No Sprays. No Harmful Chemicals. Just Walls and Clean Hands.

Here's a number that might ruin your next salad: 86% of leafy greens at the grocery store contain residues from two or more pesticides. One sample of kale tested positive for 21 different chemicals. 

And the really unsettling part? DDT, banned in 1972, is still showing up on lettuce today.

We decided to skip all of that.

At Grow Space, we don't spray synthetic pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides on our plants. Ever. Not because of a certification. Not because of a regulation. Because we built a system that doesn't need them.

How We Keep Pests Out

It starts with walls. Our indoor facility is enclosed — sealed doors, controlled entry, no open fields exposed to insects, birds, or wildlife. Most pests simply can't get in.

No soil helps too. Many agricultural pests and pathogens live in dirt. By growing hydroponically, we eliminate that entire problem.

And we keep it clean. Citric acid to sanitize our systems. Dawn dish soap (the one with the duck) to scrub our trays, pots, and channels. Hands washed before anyone touches a plant.

What Happens When Something Does Get In

We're not going to pretend we've never had a pest. We have. Aphids got into our facility once, and here's exactly what we did:

First, we tried ladybugs. Classic biological control. Didn't work well enough.

Then we brought in tiny parasitic wasps — 2-3mm long, can't sting humans, but devastating to aphids. They lay eggs inside the pests and eliminate them from the inside out. It worked. No chemicals. No sprays. Just nature handling nature.

If mildew pops up from a humidity swing, we use potassium bicarbonate mixed with soap. That's the same compound used in baking it's in cakes and cookies. It just changes the pH on the leaf surface and the mildew dies. Nothing toxic. Nothing synthetic.

Why This Matters

History keeps teaching us the same lesson: chemicals get approved, we use them for decades, then we find out they weren't as safe as we thought. DDT. Chlorpyrifos. The list keeps growing.

We'd rather not wait for the science to catch up. Clean food shouldn't be a luxury that comes decades after the damage is done.

Want the full breakdown? Read our complete guide: Why We Don't Spray: How Indoor Farming Eliminates the Need for Pesticides