When considering growing plants indoors, there are numerous advantages to growing them in an hydroponic system grow box versus converting a room in your house or apartment. The cost of converting a room can be a huge undertaking. Often there will be quite a mess associated with convertion. Often, these spare rooms do not have adequate ventilation required, so you could have temperature issues right at the beginning.

Obviously, it’s not a good idea to have water directly on your carpet or wood floor. A grow box is self-contained and, unlike the grow room, the advantages don’t stop there. A grow room cannot be moved. A hydroponics grow box, however, can simply be moved to another room or space in your house or even to another growing location with ease. It comes completely assembled, ready to use and can be broken down and cleaned in minutes. You can’t rebuild a the room that fast.

I’m considering growing my own hydroponic strawberries. They are delicious and I hope to make money from them. Here are some of the reasons why hydroponic strawberries beat traditional soil grown strawberries.

No matter where you live you can grow strawberries in an hydroponic system.  So even if you live in a crowded city centre apartment block, you can still grow them. Because you are not using soil, no soil borne diseases will be passed on to the plants. There will be no need to eliminate any soil loving pests. You will have no need to use any expensive or controversial pesticides.

Once you have your strawberries growing, your running costs will be around 20% lower compared to soil based gardening. You can grow more hydroponic strawberries in a smaller area. This is due to the decreased size of the roots as they do not have to spread out to find nutrients. So you will be able to grow more in your growing trays.

Maintenance time is greatly reduced from as soon as your system is set up. There is no need to water your strawberries as they will already have access to all the nutrients. There is also no weeding involved as there is no soil. All you really need to do is pick the strawberries as and when they are ready.

The strawberry yield will be year round. You control their environment and you will have everything set to their optimum growing conditions so they will continue to produce 365 days a year.

You can grow hydroponic strawberries anywhere; greenhouse, cellar, kitchen, conservatory, rooftop, window ledge, living room or in the garden. Th strawberries grow on average 40% larger than their soil born brothers. This is because you have created their ideal growing environment and they have full access to all the nutrients they need. Could be money in the bank!

The magazine I’ve come across covers such a wide range of gardening subjects; everything from diagnosing what’s wrong with crops or an individual plant to tips on hydroponics.

When you subscribe, the copies are free.  On line, you can read issues going back three years.  I think paper magazines are still such a comfort to read and keep around the house.  Here’s a snippet from the latest edition:  “A Diagnostician’s Does and Don’ts”, written by J Benton Jones, Jr., an expert in hydroponics:

“A greenhouse tomato grower asked me to make a visit to determine why some tomato plants had leaves with dark “scars” on them. The greenhouse was glass-covered, the crop being grown in a home-made NFT hydroponic system. There were open water surfaces and the air in the greenhouse felt “humid.”  What was happening? With night cooling, condensation accumulated on the interior structure and water dripping from the joined structural pieces was falling on the leaves, causing the leaf “scaring.” The grower thought that there was a disease condition developing and was prepared to apply a fungicide to his tomato plants.”

Read more……..

For the purposes of indoor gardening, LED lights are used as a substitute for the natural light of the sun.  A grow light refers to an electric lamp, which is designed to promote plant growth by way of emitting an electromagnetic spectrum which is appropriate for photosynthesis. This light spectrum resembles the light of the sun and allows indoor growth of the plants. Since natural daylight carries a high color temperature and appears bluish in color, a color rendering index is used for getting the bluish appearance.

Different spectrums are used during different stages of growth. In the initial stages of vegetation, a blue spectrum of light is required, whereas during the later stages, red-orange spectrums are usually used. You can buy lights of different color spectrums specifically for different stages of vegetation, or you may buy a full spectrum bulb which can be used during all the stages of growth.

People are coming up with new ideas for growing everyday produce in hydroponics and in home gardens all the time.  It’s a “growing” industry that will feed the world one day.

Here’s an excerpt from a news report:

………”Mr. Fitzpatrick and his friend, an adept student of hydroponics science, began conducting some edible experiments which, after some time and nourishment, yielded a gold mine of an answer. “Anything that doesn’t grow inside the ground, we can probably grow it. We worked with some strawberries and these strawberries turned out to be the best-tasting, juiciest strawberries I’ve ever eaten in my life,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said.

“We tried basil. It was like a weed. It was phenomenal. You couldn’t keep up with it.”……..”

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for children is a great way to encourage growing vegetables and more.  The plants grow so fast, the children don’t have time to lose interest.  Maybe this school will discover this eventually.

Ivanhoe Junior and Infant School is growing its own vegetables with help from £5,000 from Local Food, a new programme supported by the Big Lottery Fund.

The £50 million scheme is funding food-related community projects across the country.

The Ivanhoe Gets Healthy project is a new education and growing scheme which will provide food-related activities for children, young people and adult volunteers to develop their horticulture skills.”

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I just read these interesting statistics in a news item.  Why on earth do we still do traditional farming to grow these foods?  Let’s do our best to spread the word and get everyone growing at least part of their own food at home in hydroponics.

“The yield in hydroponics is much greater than the traditional way of soil farming. Wheat yields 5,600 lb in soil farming, while it produces 8,000 lb in hydroponics. Potatoes yield 1,56,000 lb in hydroponics in contrast to just 18,000 lb in natural farming.

The pioneers of hydroponics were Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, New York, New Jersey Agriculture Experimental Station, Alabama Polytechnic Institute and Horticulture Experiment Station, Netherlands. Hydroponics did not reach India until 1946. First research on hydroponics was done in Government of Bengal’s Experimental Farm at Kalimpong in West Bengal.”

Read more….

When you start thinking about building your own hydroponic system for the first time, you need to be aware that not all types of hydroponic grow systems will work for growing indoors. Picking up relevant information becomes the first important step. One of the best, and easiest hydroponic systems is the ebb and flow technique which can be built at home within a modest budget.

Here are a few hydroponics supplies you will need to get an efficient system working for your indoor gardening.  These include plastic storage containers, water pump and air pump used in a fish tank, good quality flood and drain fittings, a timer and a good length of plastic tubing.  When picking out the plastic container as a nutrient storage unit, keep in mind that dark colors are the best prevent growth of unwanted algae.  You need to keep bright light from reaching the water soluble nutrient solution which will encourage algae growth.

Shipping fresh vegetables overseas during World War II the  was not very practical. The remote islands where troops were stationed were not places to start growing in the soil. Hydroponic technology was suggested as a viable alternative for producing fresh vegetables during this time.

It was in 1945 that the US Air Force built one of the first large hydroponic farms on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic.  There followed additional hydroponic farms on the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa in the Pacific.  They  used crushed volcanic rock as the growing medium and, on Wake Island west of Hawaii, used gravel. These hydroponic farms helped fill the need for a supply of fresh vegetables for troops stationed in these areas.

Growing plants has many shapes and forms. The traditional garden is the one with rows of seeds that have been planted in soil. People till the soil, plant the seeds, kill the weeds and protect it from insects and other animals. Then they  fertilize it and harvest the bounty of their work. If the soil loses its nutrients, plants cannot grow. Scientists and plant enthusiasts have come to the realization that it is not the soil that is necessary for growth but the nutrients and minerals stored there. Enter the world of hydroponics.

“Hydro” is Greek for water and “ponos” (ponics) is Greek for labor or work. Hydroponic gardeners grow plants without soil, letting the water or other solution do the work.