Hydroponics

 Hydroponic System

Hydroponics … it has been around since the 1860’s, but it has only been recently become the buzz word heard around some main stream “foodie” circles. Typically, having a hydroponic system a few ago was considered something that only the health nuts and hippies did in their backyard or garages.

The food grown using a hydroponic system in a hydroponic garden tastes far superior to what you can normally find in the super market. Luscious produce like broccoli, cabbage, celery, chard, cucumbers, eggplant, flowers, grapes, lettuce, melons, onions, peppers, pole beans, radishes, strawberries, and tomatoes have all been produced hydroponically. They taste great because they are not sprayed and can be harvested when they become ripe.

Hydroponic plants are not as affected by insects either, therefore they do not need to be sprayed with insecticides that may or may not cause cancer in humans … what a plus!

Hydroponics is such an efficient way to grow our food it amazes me that it has taken this long for most people to get on the band wagon. Yields per plant are significantly higher and losses are much lower in hydroponics than in soil. Crops can be grown on poor land and weeds in the crop are virtually eliminated. A Hydroponic Garden can be vertically tiered to maximize the use of space. The sky's the limit on how high you want to stack your gardens, but with this technology, a big backyard can provide fresh fruits and veggies to over 100 people throughout the year.

Hydropnics gardening allows complete control over the growing atmosphere and the hydroponics nutrients.

People often mistake hydroponic gardening with “indoor growing.” While it is true that most hydroponics gardens are indoors under artificial lights, they also grow hydroponic gardens outdoors, like here in Florida, and also in greenhouses.

Some people insist that hydroponics gardening can only be gardening that uses soilless root media, such as a sterile growing strata or water.

Others say that the use of soil or other organic media in the root zone, in situations where the media is used primarily as root substrate rather than as primary nutrition sources, can also be defined as hydroponic growing.

The main issue in determining whether you have a hydroponic garden or not is whether the grower supplies the bulk of the nutrients through water infused with additive nutrients, or whether the crops are obtaining most of their nutrients from those found naturally in a soil media or other organic media.

The former method is hydroponics; the latter is traditional growing.

Hydroponic gardening has several advantages over the traditional dirt farming. It is easier to produce larger harvests with superior bounty and gives it to you consistently year round. Not so by using soil or in green houses using only natural light.

By using sterile root zone media in your hydroponic garden you have a hygienic setting and the crops aren’t exposed to pathogens and diseases that live in soil. Hydroponic gardening eliminates weeds and other soil borne problems.

Hydroponics gardening can be done more intensively than traditional gardening, with more crop cycles, using controlled environments that maximize growth potential. Indoors hydroponics, under artificial light or in greenhouses with manipulation of sunlight, artificial light augmentation, light color, light timing and light intensity, growers can harvest year round in very small spaces.

Hydroponic growers can totally control the content and timing of the hydroponic nutrient delivery, which lets them manipulate crops to achieve not only more product but, higher quality.

There are all sorts of ways to grow fruits, flowers and vegetables hydroponically:

1. The Ebb and Flow system features plant pots filled with sterile grow medium flooded with nutrient rich water for a few minutes every hour. Many times, the pots sit in an upper reservoir that drains into a lower reservoir. The most widely used grow medium for Ebb and Flow gardens are rockwool, perlite, vermiculite, and lava rock.

2. Drip systems, by using an irrigation approach, relies on drip emitters hanging just above the root zone. These emitters come in varying shapes, sizes and spray patterns, so growers can use the emitters to regulate the amount of moisture reaching root media, and how the moisture is distributed spatially. Drip systems can be fine tuned in conjunction with temperature and humidity to create a near continuous feed cycle that pours lots of nutrients and water into plants to produce growth.

3. The Nutrient Film Technique (NFT) tends to be quite technical. In this method, plants are placed in narrow grow channels that sometimes resemble a long pipe cut in half horizontally. A “film” of nutrients in the water at the bottom of the channel where roots are dangling. Oxygen is taken in through the top of the roots and then through the irrigation solution as it passes by the lower part of the roots. While NFT is very productive, it is the most temperamental and high maintenance of all the hydroponic growing methods.

4. The easiest type of hydroponics garden to set up is a passive system in which plants sit in their pots or in a piece of equipment that allows their roots to hang in a weak reservoir of nutrients.

All in all, using a hydroponic system to grow veggies like tomatoes, "burpless" cucumbers, and bibb lettuce have become routine offerings in the produce sections of many supermarkets. The more educated we become about growing without soil and using the hydroponic techniques available, the better off nutritionally we will all become.