What makes hydroponic gardening different from traditional in-ground gardening is a soilless growing medium. No dirt! All plants require support, to be held up. This basic requirement is dealt with by soilless growing mediums which are inert, meaning they neither add nor take away anything from the growing environment.  There are a perplexing jumble of growing mediums available for hydroponic gardening. Generally speaking, these mediums are porous, light and coarse, allowing oxygen and nutrients to be easy accessible  to the plants roots.

Some of the most common used in hydroponic gardening are: (more…)

There are hundreds of different kinds of growing medium as anything that a plant can grow in is considered a growing medium. They range from organic (natural) mediums to man-made. What growing medium is the best?  The answer depends on the job you need it to do. The best growing medium for your purpose depends on many variables which include the type of system you are using, what kind of crop you are growing and local environment as some of the determining factors choosing a growing medium for your hydroponic systems.  Mostly it comes down to availability, price or personal preferences. The most popular types of growing are Rockwool cubes, Coconut fiber, Perlite, Vermiculite and Soilless mixes.

Rockwool cubes are lightweight pre-formed cubes designed for propagation. An extremely popular medium when growing from seed or from cuttings, cubes have a neutral pH and retains water very well. They are meant to be a starter medium and commonly come in three sizes starting at 2″ x 2″. They can be easily moved into just about any type of hydroponic system or growing medium – including soil.

Coconut fiber is moving into position as one of the primary growing mediums in the world. As the first totally “organic” growing medium which offers top performance in hydroponic systems, it is essentially a waste product (powdered husks of the coconut) of the coconut industry. The advantages – maintains a larger oxygen capacity than rockwool, superior water holding ability than rockwool (a real advantage for hydroponic systems that have intermittent watering cycles), coconut fiber contains high levels of root stimulating hormones and can offer some protection against root diseases such as fungus infestation. A mixture of 50% coconut fiber and 50% expanded clay pellets is the perfect growing medium according to Dutch growers. You must be careful when you purchase coconut fiber. There are lower grades of coconut fiber high in sea-salt and is very fine grained. Expect disappointing results should this coconut fiber be used in your hydroponic systems. (more…)

Let’s examine some of the basic Hydroponic Systems available to the home user.

EBB AND FLOW

Also called the Flood & Drain, this system works by flooding the reservoir routinely with nutrient solution and empties back to yet another tank to be recycled. Crops on this method are put into trays which hang over a nutrient chamber. The choice of growing medium will determine how often and how long you flood the container for. To regulate your ebb-and-flow cycle a water pump is utilized. This system is considered the most typical of all hydroponic systems.

DRIP

Having the identical set up as an Ebb & Flow system with a reservoir and trays that hang over the nutrient chamber, this hydroponic system works by a constant drip of solution pumped in the growth tray. Flow rate can be difficult to control on a drip system as well as the emitters are prone to clogging. These problems can be magnified when you try to make your own drip system.

WATER CULTURE

This setup will work well for beginners as it is widely considered the easiest arrangement for small scale hydroponic systems. Crops drift on top of nutrient tanks with dangling plant roots within the solution. An air pump can be employed to oxygenate your nutrient solution. Water Culture is one of the oldest examples of hydroponic systems; however it can be a bit tough to control. You must make an effort to keep light from getting to the nutrient solution as it promotes the growth of algae. Algae will eat the nutrients you are trying to feed to your plants, and when pieces of algae die they attract pests leading to many other problems.

WICK

This technique needs no pump and little upkeep. Wicks, usually nylon rope, soak up the nutrients solution to the plant roots inside the growth tray. The solution will not cycle out of the trays so you may have issues with dissolved solids in the nutrient solutions crystallizing on the wick which results in a decline of water absorption. Should there be any pH issues they are slower to remedy because the wick itself harbors additional nutrients which would throw the actual nutrient pH off.

These simple, yet versatile, hydroponic systems allow the home user to pick and choose which method will work the best in spaces available.  After all you are not limited to just one way of growing. Each will have their positive and negative attributes and you may be surprised at what works best for you.  All these hydroponic systems allow for adjustments to make them capable of growing organic crops.

Well imagine one of these scenarios- you have a plant you really enjoy that you’d love to have more of like a rose, you have grown some really brilliant variety of tomato in your hydroponic garden and you want more of it, you have a herb you cook with frequently and need more of it or you simply just want to grow plants you as gifts for friends and family.  What do you do? You clone it in a hydroponic system.  In biological terms- participate in the process of developing similar producing populations of genetically identical individuals. Quite the mouthful?  Simply put – cloning is the process where you propagate or make copies of a whole plant from a piece of an existing plant.  This works really well in a hydroponic system.  You do this every time you take a cutting and place it in water – and as a fact plants propagate this way in nature rather easily- take strawberries and their runners as an example. (more…)

pH Testing invokes this image of a mad horticulturalist muttering an arcane ritual over a set of vials when nothing could be further from the truth.  pH testing is simple and easy to understand.

First off – what is pH?  It stands for the rather cumbersome potentiometric hydrogen ion concentration. Simply put, it is a measure of the acidity or alkalinity of a solution.  The pH scale is from 0-14 and pure water has a neutral pH of 7.  Anything that would be considered acidic is rated lower than 7 and anything considered alkaline is rated higher than 7. Pretty simple. (more…)

Fresh air is at the centre of successful indoor gardening. Outside, air is abundant and almost always fresh. C02 levels in the air over a field of rapidly growing vegetation will vary on how still the air is. Being outdoors, and subject to the warming and cooling of the day, the wind blows in fresh air. Rain will cleanse the air of dust and pollutants. The outdoor environment is always moving. Plants grown indoors do not have the natural balance that is present out of doors and must be achieved indoors by way of fresh air ventilation or CO2 enrichment.

So you have decided to add CO2 to your hydroponic systems. Great! Welcome to the wonderful world of bigger yields.  Now having said that, there is a caveat – like all good things – there can be some events to watch out for.  For our purposes we will be dealing with the increases of humidity in a CO2 enriched environment. (more…)

Everyone’s getting in on the act!  I love it.  The more we eat locally grown food containing all the nutrients we need to keep healthy, the less money will have to go to reacting to ill health.

By Siobhan Connally
The Record

CASTLETON — Mark Dausch loves salad. The Castleton resident and hobbyist gardener, however, didn’t love the anemic greens, often trucked in from California and Mexico, he was finding at his local grocery store.

“I have 36 acres and have gardened for years,” said Dausch, who decided to come up with a home-grown solution to his salad dilemma. Instead of tilling the soil, however, he started plowing through research.

Eighteen months later, he’s gearing up to sell his own locally produced greens to Hannaford in Kinderhook as “Better Nature Produce.”

“My perspective in this was also about the environment and how to save energy,” said Dausch, who has his undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemical engineering as well as a PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Dausch also works full time at GE and teaches a course in engineering at the state University at Albany.

“I just did some research on hydroponics and started a small system in my living room of about 20 plant sites last summer.”

Read more……..

Have you ever thought of growing mushrooms and selling them?  There’s good money in it if you have time to be a part-time grower.  You can even buy a mushroom growing kit.  We all know that mushrooms are a tasty ingredient for any meal. They’re a popular item at restaurants, farmers’ markets and super markets.

The Oyster mushroom, a type of exotic mushroom, is enjoying a high level of demand at the moment. Last year in the United States, more than a million and a half pounds of exotic mushrooms were grown. This high level of demand isn’t expected to drop off anytime in the near future.

Additionally, oyster mushrooms are fairly easy to grow. They take about six weeks from start to harvest. This is one of the reasons they’re the perfect mushroom for the part-time grower. It’s not necessary to do this full-time to be a successfully grow oyster mushrooms. If you can spare a few hours a week, then you have enough time to be a mushroom grower and sell for extra income.

The technique of growing in hydroponics is taking off in many places.  I encourage you to read this article and start thinking about a space in your home where you can set up an efficient, small in home garden and enjoy the nutritious benefits of home grown food.

Written by Danny O. Calleja / Correspondent

Monday, 28 December 2009 18:34

PILI, Camarines Sur—Even urban areas in the country can now produce in commercial scale high-quality vegetables and other agricultural crops through a revolutionary approach in farming called hydroponics. This newly introduced urban-farming system is a potential approach to revitalize agriculture by fundamentally altering the manner of how crop is produced. This included eliminating the dependence of plants on soil by completely changing their growing medium. The concept of hydroponics proves that soil is no longer crucial for the plant to thrive when the required mineral nutrients are artificially introduced into the plant’s water supply and plant roots absorb them, said Jose Dayao, the regional executive director for Bicol of the Department of Agriculture (DA) based here. Dayao explained that hydroponics makes use of crafty facilities, and resource-efficient and cost-effective cultures and systems to allow the effective use of land, nutrient, water and labor in a comfortable and sanitary working condition. Read more………

It is a common myth that plants can’t utilize more than 12 hours of light per day and require a dark period. It isn’t true. Try to imagine a plant’s growth cycle is similar to an animal, the more you feed it, the fatter and bigger it gets. If you never decided to switch to 12 hours of darkness your plants would continue to grow until they reached an unmanageable size!

It is recommended that you start the flowering stage, which is when you start the 12 hours of darkness, once your plants reach 10-18inches in height. During all stages of growth your light hood should be around 5 inches from the growing tips of your plants. Since the reflector stays cool to the touch there is no risk of your plants burning. Move the reflector up as your plants continue to grow taller.