Anyone growing vegetables/Herbs in hydrophonics?
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Hydroponics or Hydrophonics?
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Hydroponics.
I’m fooling around with it. I was given an Aerogarden as a gift. Studied up on it and made my own.
Initial impressions: Be careful with the light. They lie like crazy about LED output. Get something name brand. I’d look to the 300w (actual 165w) Galaxy Hydro led if were to do it again. The dry Maxigro and Maxibloom are fairly priced and excellent.
My little rinky dinky set up was surpringly expensive. Buying that large an array of doo-dads adds up.
Getting an el cheapo ppm meter and a color match pH kit was worthwhile.
In fact, the actual hydro stuff wasn’t bad at all. Hardware stores clean up on odds and ends.
I have exactly the kit in your first pictures. But after I killed several bettas, I grew depressed with it and let it fall by the wayside. Maybe I’ll give it another go later. The plants I grew in it were fine, even if I felt like a hippy growing sprouts and wheat grass. (Ultimately, I let some of the radish sprouts grow out and they managed to reseed themselves.)
My real fish tanks are bursting with plants, mostly for filtration purposes. Golden pothos is great for that, but inedible.
Here’s a tip: go to your local Asian supermarket and get some empty heart vegetable. It will grow from cuttings, so you can just plop it in any tank and it will take off, taking your nitrates with it.
Mine even flowered. I got some good stir fry out of it, but ultimately I was the only one willing to eat stuff taken out of my fish tank.
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You can also get water crest from any grocery store, they grow from cutting too. Have the same filtering function, utilize the nitrate in the water.
Back on this topic, I recently set up a cichlid tank, which is producing buckets of water full of nitrates. I’m who gets it after the house plants. Would my 2-yr old fruit trees be good recipients, or is that too much nitrogen?
your fruit trees will love that aquarium water.
I think they call it aquaponics be we also “grow” tilapia in the bottom tank. Love it, we use the extra wastewater for the fruit trees, the bed plants seem to grow faster and we get some protein!
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I grew 32 heads of lettuce in mistponic totes under grow lights in my back room last winter, the weather never did get cold enough for long enough here this year to do it though. Lettuce likes temperaures to stay below the low 70’s
Looks great and the perfect combination!
Closed ecological system where the plant residue feed the fish and the fish waste feed the plants.
We saw this demonstrated at the New Alchemy Institute in Cape Cod in the 70’s by some of the scientist from Woods Hole Oceanographic. Expected this technology to be implemented in a large commercial scale, but don’t believe it was.
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I am trying hydroponics fruit indoor. This is my first trial. I still have a lot to learn.
DWC strawberry Albion with LED lights.
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I have two fig trees, a cherry tree, an avacado tree, and a peach tree growing aquaponically. I’ll try to get some pictures up.
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Super cool! Can’t wait to see your pictures!
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I’m going to up-pot my peach tree this weekend. I’ll take pictures and bring you all along… This is a peach tree grown from pit. It started life in rockwool, was up-potted to a larger rockwool block, then placed in a bato bucket with hydroton. This weekend the peach tree will be moved to a half 55g plastic drum, filled with lava rock and topped with hydroton.
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I was given an Aerogarden. That works great for herbs.
I’ve learned a lot with my home-made attempts. Minor things make a big difference in hydroponics.