While it would be a lovely to GETAWAY in your VERY OWN BACKYARD RETREAT, not everyone has the luxury of an available outdoor space for planting. Not everyone has continuous sunshine either! Luckily, a lack of a yard doesn't mean you can't enjoy a beautiful garden.
Hydroponics certainly isn't a new concept, but the idea of a soil-free way to garden indoors is an idea worth revisiting. Basically, hydroponics is the method of growing plants using mineral nutrient solutions rather than soil.
Hydroponics is a subset of hydro culture that deals with growing plants using only mineral nutrient solutions in water. The terrestrial plants may be planted in water only or with the help of inert medium such as mineral rocks, coconut husks, pebbles and the likes.
The advantages of hydroponic gardening are impressive. According to some experts, soil-free gardening means no soil-born diseases, soil loving pests or weeding. Hydroponic gardening also tends to give quicker harvests and higher plant yields. The water stays in the system and can be reused, thus, a lower water requirement. The nutrition levels can be controlled through certain methods, meaning, lower nutrition requirements. Pests can be easily rid of because the container is moveable. There will be easy harvest, no need to sweat and stay under the sun all day. Just hassle free farming!
The only hard part in this method is the maintenance of the equipments and the control of the water’s PH system. Plants need a certain amount of PH in the water where it is grown and too much PH will wilt your crop. One should be a bit of a scientist as well as a green-thumb when engaging in this method, I must say.
While some might be turned away by hydroponic gardening because of the number of equipments and knows-how involved, the ability to grow your own plant garden in a small space without the aid of soil might be the incentive to try this cool gardening method.
Tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, and lettuce are the most common to be produced with this system. And it has been proven that hydroponics products are of high yield than ordinary agricultural crops.
A very common example of hydroponics is planting a fortune plant in a glass vase full of pebbles or marbles. All you’ll need is just a little bit of resourcefulness and creativity. Very simple and easy to do.
Hydroponics has not been new to this age however. Its existence started in the book written by Francis Bacon, entitled Sylva Sylvarum. This book was about growing terrestrial plants without soil. After the book was published, attempts of water culture research became popular.
A few years after, in 1929, William Frederick Gericke of University of California in Berkeley began promoting hydro solution culture is used for crop production. He termed the practice aquaculture which was already an existing term for culture of aquatic organisms. He coined another name for it after analyzing the ancient Greek term for agriculture which is geoponics, the science of cultivating earth. And in 1937, he finally named this system hydroponics.
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