Ellicott City Businessman Wants a Plant Revolution

Noah Berk said he’s never been able to keep houseplants alive. 

Kind of embarrassing, considering he worked for his father’s landscaping business. 

Still, the Ellicott City resident said, tending houseplants became somewhat of a hobby for him, despite his murderous streak. And now he hopes to turn it into a career and start what he calls a “revolution” with his Columbia-based business, GreenSpacers.

Berk, 28, is marketing a hydroculture-based growing system to a target audience of people like him. “If you say, ‘I kill everything,’ you’re my target market.”

Hydroculture is a method of growing plants without soil, just water and, in the case of GreenSpacers, porous pellets made of fired sawdust and clay.

“Most people over water plants,” Berk said, either watering them too often, or forgetting, and then over-watering them in an attempt to make up for it. He said his system, which includes a plant; an interior pot and a decorative container; a water level indicator; pellets and fertilizer, means less watering and fewer dead plants.

Before getting into the plant business, Berk, a 2002 graduate, worked in Internet marketing and, he said, he was successful enough that he was able to launch GreenSpacers using mostly his own capital.

Currently, he’s working with more than a dozen, mostly-local property management companies, selling plants that are used in offices and apartment buildings. He’s also participating in research with the University of Maryland to determine whether the soil-free plants are safer for hospitals since no dirt means no bacteria.

In addition to sterility and ease of maintenance, Berk said he encourages people to own plants for inside air quality and aesthetics. He plans on offering an array of decorative pots along with a variety of plants.

“We have a misconception of plants in this country,” he said, and we tend to see them as work fitting into a specific lifestyle as opposed to being accents to any style.

Berk ran to a computer and pulled up examples of hydroculture nursuries around the world. They showed vast, sundrenched spaces with plants of every variety growing seemingly out of the concrete floors. Underneath the concrete, Berk explained, his eyes widening, is a water reserve that feeds the plants. “It’s so cool.”

But to be that cool – and that successful -- Berk has to be able to provide more plants to more customers on smaller scales; house plants for homes, not apartment complexes. And to do that, he has to be able to grow more plants and grow them faster. 

So he has turned to Kickstarter to raise the funds he needs to expand his operation.

“Kickstarter is so awesome,” he said, “because we get cash up front, then we can go and fill an order right away” instead of waiting the weeks it takes to prepare a plant to switch from growing in the ground to growing in pellets.

He does that preparation on a small scale now in a Columbia warehouse that looks and feels more like a jungle. He has to cut the roots, clean as much of the dirt from the plants as he can, and then re-plant them in one of his potting systems.

The plants sit in the warehouse for a few weeks, soaking up water through the leaves while the roots re-grow and get used to growing without soil. Because of its tropical climate, the process would move along faster if production was done in Florida, which is where Berk hopes to expand if business takes off.

It’s not a new way of growing plants, to be sure. Berk pulled out a hard cover book with a title written in swirly 70s script: Soilfree Growing and Decorating Ideas. Berk said, however, that it didn’t catch on. 

Until, he hopes, now.

“I used the word ‘revolution,’” he said. “And I meant it.”

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