Words by Smiley Team
Growing greens underwater might be the future, according to this innovative company based off the coast of Italy.
Nemo’s Garden is the first underwater garden for terrestrial plants – and the implications of that are huge.
Sergio Gamberini, the founder of the diving equipment company Ocean Reef Group, was on holiday with friends when he was inspired to combine his two passions: diving and gardening.
With the help of his team at the Ocean Reef Group, he began experimenting with biospheres, sinking them 20 feet underwater and then filling them with air. Initially, these were nothing more than experiments – but the goal soon became clear: to create an alternative agricultural system for environments that made growing plants difficult.
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The aim of Nemo’s Garden is to create an agricultural system that takes advantage of the resources that exist around us already as part of the natural world – primarily, bodies of water like the ocean.
Nemo’s Garden also happens to be not just eco-friendly, but self-sustainable, using solar power and getting fresh water from desalinating seawater. The biospheres act almost like greenhouses, though underwater, but require no additional energy sources.
On top of using the biospheres for farming, more and more applications for this new technology are becoming apparent.
