Rachel Graham speaks to Niall O’Brien, one of the team behind The Grow Dome Project.
The eye-catching geodesic dome is in Flanagan’s Fields community garden, Dublin 8, where it is used as a space for hydroponic vegetable gardening and community events.

How did the Grow Dome Project come about?

We’re a social enterprise that started life as a community project. The idea was to try and turn a derelict space into a community resource that’s able to create food, employment and a social space all in one place. I was looking around and there were derelict building and derelict land everywhere at the time. So I was like, if you’ve no money, but you’ve loads of time, and you’ve loads of space, what do you do? Grow things was the only thing I could really think of. So we were looking at the best ways to grow things, and hydroponics seemed to be it.

We all came together – there’s a wide mix: engineers, a photographer, me, the ex-journalist. Jamie got chatting to his neighbour, who was involved in the Flanagan’s Fields garden from the get-go, and asked them if they’d like to put the dome in here. It happened literally as a conversation over a back wall.

What is the social enterprise element?

It’s very important to us that the dome can support a job. We want to take the voluntary nature out of community gardens, because they do lots of good work, but there’s usually two or three main people, and if one of them gets sick, or moves, or has a kid, then the whole thing falls apart. You could see a garden that’s four years old just quietly get closed up and forgotten about. How do you stop that? If you have a paid position in that garden, then you will always attract another person to do it.

This dome is quite small, but we can grow about 1,200 lettuces a week in here once the hydroponic systems are up and running. We’re looking at higher priced items, basil, herbs, wheat grass. There is still a bit of paperwork to go through until we can run this dome as a social enterprise. For the moment, there’s no point growing buckets of lettuce if you can’t sell it on, because there is the cost of growing it. So we kind of have to kill a bit of time, but we’ll be back!

 

Can you explain hydroponics in layman’s terms?

Basically you’re substituting water for soil. The plant food is dissolved in the water, so the roots are sitting in a bath of food. They don’t have to do any work to grow their roots down and search for food – all the energy goes up into the plant itself. The advantages are that it uses 90 percent less water than watering in soil, the plants grow much quicker, and the fruit matures quicker and grows bigger.

There was no soil on this site it all when this started. There was just an apartment block that was knocked down and patted into the ground. There was meant to be development but recession hit. So in an area where there is no soil, it’s perfect. All you do is catch the rainwater, run it through a simple filter, and add food into the water. Then because the root systems stay smaller, you can have a much higher concentration of plants. That’s important in urban farming because space is at such a premium. It’s gas, some people think hydroponics are the devil or something. Flat-earthers, you know! But you only need a bit of space for the hydroponics. This dome could support the job that runs the whole garden.

We’ve got 5 or 6 different prototype hydroponic systems in here, and we’ve been running them side by side over the last year, just to see which ones work best. Normally a hydroponic system needs to have electricity 24/7, to power a pump that keeps the water flowing. We’ve come up with a different system where we’re combining three or four different hydroponic systems, and it needs very little electricity. We only need to turn the pump on for maybe ten minutes a week, as opposed to all day and all night.

 

 

It sounds like the use of hydroponics is pretty good in terms of water conservation. Are there any other eco aspects to the dome?

This roof will collect 100,000 litres of rainwater a year. It runs off the roof and falls into collection tanks underneath the dome. Imagine if you had a few of these around – that’s a lot of water, you could even use it for something like flushing toilets, or gardening. We envisage future housing estates having a cluster of these. You could grow an awful lot of food for the estate. You’re creating food, you’re creating employment, and you’re harnessing the rain and the sun. It’s making your estate more self-sufficient. I think it’s a better idea to do things localised.

This is also a very efficient structure. For the space enclosed, it uses less material than any other structure, because its free supporting, there are no structural beams at all. You could fit all the wood from this on the roof of your car when it’s just laying down in sticks.

 

What reception has the dome gotten from the local community?

We knocked on every door in the area before we built it, to seek permission. No matter how well-intentioned you are, you really need to bring the area with you. That’s very important, so everyone feels it is theirs. It’s a very chilled-out, tranquil space. It catches people’s imagination, and I think that’s half the challenge with community projects – people don’t care. There’s a lot of apathy. But when kids come in here, generally the first thing they say is “oh wow!”

Lots of community events are held here. Children’s playgroups, garden meetings, residents association meetings, sometimes you’ll come in and there’ll be lads asleep on the couch with the paper over their heads. It’s a real melting pot. The social aspect is very important, and it was a surprise how well that went. We also have Tús [community work placement programme] workers in the garden. Every 8 months or something new people come in and they all get to learn a bit about gardening and a bit about hydroponics. We’re actually gonna have the guys who are here at the moment helping us build the next dome, so that’s very exciting.

Plans for the future?

This one is the proto-type. The next one is gonna go into a university that I can’t name – yet! We are hoping to expand the social element in that one – these domes would be a great place for gigs. And then there’s a school close to here, where we’re gonna do smaller versions as alternative classrooms – a cheap alternative to prefabs. Prefabs cost an absolute fortune, and they’re not very inspiring buildings. We’ll be building smaller domes in steel and polycarbonate, so they’ll last a lifetime. Basically we’ll be using all the tricks that we learned from this one and putting them into the next ones!

 

Photographs by Rachel Graham.