If you are unsure what hydroponics is, you have come to the right place. For those who are already familiar with hydroponics, I don’t want to keep you too long. Check out this page for more information on the 200+ page hydroponics guide ebook! Anyways, humans have farmed food for a very long time. We have dialed in the process of growing food at a large scale, but people who want to grow their food are often too busy to worry about producing their food.
Hydroponics is a gardening technique that automates growing fruits and vegetables using pumps and nutrient solutions instead of soil. Growing food with this technique can be accomplished inside a greenhouse or in a cave. Obviously, you will need additional equipment to succeed at growing plants in a cave. The point is that people who live in harsh climates or areas with no access to a garden bed can grow food indoors with hydroponics.
This technique is a trendy method for growing food, and there are a lot of resources available. In fact, there are a lot of hydroponic brick-and-mortar stores that you can visit to browse equipment. There are plenty of products on Amazon too! This is great for people who want to get started because they don’t need to spend a ton of time hunting down equipment!
The Hydroponics Guide: Summary
In this section, I will briefly summarize what a hydroponic system looks like and how it functions. This list summarizes many hydroponic guides that exist, and it isn’t exhaustive because this farming technique is very flexible.
A hydroponic system is made up of the following components: Note I am not an amazon affiliate at this time.
- Water storage container.
- Water pump.
- Plumbing. (tubes, pipes, fittings, clamps, etc.)
- 2 Programmable Timers.
- Grow bed or narrow water channel.
- Loose grow media or grow media pods.
- Grow lights.
- Nutrient Solution.
- Seeds.
- Support Framing.
- GFCI Circuit Breaker. (Plug-In or Permanent Installation)
The list includes examples of what would be used in a setup, but it isn’t exhaustive. Most importantly, there are many small parts that you may need depending on the design of your system. Some plants do better in one design vs. another design which these details can be found in this hydroponics ebook.
A hydroponic system works like this:
- A water storage container contains water mixed with liquid plant food with a water pump installed inside or outside the tank.
- A timer turns on a pump that circulates the water from the water storage container through a channel system or floods a grow bed.
- The nutrient-rich water passes over the roots of the plants providing water and food for the plants to grow.
- The excess water returns back into the water storage tank.
- Natural sunlight or grow lights are used for photosynthesis. A second timer is used to control the grow lights if grow lights are utilized.
Hydroponics eBook
To get started with hydroponics, you could just buy everything mentioned in this article and piece it together. You will likely succeed at growing food because hydroponics is not a complicated technique, but you will probably run into some issues that you are not expecting. If you want to dig deeper into hydroponics, I suggest you look into this ebook which contains 200+ pages of information on hydroponics. This ebook can help you make better decisions to optimize your setup to produce more food with less.