Hydroponics – just so many opportunities for self-fulfilment

Hydroponics holds many people in a suspended sense of some awe and much fascination. After all, how can you grow plants without soil? Must be another marketing trick, surely? Well, hydroponics has been around since before the middle of the last century. It didn’t start with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon as many would believe but with experiments carried out by the US Dept. of Agriculture, which were later given a boost during the war

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Myths About Hydroponics

Ask yourself how much you know about hydroponics and from where did you obtain that information? Many people obtain their knowledge from the internet and the problem with that is that the information is contributed by a plethora of sources, much of it from amateurs. The net result is a mine of confusing information, resulting often in delegates starting on our course with heads-full of bird’s nests (!) Hydroponics is the growing of plants in

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Have You Ever Considered Hydroponics as an Additional Source of Income?

Hydroponics, the scientific growing of fruits and vegetables without soil in a water soluble nutrient fertiliser solution cuts out much of the intensive labour and ‘dirty work’ involved when planting in open ground. Also, irrigation is made very easy as it is already part of the nutrient feeding system in hydroponics and not a separate activity.

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Hydroponics – Food for the Future

Hydroponics has been around since the 1930’s when US Dept. of Agriculture scientists experimented, using water soluble fertilisers to grow plants. Then during the Second World War the US Army gave it a huge boost when they successfully used hydroponics to feed their troops in the South Pacific using the clear crystal water from the volcanic slopes together with beach sand. It did not start with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a misconception, as then they had no water soluble chemicals with which it could be done.

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Pitfalls in Hydroponics

In an earlier issue of The Farmer’s Weekly Julia Kupka exposed some of the shortcomings of the hanging bag system and the dangers of unscrupulous franchisors. These are two very real dangers for potential hydroponics farmers, but there are many others too that the inexperienced hydroponics farmer may not be aware of.

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Five Things to Know About Hydroponics

Hydro from the Greek meaning ‘water’ and ‘ponos’ from the Greek meaning ‘work’ gives us the meaning to work in water. Hydroponics is the growing of plants without soil. The plant nutrition, instead of being supplied by the soil is supplied by water soluble nutrients dissolved in the water. This gives this method of growing many advantages over growing in soil.

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How Does Hydroponics Work

Contrary to what many suppose, hydroponics didn’t begin with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon – there were no compound chemicals available then and, at best, the Hanging Gardens were a series of cleverly constructed water channels down which the water flowed thus watering all the plants in soil-based systems from top to bottom. Rather, it began in the USA during the 1930s as an outgrowth of the culture techniques used by plant physiologists in plant nutrition experiments in that country.

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