Influence of Textile and Environmental Parameters on Plant Growth on Vertically Mounted Knitted Fabrics

Vertical farming is of major interest in research and development to enable the production of food in the quantity sufficient for the growing world population under the weather conditions, which are increasingly becoming more and more extreme. Especially in cities, vertical farming allows for growing vegetables and other plants locally. Apart from industrial applications of vertical farming, new ideas are being developed to make cities “greener”, often related to the maker culture. In the study, we concentrated on the second approach by investigating the possibilities to grow plants on textile fabrics placed vertically, e.g. along a balcony railing, but also as structural elements in agricultural areas. Our investigations revealed, using the example of cress, that steadily irrigated knitted fabrics enable plant growth on them, indicating no significant differences between differently knitted stitch dimensions and different illumination intensities. Finally, we discuss the possibilities to measure the time-resolved plant growth reliably and suggest additional possibilities to evaluate the growth success.