More about Dalston Farm Shop in London

Eco vision: founders Andy Merritt and Paul Smyth.

Down on Dalston’s farm

By Kieran Long
London Evening Standard
11 May 2011

Excerpt:

The main ground-floor room, where beds of salad plants bud, is most notable for two huge fish tanks at the front of the room, containing a multitude of tilapia fish. The fish are part of the produce of Farm: Shop but also play their part in an aquaponic system that naturally enriches the water with nutrients to feed all the plants in the room. No new water is fed into the system. The protein- and nitrate-rich water coming out of the tilapia tanks is filtered and then used to feed a series of plant beds, circulated around further tanks and finally pumped, now clean, back into the fish tanks. It’s quite astonishing, a closed system, on full view to the many curious members of the public who pop in to have a look. It’s a manipulated but natural ecology in a front room in Hackney.

From there it just gets weirder. In the back garden is a polytunnel, a greenhouse with an ETFE-clad roof (the material used at the Eden Project) where rocket, pea shoots, mangetout, camomile, radishes and more sprout liberally. Large tadpoles wriggle in a small pond in the corner (“When they grow into frogs they’ll eat the slugs in the polytunnel,” says Merritt, matter-of-factly. “We just hope they don’t all spawn again next year, because there’ll be about 200 of them”).

Upstairs, in a small former bedroom lined with what looks like high-tech BacoFoil and hung with hot lights, an extremely knowledgeable man called Kid (who has a stud through the bridge of his nose) explains the workings of a flood-and-drain Intelligent Watering System. This feeds a population of loofah plants in pots on the floor, which the Farm: Shop founders reckon could be a good earner.

Read the complete article here.