THE WINDOWSILL, HYDROPONIC, INFLATION-BUSTER GARDEN

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If the hydroponic experiments we've conducted over the past few years are any indication, there's also nothing sacrosanct about the solutions used in this type of gardening. We've tried three different brands of commercial chemicals and had excellent results with all of them. Our research into organic solutions and the trials we've conducted with them have proven satisfactory too, and have been described in this magazine (MOTHER NO. 39, pages 32-35) and discussed in detail in our book, The Survival Greenhouse.

IN CLOSING

Our experiments with a number of hydroponic systems and techniques goes on ... mainly because we're having so much fun with them. However, if you'd like, you can forget all about the fun part of this kind of gardening (or else just chalk it up as an added benefit which costs you nothing).

Which is to say that if [1] you're only interested in a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly dollars-and-cents saving on your family's food bills while [2] you eat fresher, greener, and more nutritious salad fare than you'll ever buy in a supermarket all [31 grown right on your house or apartment's windowsills for [41 a total equipment investment as low as one skinny dollar ... well, there's no need for you to worry yourself about our "fun" experiments at all.

Just plant one of the "windowsill, hydroponic, inflationbuster gardens" described above ... flood it regularly with any of the nourishing solutions mentioned here ... and stand back! We've already proven that such a mini-vegetable patch can do the job.

A NOTE TO "ORGANIC" GARDENERS ABOUT HYDROPONICS

I often find myself defending the hydroponic method of gardening from the criticism of misinformed people who state that since it isn't "organic" (it can be, but usually isn't), hydroponics is therefore "bad" and sleeps in the same bed with chemical-based "agribiz" types of farming. I don't believe that's true, for these reasons:

[1] 1, too, agree that the agribusiness chemical fertilization of farmland is bad agriculture. And I believe it's bad because, eventually, it seems to starve out the natural bacteria in the soil which break organic material down into the chemical elements required by plant life. And once these bacteria have been killed, nothing seems able to grow very well on that soil unless it is fertilized with larger and larger doses of chemicals. In effect, then, the chemical fertilization of farmland sooner or later seems to turn that land into a junkie.

The chemicals used in hydroponic gardening, on the other hand, are not put on the soil ... they are only used to irrigate gravel or some other inert growing medium. And when those solutions are finally discarded, they're too depleted to do any damage to the earth (I dump our old hydroponic solutions at the foot of a small elm tree in our yard).

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