Pekin man finds hobby in hydroponics

PEKIN - What do the King Nebuchadnezzar II and James O'Donnell of Pekin have in common?

The king, according to legend, built one of the Seven Wonders of the World to please his home-sick wife back in about 575 B.C. O'Donnell has built something smaller, but similar, in the kitchen of his Lakeside Townhouses residence because he likes tomatoes, but doesn't like the off-season prices for them. He's also added a feature to his homemade wonder to please his 4-year-old daughter.

Nebuchadnezzar built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to bring an umbrella and carpet of trees and plants to the Middle East desert for the wife he had taken from such a climate.

O'Donnell, 28, has used PVC pipe, pine lumber, rubber tubing, several buckets, a few small water pumps and sheets of aluminum foil to create more garden in his cramped kitchen than many people have in their backyards. He gave a small part of his contraption over to a morning glory plant that he hopes will produce flowers for his daughter Riley, but which so far has produced only the plant's vines that, if left unchecked, might soon stretch into his living room.

"My daughter wanted flowers," he said. "I don't know a thing about growing flowers."

What O'Donnell does know, however, is hydroponics - the science and art of growing plants without dirt.

He and an increasing number of other garden lovers in the Pekin area are devoted to what's fair to say is a growing hobby.

"It's not just for hippies anymore," Nate Schmidgall joked one recent morning as he opened his small business, Gro Up, off Fifth Street in downtown Pekin.

Once or twice city police officers have visited, he said, perhaps out of curiosity. Schmidgall, after all, has since late September been selling hydroponic equipment that can be used for growing marijuana indoors as well as tomatoes.

"Anything you can grow in soil you can grow in water," and indoors with the proper lighting, he said.

Gro Up, however, is not a horticultural head shop, and O'Donnell's kitchen is not home to a forbidden garden. Nor is he, in the derogatory way many have come to use the term, a hippie.

"Whenever I tell people I'm growing hydroponics, that subject comes up" about secret marijuana plants, he said. Well, not everyone he discusses the simple but highly effective growing machine he's created from his own designs holds that suspicion. His fellow engineers and professors he keeps in contact with know differently.

O'Donnell started his first hydroponically-produced crops of cherry tomatoes while he was completing his master's degree studies in electrical engineering at Bradley University about two years ago. He returns to his hobby each day after finishing work at the SCADAware facility in Bloomington, where he helps develop industrial controls for water treatment plants.

He holds that background in common with Schmidgall, 30, a Pekin native who spent 15 years in Colorado after graduating with a bachelor's degree in electronics systems technology from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. O'Donnell often visits, and occasionally helps Schmidgall out in the Gro Up store.

For both, hydroponics combines the entertainment of an engrossing hobby with a lifestyle pursuit that caters to eating healthy and living in balance. It can be a bit of a challenge, Schmidgall said.

"The more you do it, the more you become a scientist," Schmidgall said.

His store, where chores are shared by his wife Brooke and other family members the couple returned to Pekin to be near, carries all the needs for a beginning hydroponist.

Schmidgall described four different hydroponic systems. "But I think the best one is DWC - deep water culture. I think it's the easiest," he said.

Breaking it down for dummies, "You basically need a plastic container, an air pump and an air stone," a porous rock that attaches at the end of a tube and breaks up air pumped into water in the container into small bubbles, he said. That provides oxygen for the roots of plants that dangle in the water from holding containers placed above the water.

"Without that (air), your plant will basically drown because it's not getting any oxygen, Schmidgall said.

"Water is your soil, your medium" for transferring what a plant needs to its roots, he said. "All you need to supply is oxygen to the water - and minerals. That goes without saying."

But that also is where the art and science of hydroponics comes in.

Schmidgall talked of "macro nutrients - phosphorous, potassium, nitrogen. You must add them. Where the art comes in is knowing how much of each to add for (the correct) balance and when.

"And there are micronutrients, about 13 of them. Iron, calcium, carbon, sulphur, zinc. It gets crazy quick" for the uneducated, he said.

Perhaps the concept won't appeal to everyone, but Schmidgall also displays an "aquaponics" approach to plant feeding. Water is pumped from a large tank, or perhaps backyard pond, occupied by fish.

"The fish poop feeds the plants," he said.

For O'Donnell, the challenge is in the physical and electrical engineering of the hydroponics system he created. He hopes to be able to market his pump-and-gravity system as a side business someday, he said.

His long-term goal, he said is to perfect the "single board computer I'm designing at work that can be used to help monitor water temperatures, nutrients, when to turn the lights on and off. If I can get it to turn the water on and off and add the nutrients, all you'd need to do is plant and harvest," he said.

For now, O'Donnell is satisfied with the "salad a day" that he can harvest from his romaine lettuce, cherry tomatoes and "microgreens," including broccoli leaves, that he harvests during those plants' young stages. He also enjoys a special father's benefit from his kitchen garden.

Daughter Riley "is into veggies more than anyone I've ever seen," he said. She gets more than that for dinner, of course - one of his cupboards is stocked with Velveeta macaroni-and-cheese.

"Shells-and-cheese" and a salad, he said "can make for an easy dinner."

For those who think he's dived a little too deep into hydroponics, O'Donnell has a counter-argument ready.

"You would be surprised how much (greens products) in stores are grown with hydroponics," he said. Hydroponics farms are a thriving industry in southwestern states, said O'Donnell.

Back at Gro Up, Schmidgall said the two cherry tomato plants that "I've probably gotten 300 tomatoes from in the past two months" are nearly out of growing strength and will soon need replacement.

He's still waiting, however, for the first fruit to sprout from another, more exotic plant, though he won't eat it as readily as he does his store's sweet hydroponic tomatoes.

"That's called a Butch T Trinidad Scorpion, the hottest pepper plant in the world," he said.

Schmidgall showed off a second one that's also growing from seed, but in dirt.

It stands about half as tall as its hydroponics brother.