Sunday, December 5, 2010

How to start your own Hydroponic hobby

I undertook this hydroponic project for a few reasons.  First and foremost I like growing things but I am exceedingly lazy and hate getting dirty.  Two, Florida has a ridiculous amount of diseases, bugs, and critters whose sole purpose in life is to destroy your crops. Three, I figured it would be fun to do and allowed me to placate my need to be creative and to build things.  The whole thing was from the get go a learning experience.  I knew I was going to make mistakes, and I honestly didn't expect anything to survive.  I was half right!

I started with a Jiffy Greenhouse I have lost nearly all of my lettuce through a variety of problems and diseases.  It turns out that our well water is very high in iron and carbonates which forces out other nutrients from the hydroponic solution.  This results in slow growing, sickly plants that are prone to disease.
Jiffy Greenhouse

On the other hand, my broccoli has done quite well.  It is very hardy and while it didn't do much at first, it did keep living and now that I have everything dialed in it is blowing up!

I did read everything I could about hydroponics, but I learn best by doing, so that is what I have done.  For anyone that is interested, hydroponics is really easy and cheap to set up, I just went big.  So here is the how to based on what I have learned thus far:


6 Easy Steps to starting your hydroponic hobby

  1. Start Simple! Do not start with a complicated and expensive NFT or Aeroponics system.  The more complicated it is, the more things that can go wrong. Learn the basics with a cheap and easy to build DIY setup, there are tons of plans and ideas online that use plastic totes and can be done for less than $50. Plans for a simple starter system. Use a tote instead of an aquarium.
  2. Buy Local, buy only what you need. Buy the correct nutrients for what you are actually doing, not what you hope to do in the future. If you have a hydroponics shop in town buy from them and make friends with them.  Don't be cheap and buy online (I always went local), these people are a huge source of info when everything goes to hell.
  3. Use Distilled Water. Do not use tap water or well water.  For your first system get distilled water - Walmart for $0.88 a gallon.  Well worth having a pure and sterile water source and not having to deal with all the issues I have had to.
  4. Get the correct measurement tools. You don't need to go out and buy the greatest Conductivity and pH meters in the world, but you do need a way of checking your nutrient solution quality.  A pet shop with aquarium supplies will sell pH test kits for around $5-$10 that test down to 6.0 pH.  If you change your water weekly or every two weeks, you can get buy without a conductivity meter for awhile, but you will eventually want to get one.  Makes life much easier.  No matter what you do, check the water if not daily, at least twice a week for pH. 
  5. Don't get crazy with your plants. Go to your local garden center and pick up something that you would be interested in growing, but is very simple. Lettuces and herbs are easy, amazingly hardy, and fast growing.  They don't take up a lot of space so you can grow them fairly dense. 
  6. Have fun!

Further Reading





Posted by Krispin Miller at 4:19 PM

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