Home Hydroponics—Organic Fertilizers

Even smaller greenhouses can use organic methods

In any type of garden, it is essential to make sure your plants have all the nutrients they need to grow and resist disease. This is especially important in your hydroponics garden. Many nutrients are found in soil, which is not present in a hydroponics setting. You will need to add these missing nutrients to realize the best crop possible. With so many fertilizers on the market, however, it is often difficult to decide which one is the best for your home hydroponics garden. It is my hope that this will clear up some of your confusion.

Fertilizers, both organic and inorganic, are labeled with a sequence of three numbers. These numbers indicate the percentage of the three main compounds found in all fertilizers, Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium (or Potash). The letters N-P-K represents these. Basically, Nitrogen helps plant foliage to grow strong. Phosphorous helps roots and flowers grow and develop. Potassium (Potash) is important for overall plant health. . Fertilizers then contain a variety of other vitamins and minerals that vary greatly from one brand to another.

Inorganic fertilizers are made of chemicals that can harm your plants and the environment. More and more gardeners, especially those with home hydroponic gardens, are switching to organic fertilizers. Organic fertilizers are derived from what was once a living plant or animal. Microorganisms break these down to release their benefits to your plants. This process is a natural occurrence that enables your plants to benefit as nature intended.

Organic fertilizers are often ignored for many reasons. One of the biggest reasons is the smell that is often produced by the organic material. Fortunately, hydroponic supply producers are finding ways to combat this odor problem and more organic fertilizers sold in hydroponic supply shops have a less offensive odor. Yet another argument is that organic fertilizers work slower than inorganic ones. While this is often the case, the way these organic fertilizers work makes it easier to grow healthier, larger plants. In addition, the plants, especially those grown for human consumption, are less likely to create health problems.

Originally, organic fertilizers were also known to attract fungus gnats. This was annoying at best for the home hydroponics gardener. At its worst, these annoying insects could harm plants. This annoyance has been virtually eliminated in some cases with the proper organic fertilizer. Some organic fertilizers, such as the Iguana Juice listed below, have also taken care of the problem caused by sludge plugging the drip emitters in your home hydroponics garden, a problem that for many years plagued users of organic fertilizers. Today, virtually every argument against the use of an organic fertilizer has been eliminated.

Home hydroponics gardening is increasing in popularity, especially with the rising costs of gas and food. Making sure your plants are as healthy as possible will help save you money in the long run. For more information on creating the best possible home hydroponics garden, visit the Advanced Nutrients website and take a look around. They have one of the finest organic fertilizers available, Iguana Juice Grow and Bloom (http://www.advancednutrients.com/iguanajuice). Grow will astound you with its boosting of vegetative growth, while Bloom will not only multiply the number of your buds, flowers, and fruits, but will serve to increase their size, as well.

Home Hydroponics—How-to Videos

Home hydroponic gardeners know that each day brings new and improved methods. In addition, new hydroponic products arrive on the shelves of the local hydroponic store daily. It is often difficult to keep up with all the changes that are taking place. Newsletters and hydroponic forums are springing up all over the Internet, but there is also a newer media to turn to for advice and learning—hydroponic how-to videos.

Videos make excellent learning tools for the home hydroponic gardener. Often, we can read something and still not totally understand it. Many people are simply visual learners. In addition, it is one thing to read a description of something like a disease, but it is so much clearer when you can actually see what the result of that disease looks like. Today’s videos cover everything from setting up your first home hydroponic system, to harvesting your plants—and everything in between.

So, where can you find home hydroponic how-to videos? One of the best places to find accurate information in the way of home hydroponic how-to videos is to visit your local hydroponic store. Many carry videos that cover the basics. You may also find some videos at online hydroponic shops. In addition, many of the manufacturers of hydroponic supplies provide videos that will help gardeners understand what different products do to help increase growth.

Video-sharing sites often have how-to videos for the home hydroponic gardener to download. Try to ascertain the accuracy of these, however. Most will be accurate and offer excellent information, but you don’t want to try something that seems too extreme until you check it out with research. YouTube is one of the most popular video sharing sites, but a Google search will turn up many others.

An often over-looked source of home hydroponic videos is the multitude of auction sites that have sprung up. Ebay is a place we are all familiar with, but again a Google search for “auction sites” will turn up many others. With practice in searching these sites, you may be able to find some wonderful values on home hydroponic videos.

Another place that may yield an inexpensive find is Craig’s List. Here, you will be able to post a request for what you need. Finally, putting out a request for home hydroponic videos on places like Freecycle can possibly find you receiving the videos at absolutely no cost. Whatever the case, don’t disregard this wonderful media as part of your learning venue.

Home hydroponic gardening is increasing in popularity, especially with the rising costs of gas and food. Making sure your plants are as healthy as possible will help save you money in the long run.

Home Hydroponics—Vitamin Supplements

Plants, like all living things, need certain vitamins and minerals to grow and bloom. They have special needs depending on which part of the growing cycle they are going through. You want to provide more of one supplement during the initial growing stages and another during the blooming phase. This is the same as the human body needing more of one vitamin when in childhood and another in old age.

In traditional gardening, plants are apt to get most, if not all, of their nutrients from the soil. This is not the case in the home hydroponics garden. For this reason, you will find it necessary to provide these essential vitamins and minerals with the addition of a vitamin supplement. The trouble is, how do you know what your plants need? For example, vitamin B1, or Thiamine, helps encourage the synthesis of sugars

Some of the most necessary vitamins and minerals needed by plants in your home hydroponics garden are the B vitamins. These give your plant the energy they need to grow, ability to handle any stresses caused by less than idea circumstances. The B vitamins also help your home hydroponics plants repair any harm that may be done. Other than oxygen, the B vitamins may well be some of the most important.

When searching through the myriad of vitamin supplements available, it helps to know what to look for in the way of a healthier supplement. The first thing is the ability to be absorbed by your hydroponics plants. Let’s face it; if the plants can’t absorb the supplement, it does no good. For this, you want to look for a product with a humic acid base. Humic acid has the ability to chelate, or bind positively to charged ions. To your plants, this means it allows many more nutrients to be absorbed than would be possible without the humic acid. This in turn translates into larger, healthier plants.

One of the best Vitamin B supplements I have found is Organic B, sold by Advanced Nutrients. Organic B is made from the best sources and provides an excellent source of B vitamins to the plants in your home hydroponics garden.

Home hydroponics gardening is increasing in popularity, especially with the rising costs of gas and food. Making sure your plants are as healthy as possible will help save you money in the long run.

Lots of vegetables can be grown in a relatively small space

Home Hydroponics–Cloning

almost any plant can be cloned

Cloning is a procedure used to asexually copy a plant. This is most often done through cuttings, but there are other methods. Cloning serves several purposes. Among them are being able to copy a plant without need for pollination and being able to reproduce healthier plants and eliminate weaknesses in crops. While this method of reproducing plants is often preferred, there are certain conditions that must be carefully considered. Among these are needs for altering the environment in which you are growing cloned plants and learning the necessary procedure to ensure a clone is healthy and more likely to grow.

Not every plant is capable of being cloned; however, a majority will not only grow, but also thrive when cloned. It is not unusual for a hydroponic gardener to start out with just one healthy plant and end up with a greenhouse full of plants that were cloned from this one. Every cell of a plant has the ability, when given correct conditions, to reproduce all parts of a plant. In order to enable this to happen, however, the growing environment should have a higher temperature and greater humidity than would otherwise be indicated for the particular plants you are growing.

In addition to requiring higher temperatures when rooting seedlings, the home hydroponic garden will need a great deal of very bright light. There are special spectrum bulbs that are sold for this purpose. They fit into regular light fixtures, so require no additional pre-planning. These bulbs will provide the needed light in the required spectrum for best plant growth.

When cutting a section off the original plant to clone, use a sharp razor and make your cut in the stem at a forty-five degree angle. Choose a piece of the stem that has several Nodules where leaves would normally grow. Remove side leaves, but leave a leaf cluster at the top of the cutting. The side nubs will eventually grow roots to anchor the new plant.

The next step is extremely important if you want to grow clones in your home hydroponic garden. Special “rooting” solution needs to be purchased at your local hydroponic store. The bottom of your cutting is then dipped into this rooting solution before placing the cutting into your growing medium. This solution helps quicken the rooting process as well as enable the growing of stronger roots on your clone.

By regularly practicing the cloning of your healthiest plants, you can eventually create a home hydroponic garden that has healthier, stronger plants than would otherwise be possible. By cloning the stronger plants, the traits shared by weaker ones will eventually be eliminated. For example, you find an infestation killing off your crop. One or two of your plants are able to fight this infestation and continue growing. When you clone these particular plants, the resulting ones will be better able to fight the same infestation. Eventually, you may be able to produce plants that are totally immune to certain diseases and insects.

Home hydroponic gardening is increasing in popularity, especially with the rising costs of gas and food. Making sure your plants are as healthy as possible will help save you money in the long run. For more information on creating the best possible home hydroponic garden you can, visit http://www.advancednutrients.com/juicyroots, and discover the world’s fastest and most reliably rooting gel to be used in the cloning process.

Advanced Nutrient’s Juice Roots not only has an unparalleled success rate (as high as 99%), but it also ensures higher yields and fights off pathogens! Added to that, it’s 100% guaranteed to outperform the competition, so it’s a win-win all around!

Easy Hydroponics–Organic Nirvana

discover more about Nirvana

Hydroponic Gardening Grows Healthy, Fresh Vegetables

Getting tired of rising prices at the grocery store? Fed up with the tomatoes shipped from the other side of the continent tasting like cardboard? Worried about all the pesticides and additives that you might be feeding your kids with the supposedly healthy meal of broccoli soup?

The solution is simple—grow your own vegetables. I can hear your excuses now—“I live in a high-rise, how can I do that?” or “My garden is barely big enough for a Fisher Price slide for the twins.”

Guess what? If you have five extra square feet in your kitchen, you can grow your own vegetables. Ditto for a walk-in closet or a small storage room in your basement. “But I got rid of my house plants, because the cats kept scratching the dirt onto the carpet,” you say? We’re not talking about bringing more dirt into your house. We’re talking growing plants in water.

Yeah, growing plants in water. There’s a name for it—hydroponics. It’s a method as old as the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon and as new as the latest space voyage. Yes, the ancients knew that you don’t need soil to grow plants, only water and nourishment. And NASA knows it too, that’s why they’re experimenting with hydroponics to grow fresh vegetables for their astronauts on long space voyages or for extended stays at the space station.

“But I’m all thumbs, when it comes to plants. And I don’t mean green ones, either.” Guess what? It’s simple. There are kits you can buy. Tiny kitchen-counter-top models based on a form of hydroponics known as aeroponics. Or cabinets that are totally self-contained.

Or if you or your husband like to build things, you can put together a home-made hydroponic system with a few items that can be purchased at any home supply store. Start with a plastic tote for a reservoir, some rubber tubing and a pump, and several plastic buckets which will hold your grow medium and your plants.

The grow medium is much cleaner than soil. It is usually baked clay pebbles or rock wool, or sometimes a mixture of peat and something else. Some growers like a mixture of coconut fiber or coir and peat. Anything but soil.

Why do you need the grow medium? Mostly to anchor your plants, but also to absorb the nutrient mixture and gradually feed it to your roots. Furthermore, it is handy for aeration purposes, which is a fancy way of saying that your roots have to breathe.

In some larger, commercial hydroponic systems, the plants are supported by polystyrene boards with holes in them and the roots dangle directly into the nutrient pond. On a smaller scale, the flood and drain (or ebb and flow) system is more desirable, since it alternates between soaking your roots and allowing them to dry out and suck in air.

In aeroponics, the plants are usually supported by PVC pipes and the roots always dangle midair, only to be misted with nutrient solution on a regular basis.

Whichever system you use, proper nourishment for your plants makes the difference between a lush, abundant harvest and a skimpy, sickly-looking one.

Advanced Nutrients, a well-established Canadian company, has been in the business of supplying hydroponic plant nutrients to large and small growers for over a decade. Their plant scientists have tested and retested all of their products and found them head and shoulders above their competition.

Here is what Donna Dirk of Laguna Beach, California has to say about their products: “I first got the idea of growing my own vegetables indoors after the deep freeze that decimated the citrus crops in this state. To top it off, the tainted spinach scare turned me off store bought vegetables forever.”

“I tried to feed my plants with Miracle Grow, then I was advised to switch to General Hydroponics. My peppers were small, my tomatoes lacked zest, and my cucumbers looked more like baby gherkins. Then a neighbor told me about Advanced Nutrients. As soon as I switched to Micro, Grow, and Bloom, their famous three-part fertilizer, true miracles started happening.”

“I still use MGB for the veg period, but I’ve started using Connoisseur for the bloom cycle, and I never looked back. My beefsteak tomatoes are huge and tasty, my red hot peppers are way hotter and bigger, and my cucumbers look more like giant zucchinis.”

“I also use the supplements and root colonizers that Advanced Nutrients recommends to be used alongside their basic ferts.”

Think about it. You go out of your way to feed nothing but the best to your children. Since they’re the recipients of the vegetables you grow, don’t you want to feed nothing but the best to your plants?

For the seven jealously guarded secrets of hydroponics, please visit http://www.advancednutrients.com/freereport/. You’ll be glad you did.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!