Mother's Mini-Manual HYDROPONICS
The how's and why's of growing plants with the hydroponic system.
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ILLUSTRATION BY JIM LESLIE
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ANIMAL FORAGE
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Hydroponic sprouting for animals is popular all over the world with farmers, ranchers, horsemen, and zoos. It is a compact, simple, and cheap way to produce high-quality green forage for house pets or farm animals. A space 20 feet long and 8 feet high can turn out a thousand pounds of greens every day, all year round. Any kind of grass or cereal grains can be sprouted—rye, oats, barley, alfalfa, etc. The nutrient solution increases the food value of the final product. It takes about seven to ten days to go from seed to an eight?inch mat of greens, packed with vitamins and minerals. Here's how you do it:
Sprouting is done in trays about 3 or 4 inches deep and any convenient length and width. The bottoms are lined with a thin layer of absorbent material such as burlap, foam rubber, or edible paper. Soak your seed overnight in plain water, then spread it generously and evenly over the bottom of the tray. Keep the bottom moist but not soggy with a half-strength nutrient solution. Keep the tray in a warm, semi-dark place for a couple of days. Then, when the sprouts are about half an inch high, let them have light. Add the weak nutrient solution from time to time but, after the sixth day, use plain water. When the greens are ready, just peel up the entire mat and watch your animals gobble it, sprouts, roots, seeds, and all.
If you start a new batch every day or so, you can harvest a steady supply. Trays can be stacked and grown compactly in racks. With a little thought and planning you can set up a very compact and efficient feed production unit.
Sprouting works best at a temperature of 65° to 70° F. If the weather turns very cold, you will have to provide artificial heat or quit. A lot can be done in some warm corner of your house, but in order to do large-scale production in cold weather, you must use a well insulated and heated structure.
At first thought, the practice of growing plants in an inert medium (such as gravel), feeding them periodically with dissolved nutrients, and then draining away the fertilizing solution to aerate the roots seems downright "unnatural". But people all over the world—from India (where folks frequently feed themselves from discarded containers filled with rubble) to the Netherlands Antilles (where large hydroponic farms operate with distilled seawater on otherwise useless agricultural land) to the good ole U.S.A. (where even famous organic gardeners, such as Eddie Albert, endorse hydroponics)?are finding that the arrangement does, in fact, have many practical advantages over "ordinary" soil cultivation techniques.
Take, for instance, the fact that hydroponics gardeners can often obtain a greater crop of tasty and nutritious foods (or of healthy ornamentals) from a smaller space simply because the amounts of nutrients given to a plant and the times of those nutrients' application can be controlled and adjusted and tailored to meet that particular plant's specific needs.
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