Do it Yourself with a Homemade Hydroponics System

What is Hydroponic Gardening

Simply put, hydroponics is the act of growing plants without using soil. The nutrients, or food, for the plants are provided to the plants via a watering system that delivers them directly to the plants roots. This allows the plants to grow in a perfectly controlled environment where you can custom tailor the nutrients to the needs of your plants or vegetables.

Advantages of Hydroponic Gardening

There are several unique advantages to growing with hydroponics. Probably the most impressive one is the significantly increased growth rate and yield. Growth will be increased across the board when using hydroponics, and averages a 30%-50% increase in rate. Yield will be increased too, due to the quicker growth rate.

Another reason for gardening with hydroponics is the control that you'll have over the growing environment. Diseases, bacteria, fungus, and bugs can all be reduced and even eliminated since you've got total control over what the plant receives and is exposed to.

Hydroponic Gardening is Environmentally Friendly

By growing with hydroponics, you'll be using much less water, and no soil, thus helping to conserve both of these versus traditional soil based gardening. And, since you'll carefully be controlling the environment of your plants, you'll have much less problem with disease and bugs. This means that your usage of environmentally unfriendly pesticides will be greatly decreased or even eliminated. And since you're in control of the nutrient solution that your plants and vegetables are exposed to, you can use organic fertilizers. This will also help to ease the environmental burden even further.

Types of Hydroponic Systems

Hydroponic systems come in two basic flavors, active and passive. These two types of systems are characterized by the way that the nutrient solution is delivered to the plants or vegetables root system. An active system uses some type of pump to provide liquid to the roots, while a passive system uses capillary action to wick the nutrients and liquid to the roots. In a passive system, one of the drawbacks is that it often doesn't deliver enough oxygen to the roots and are too wet. This can cause rotting and other problems that aren't a problem when using an active system.

Active versus Passive

An active system can be further categorized as either a recovery, or a non-recovery system. This means, as the name implies, that you either recover the nutrient mix and reuse it, or use it only once. It's plain to see the benefits of using an active recovery system.

Buying or Building your own Hydroponic System

While there are many excellent commercially available hydroponics systems on the market, you'd be wise to consider building your own. By doing so, you'll gain a greater understanding of how your systems works, and in the process will learn a great deal more about it. You'll also be able to put together a system that will work as well, if not better than anything you could buy. By building a do it yourself system, you'll also be able to easily and cheaply scale up your system if you want to increase your garden size.

But the best part of building your own system? It's fun! It's also extremely satisfying to know that you built something that allows you to grow high quality fruits, vegetables, and plants year round. So what are you waiting for, get the guide to building a homemade hydroponic system today!