Emily Marsh read about the surge in
gardens and felt the urge to plant her own. But her only real option was a
hydroponic setup due to living arrangement constraints.
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“I was completely against it at first,” she said,
adding that it just didn’t seem like real gardening. Reluctantly, Marsh
purchased a unit from Lettuce Grow, a company that sells ready-to-grow
hydroponic kits. “Now it’s just my favorite thing,” she said.
Hydroponic gardening lets you bring your garden
indoors.
Like urban chicken coops and backyard beekeeping,
interest in
hydroponics has surged during the pandemic. DIYers are building
hydroponic gardens out of PVC pipes and 5-gallon buckets.
Compared with traditional in-ground gardening, “hydroponics
grows more food in less space with less water and less time,” said Dan
Lubkeman, president of the
Hydroponic Society of America.
That is, if you get everything right. Hydroponics is
about optimizing growing conditions: You must have the perfect amount of light
and nutrition available at all times. Nail it, and plants can grow up to five
times as fast as they would in soil outside, Aerogarden marketing director Paul
Rabaut said.
Here’s how to reap a lot of produce without so much
as getting your hands dirty.
A
hydroponic setup requires a few basic elements:
Whether you construct it yourself or buy a kit, a hydroponic garden needs
the following:
— Seeds or
seedlings. If you are doing this inside, look for varieties that thrive in
containers. This will ensure that none of your plants get so big they take over
your whole hydroponic setup.
— A reservoir for
the nutrient solution, which is made up of all the macronutrients (think
nitrogen and phosphorus) and micronutrients (like iron and calcium) plants need.
— An aerating pump
for oxygenating your nutrient solution, since plant roots need oxygen, too.
— A water pump to
move water out of the reservoir and onto your plants throughout the day.
— Light! More on
this below.
— A “medium.” Since
you are not using soil, you will need something to hold the plant’s roots in
place. Many mediums also help keep roots moist between waterings. Lubkeman
recommends a material called rockwool for beginners.
Decide
whether to build yourself or build out of a box
As with most hobbies, you can spend a little or a lot. Originally, Marsh
wanted to go the cheap route. Setting up a medium-size DIY system with a few
buckets and an aquarium pump can set you back less than $150 in the
US. But
Marsh worried about getting everything working correctly.
Ultimately, the
decision to buy a kit or build your own comes down to whether you enjoy
tinkering or would rather not spend a Saturday gluing PVC pipes and plastic
tubing together.
It’s all about
balance
Once your setup is
set up, you may see seeds sprouting within three days, though some plants take
longer. By two weeks, your seedlings should start to look like real plants.
Which is when Vicki Liston, a DIY hydroponic garden builder, realized that her
hydroponic experiment was not going quite right. Just a few weeks in, her
plants were dying.
It turned out her
tap water was too alkaline. A pH buffering solution fixed the problem. (Water
testing between 6.5 and 7.0 on the pH scale is considered ideal.) A setup like
AeroGarden will tell you when you need to add fertilizer or adjust the pH of
your water. If you built your own operation, you will need to remember to add
nutrients and check the pH of your water (using testing strips) weekly.
There is too much
of a good thing
If some plant nutrients
are good, more would be better, right? That is not at all the case, Liston
said. So far, she has managed not to overfeed her plants, but too much plant
food can result in dead or severely damaged
plants. How often and how much you
will need to feed depends on the type of nutrient solution you are using. Read
the directions on the bottle.
Let those lights
shine
You may be able to
grow lettuce, kale, or
herbs in a sunny window, but as days get shorter,
investing in a full-spectrum grow light is worth the expense. These lights
provide the same range of light as the sun, and you will see much faster
growth, Lubkeman said.
Goodbye, bugs (for
better or worse)
Liston’s favorite
thing about growing indoors is that its bug-free. While that means you will not
need to pluck slugs from your lettuce, you will need to take over for bees and
do your own pollinating.
For plants like
peppers,
tomatoes, and
cucumbers, Rabaut
said that some customers report getting decent pollination rates just by
shaking plants gently every day or two.
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