Total-control Indoor Gardening with Modern Hydrop

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Even better as a rooting medium, but with none of the controversial baggage, is a newly available milled coconut husk fiber. Called Cocopeat or Grow Bricks/GroBrix, it is a rich earth brown and soft to the touch when moistened—much like peat moss—but is a by-product of copra production (coconut grown for its rich oil, which is pressed from the nut meat and used in fattening foods and luxurious soaps and unguents) in the tropics. It is a totally natural organic material. But having grown 30 feet up in a coconut palm and kept uncontaminated, the horticultural grade is free of weed seeds, as well as fresh waterborne or soil organisms that could compromise a hydroponics system. It comes ultracompressed into brick-sized 20 oz. blocks that expand to form eight or more quarts (liters) of mossy plant bedding when wetted. A brick costs less than $3.

For use as a holding medium for coconut fiber or rockwool starting cubes, many systems employ pellets made from ground, shaped, and fired clay or shale (mudrock), both of which are abundant and fully natural. They are also cheap as dirt, which is what they are. Pellets are spheres about a half-inch in diameter that are brick red on the outside and dark gray and porous-looking on the inside. Geolote, Grorox, and Hydron are common names, made in Europe and Australia. A similar product, formed into irregular shapes rather than spheres, comes from Israel. All are highly porous, lightweight, and mostly air, and so absorb, retain, and drain water readily. They are also sterile, of neutral pH, and chemically inert. Typically, plants are started in rockwool cubes and transferred to water tables or larger pots packed with pellets. Infinitely reusable and recyclable, it sells for under a dollar a quart (liter).

Water and Air

As in nature, it's in water absorbed largely through their roots that your hydroponic plantings, obtain most of the minerals they need to groW, the fluid they need to sustain life, and some of the atmospheric gasses that figure in "transpiration"-the proper name for plants' way of breathing (where, as you know, green plants use carbon dioxide and emit oxygen-the reverse of animal life).

We sprout seeds in a popular starter set (we got ours from Johnny's Selected Seeds of Albion, Maine) that consists of a standard propagating tray with a clear plastic dome on it, set on a metal rack over an office worker's foot heating mat. For postgermination growth, we keep plant tables warm with soil-heating cables stapled to plywood sheets.

In winter, we keep room temperatures in the 50s°F or 60s°F—lower than many plants like, so I get warm air to the growing area from the wood stove with a ceiling fan and with small muffin fans set inside air ducting (sometimes in cold snaps, using flexible clothes-dryer duct hose just laid on the floor). The lamps I use have a vented metal reflector hooked to dryer-vent hose and a 265 cubic-foot-minimum squirrel cage blower. If the room is too warm, heat from the lamps is blown outdoors. In cold weather, it can be directed under the plant growing table.

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