NEWARK — Seeds are sprinkled from a pizza shaker, the kind you’d normally see filled with red pepper flakes or parmesan cheese.
Tiny granules of arugula are in one. Komatsuna and fun jen, an Asian variety that produces a crunchy like cabbage in each leafy bite, pour out of another. Every 18 days or so, they get doused over a soft, white cloth fabric neatly attached to eight metal trays on two levels of a mechanical contraption at St. Philip’s Academy in Newark.
Each is 30 inches wide and 60 inches long, all laying side by side in this noisy invention with LED lighting and water pumping underneath through plastic tubes to feed the root system. Students at the private school call it the beast, but the technology it uses brings them baby Japanese lettuce with Chervil, a licorice tasting herb, in half the time it takes to grow conventionally on a farm.
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