Start Here for Hydroponics

We all have reasons, and they are all valid, including just growing for fun, as a healthy hobby.

Attraction to technical growing.

Hydroponics can be great geek gardening. Because you have to create and operate the environment, there are endless opportunities to configure, reconfigure, adapt, construct and evaluate. It’s great for tinkerers. And digital controls can add another dimension. Even some home hydro growers are operating sophisticated control and automation facilities by combining processors sensors and remote controls, often using single board computers like Raspberry Pi.

Year-round indoor growing.

Many of us are not blessed with good growing conditions all year. Freezing winters and blazing summers often both occur in the same location. Used indoors, hydroponics offers freedom from seasons. Of course, you can grow hydroponically outdoors, even where summer and winter limit your good growing periods.

Total control of the growing environment.

In hydroponics, nothing comes to the plant except through you. You supply the water and nutrients. You decide on nutrient strength and pH. There are no accidents. You know exactly what is going into your food. Of course, that means that everything the plant gets costs something, except sunlight, if you grow outdoors or in a greenhouse.

Conservation of water.

Plants consume a lot of water. Many soil plants are sadly underwatered or poorly watered. Providing a plant in soil outdoors with an ideal amount of water can be costly. Hydroponic growing does use water, just generally not as much. For most people, it is not a high cost. For others, it is.

Quality Food

This is, of course, also a benefit of soil gardening, but for many, indoor hydro is the only way their living situation allows them to grow their own food. Commercial produce often concentrates on varieties developed for commercially attractive characteristics. A tomato that can stay firm and red for a long time is more important to most marketers than flavor. You can do much better.

Hydroponics Grows Better than Soil

Gotcha! That one’s not true. Hydroponic growers do often get better results. But there’s a reason that has nothing to do with the method. It’s quite easy for a soil gardener to think, Well, there’s some dirt. You put seeds in the dirt and water them, and they grow. Right?

Hydroponic growers don’t find everything waiting for them. They must deliberately create an environment and provide for every one of the plant’s needs. To do that, they must learn about plants and plant nutrition, and light and water, and a host of other factors. When they know that much, they likely get good results.

Soil gardeners would get good results just as often, if they learned about their soil and their plant’s needs and a lot about what fertilizer they were using and planted at the right time and in the right place. Many soil gardeners do make those efforts, and they are rewarded with success.

Both hydroponics and soil growing provide for all a plant needs to be productive. Neither has any advantage, except for how it suits the growers and the growing environment. Which is another way of saying that, if you want success in hydroponics or soil growing, you have a lot to learn.

This book is about hydroponic growing for all those reasons. I may, from time to time, mention something about large scale commercial hydroponics, but it will be only to make a point. Commercial growing has any number of concerns that will be of little interest to home growers.

What Is Hydroponics?

So, what do we mean by the term hydroponic? First, it is growing plants, usually food crops, without soil. That really says it all, because, without soil, all the plant’s needs must be met in ways that we recognize as hallmarks of hydroponic growing. The plant’s nutrition is provided by the grower in the form of nutrients dissolved in water. There’s not much more to the definition, so there is room for many variations on that theme.

Plants in soil depend on the soil to preprocess compounds into nutrients and to buffer acidity. Many soil fertilizers are useless in hydroponics. In hydroponics, plants have their roots in an inert (more or less) medium. One such medium is Perlite. a water bearing volcanic glass that is heated until the water vaporizes and causes the glass to expand into a white, lightweight material. Another is coir, a fine, soil-like medium made from coconut fiber. A similar medium is peat, a product of plant decomposition found in bogs. Clay pellets, sometimes sold under the commercial name, Hydroton, and sometimes called LECA—Light Expanded Clay Aggregate. The pellets are about the size of marbles and are natural clay baked hard. There are others. Or there may be no medium at all, and plants are suspended in the air with roots in contact with the nutrient solution. Or suspended in the nutrient solution itself.

One thing all hydroponic media have in common is that they provide no nutrition to plants. (That does not mean, however, that they all don’t have affects on plants that we have to deal with.) All food must be provided by the grower. The most common nutrients are minerals in forms that can be taken up by plants and used. These elements must be provided in ionic forms in order for the plants to use them. Many of these are provided in nutrient solutions as ionic mineral compounds. For instance, calcium and nitrogen may be provided by the ionic compound, calcium nitrate.

You need not immediately have a full understanding of the natures of these ionic compounds. For now, it is sufficient to understand that, while an analytical report on a fertilizer may list individual elements, like nitrogen or boron, you cannot compound a useful set of plant nutrients simply by mixing individual elements. And many will not dissolve, or they exist in our normal Earth environment only as gasses.

All commercially produced hydroponic nutrients are essentially the same in their ability to provide essential, water soluble nutrients. But makers may have different strategies that involve different ingredients. Some makers offer different nutrient sets intended to satisfy the particular needs of fruiting plants in their different stages of growth, growing, blooming and fruiting. Some growers use them. Some do not. And, inevitably, some maker decisions are more about how many products they can sell than about the benefits of using them.

One practice within hydroponics is organic hydroponics. Organic growing uses organic fertilizers in place of conventional manufactured fertilizers. One example of organic fertilizer is worm compost tea, an extract of excreted worm casings. Because they are not manufactured products, users must know a good deal about how they were produced and the potential problems of organic material in their growing system. Note that when I use the term organic, I mean the common definition, not the definition of certified organic food production.

Another practice that I will discuss only briefly is aquaponics. Aquaponics combines raising freshwater food animals, fish, crayfish, etc., with growing food plants, using the animals’ bodily products as plant food. It is an ancient method, going back thousands of years in Central America and Asia. It has requirements unique to it that do not figure otherwise in hydroponics. It is a controversial practice, because of concerns about nutrients in food and effects on the environment.

This is a good place for a quick word on the environment. Hydroponic growing generally uses less water than soil growing. And indoor hydroponics requires electricity to power lights. Solar power equipment required to operate useful grow lights is quite substantial. So, for most, there is an additional impact of power generation. And used hydroponic nutrient solutions must not be discharged into natural waterways. It can, however, sometimes be used to irrigate some soil plants, and it is possible to produce clean water from used nutrient solution with the proper methods, such as solar stills. But we will cover hydroponic methods that can be done outdoors or in a greenhouse with very little environmental impact.

What does it take to grow a plant? Plants must have food, water, root access to air, and light. Those are absolutes. Leave any of them out, and plants will not grow. There may be other environmental requirements for best production, but those four must always be provided. How each is provided constitutes the differences among the different hydroponic methods. I will address each of those requirements so that we have some basis for discussing practical methods. Because they are essential needs, each will have particular requirements as to how they are provided.

Plant Need #1 - Light

Plants require light. Actually, quite a lot of it. But they also require dark periods. Outdoors and in greenhouses, direct sunlight and the day/night cycle provide for the plant’s needs and directs much of its growth and development. But when we talk about sunlight or daylight, we mean actual direct sunlight. We do not mean the blue skylight, such as in shade.

Plants evolved under our sun’s radiation, and to some degree they use most every part of the sun’s spectrum of wavelengths. But most essential to them are reds and, to a lesser extent, blues. Thus, the classic grow light’s distinctive color. In traditional LED grow lights, that balance is created by some number of red LED’s and a lesser number of blue. The resulting color is sometimes called blurple.

There are newer grow light designs labeled full spectrum. Once, science believed plants made no use of green light. However, we now know that, although they are not essential wavelengths, they do have value to plants. True grow lights include useful intensities of red and blue but may cover other parts of the spectrum as well. Full spectrum lights are part science, part hype and unquestionably attractive because their light appears white to humans who think, Ah. Like the sun. It’s not. Again, not essential, but providing the full spectrum is useful and certainly more comfortable to work around.

But do not make the mistake of thinking that all lights that appear white can be good grow lights. If powerful enough, they will support some growth, but common LED task lights or shop lights or home lighting concentrate their intensities in the middle wavelengths, those that most easily appear white. But they are woefully short on the vital wavelengths for growing, so they are inefficient, because you get less benefit for electricity cost. Nor is most window light of any real value, unless the window faces south and receives hours of direct sunlight.

Additionally, they are really no bargain. Consider that an LED device has an expected life measured in years. Over its life, used 16 to 18 hours a day, it will consume electricity that costs more than the small difference between a shop light and a true grow light. And much of that expense is wasted on less useful light. And as with so many things, aggressive Chinese entry into the hydroponics market have brought grow light prices down.

But there is one huge difference between the sun and an electrically powered grow light. The sun is so far from Earth that a difference in distance of two, ten, one-hundred or one-thousand feet makes no measurable difference in the intensity of the light. But when our light source is close, as within the same room, even small changes in distance can make large changes in intensity. Therefore, how powerful a grow light we need depends, in large part, on how far from the plants it will be mounted. There are several considerations in choosing grow lights that I will discuss in another section. For now, suffice it to say you will need to provide sufficient light for the plant’s use.

Plants use light in the process called photosynthesis to make energy in the form of sugar from carbon dioxide and water. This involves chlorophyll in the leaves, which is why they are green. That also helps explain why red and blue lights are so important where green leaves reflect green light. During lighted hours, the plant converts the energy of light into chemical energy in the form of molecules called ATP and NADPH. Then, in the Calvin Cycle, which does not require light, the plant uses energy from ATP and NADPH to assemble carbohydrate molecules.

But plants also need dark. Most plants will survive on 24-hour light, but the dark hours let them stop producing food through photosynthesis and use all that energy from the day for growth. Plants do not go to sleep at night. They just change their internal activities.

It is common wisdom in the gardening world that a vegetable garden needs four to six hours of direct sunlight per day and at least 10 more hours of bright light. We don’t have to manipulate light to match that exactly. The outdoor garden grows fine in all-day direct sun. Plan on running your lights 12 to 16 hours a day and turning them off for 8 to 12 hours.

Some plants, especially perennials (whether you overwinter them or not), benefit from varying the light/dark cycle times according to changes from growth stage to flowering stage. Check references for specific light issue with plants you grow. Most non-flowering plants will be okay with changing lighting for their flowering roommates.

Inadequate light will be most readily seen in plants growing tall and spindly, leggy, as they strive to grow rapidly upward where they hope to find more light. Such plants will not thrive and will not produce abundant crops.

The question then arises: How much light is enough? One can get very technical, but the home grower need not purchase expensive meters to measure light intensity. Note that plants grow outdoors in all sorts of conditions.

There are two approaches, one more precise than the other. One is to apply a rough rule of thumb.

Indoors, a reasonable working rule, expressed in power consumed by LED grow lights is that 35 watts of actual LED power consumption in a light mounted 18 inches above the plant canopy is appropriate for one square foot of growing space. A rough measure, but it works surprisingly well.

There are many considerations, though. One is whether all that light is cast onto the plants. Beam width means the angle within which all the light is cast. A beam angle of 45 degrees at a height of 18 inches will cast 50% of the light onto about one square foot. The rest falls off to the edges of the full light field at less useful intensities. But a beam angle of 90 degrees will cast that light on about nine square feet. If the two devices are alike, except for the beam angle, the one with a 90-degree beam will only cast one-ninth of it’s light on a square foot of surface below it. If the growing area is one square foot, almost all the light will be wasted.

And raising the light, increases the area it covers, but gives every portion less light. Double the mounting height of our pretend light with a 90-degree beam, and it will cast its light over 36 square feet. Each square foot will get less, but it won’t be the