorb a lot of nutrients through their leaves because
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of the waxy cuticle, which I talked about on a previous episode.
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They just don't absorb water or nutrients very well. They might absorb a small amount, but they don't.
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But the difference there is in primitive plants and ferns especially they can
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absorb a lot of water and nutrients through their fronds so keeping them in
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a humid environment is not just essential to prevent them you know,
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desiccation it actually assists with water and nutrient uptake this means that
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ferns should be irrigated from overhead sprinklers and not by drippers so you
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might want to look at some sort of,
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dripper based system if you're doing hydroponically from above which
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you would never consider you normally think oh well they're all going to get mildew over
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do that and spread damping off and things
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like that so you might think of a funky way of growing
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the plants where you water the leaves first and then drip down okay and hydration
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of fern through their fronds is also seen in the in the reservoirs in fern which
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i talked about so it springs back to life once misted so they actually absorb
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the water through the leaves not through their roots and ferns have roots.
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Mosses and liverworts don't really have roots they're much more primitive i
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think they have something called rhizoids which are like hold fasts like seaweed
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has so they're not really proper roots what can we say about anything else about
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propagation perhaps a lot of plants the ferns outdoors will produce their spores in late autumn and,
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certainly autumn and late summer and so you need to
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be able to collect them at that time and the
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spores need to be sown on the surface of the grow media as
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they will be photosynthesizing as soon as they sprout so you
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don't put any grow media on top of them and the seed trays need to be kept in
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transparent plastic bags or a piece of glass over them to keep the humidity
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100% because they need that light and they need that 100% humidity and you should
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get some young plants You should get the gametophytes being produced and then
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the sperm swimming along.
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It'd be a good thing to look under the microscope for and find some ferns.
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Sperm. That'd be interesting, wouldn't it? I might do that. Counter what I was
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saying about them liking humid environments, the spores actually open when the
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humidity is lower than normal.
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I guess that improves their ability to float through the air.
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And so you need some variation in humidity for the spores to actually be released.
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So the sorry open dramatically fast, almost
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like a ballistic method when the humidity drops and
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that propels the spores away from the front surface and
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into the air so they can find soil to grow on the easiest
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way to harvest the spores is to just remove the section sacrifice a
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leaf and put it on a sheet of paper as i said the spores
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will just drop straight down and once they're released from the sorry and
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it's quite a dry environment on a piece of paper so they're black
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brown or yellow the spores and
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you'll get millions you'll get a powder forming and they
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can be stored in a similar manner to to seeds low humidity and
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low and constant temperature although like seeds the
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spores of certain species cannot be stored are termed
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recalcitrant we talk about recalcitrant trees that can't be
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stored like oak as the
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acorns can't be stored for a long time one genus of
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ferns that can't be stored the spores can't be stored is the osmunda
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other ferns have very long-lived spores and
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it's thought that they and this property could assist attempts to
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conserve ferns that have been lost from their natural habitat and
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the members of the british terological society which
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is study ferns are dedicated to the cultivation of
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ferns and run a spore exchange scheme that lists several hundred species.
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Available for swapping among its members so maybe if
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you're in britain and you're interested in ferns join the british terological society
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with a putter at the start fern spores are best sown fresh in the autumn under
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protection and the young plants pricked out in the spring however if you're
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growing hydroponically you could cut this down dramatically and yeah once they've
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started growing you've just got to make sure they're kept damp but not rotting and.
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That's a delicate balance that you have to,
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balance they're normally grown in an organic compost or sphagnum peat finely
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chopped tree fern fiber ironically is used to grow ferns they may want an acidic
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growing media though and so you could mess around with this and find out which is the best option,
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very few species are adapted to alkaline conditions but they're even the ones
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that are still prefer an organic medium so peat cocoa things like that but who
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knows whether they'll grow on other things like lecker and rockwool i don't
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think much research has been done,
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you pro the alkaline ones want a ph above seven which is pretty alkaline if i was going to grow.
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Ferns and spores then i would take my growing media and i would if it's peat
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or cocoa i'd probably certainly peat or any compost from a grown garden center
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things like that any soil i'd probably put them in the microwave sterilize it
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with some hot water maybe some boiling water from the kettle because I don't
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want algae growing on it first.
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You definitely don't want to confuse algae for gametophyte and young spores
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because algae will probably be your enemy when you're,
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growing ferns. It can take between 6 to 12 months in the seal bags for the gametophyte
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to fully develop, and then they will produce a sperm that swims to the eggs. So that is a long time.
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So this is not for people who are in a rush.
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It's definitely for the people with a passion for ferns.
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So if you are in a rush, then crown division is possible in most ferns.
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But it produces a small number of plants and obviously damages your
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fern so you have to bear that in mind as i said you can
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take rhizome root cuttings or from the runners
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of some species you can't take leaf cuttings
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like you can on many other plants so cuttings clones
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are not an option for fern
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propagation on your species you may see pegs which
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are like at the leaf base they're unusual they're specific
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to ferns and then you can use them as a
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sort of like primitive cutting so you remove
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them from the base of the plant and despite the brutality the pair
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technique can be performed with only minimal damage
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to the plant so it looks worse than it is the pegs
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are removed and then planted into the grow media to half their depth
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in a similar manner to propagating sort of lily
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bulb scales there is some reports of
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something called a giant cutting technique where you
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for propagating tree ferns and this produce this is
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stupid because it only produces one small plant from one large plant
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so there's no increase in the number of plants it's only used to
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get large tree ferns that are growing in wild into cultivation
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by shrinking the size of the plant and so
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it's actually detrimental to conservation efforts because
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it just takes wild plants that are in their natural habitat and makes them smaller
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for sale in garden centers so don't do that a few fern species produce bulblets
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or plantlets on their fronds which can be removed a sort of vivipery that we.
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About in a previous episode where you produce like.
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Young plants without any seeds the bulbul forming species
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such as mother spleenwort and bladder fern
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are propagated easily by cutting up subsections
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of the frond and placing them on the top of growing medias for the bulbul to
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develop into a full plant so that's a good one i mean you will see reports of
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some growers finding success with leaf cuttings as well where the leaves the
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fronds can be sliced into sections and containers but they're very very few and far between and
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I'm not sure how scientific those studies were.
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Ferns that grow well in gardens but are difficult to propagate now are often
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propagated by micropropagation, and it's helped increase the number of plants
24:43
in commercial co-propagation for ornamental plants, but also rare plants from the wild.
24:48
So the Tunbridge firmy fern is difficult to culture by any other means and has
24:52
actually been extinct in the town of Tunbridge Wells in Kent since 1875,
24:57
but with micropropagation it could be a coming back. So that's good to know, isn't it?
25:02
So that's been propagation of ferns for hydroponics.
25:07
The silver fern of, is it the silver fern or the white fern of New Zealand?
25:12
What is the symbol of it? It is the silver fern.
25:14
Maybe if you're in New Zealand or you're a New Zealand expat,
25:18
then you might want to grow the silver fern, which is a beautiful species.
25:22
And that's Alsophylla diobata.
25:26
So maybe there's a market for that plant as well.
25:29
It's a nice silvery fern that's been
25:32
hydroponics daily for today anyway if you found it useful then
25:35
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25:58
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