Total-control Indoor Gardening with Modern Hydrop

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Hydroponic nutrient must be aerated and kept warm. Large reservoirs are equipped with a pump, air stone, and an aquarium heater set in a water-filled bottle so its glass tube won't overheat and break when reservoirs are drained. I figured that the melon solution bubbled plenty as I poured it on the plants and then back into the jug. And it stayed warm enough in the kitchen end of the cabin, where the wood stove burned all night and through chilly mornings and evenings.

After a week under my home-rigged propagating fluorescent light battery, the plants went onto the Lee Valley ebb-and-flow water table under The Light Manufacturing Company's dual-bulb sunlight and got a good soaking twice daily, automatically, in a revolving mix of general-purpose nutrient solutions.

When weather warmed sufficiently, the melons were transplanted into the garden. The roots and their Hydrox went into a bushel of pure compost; vines grew out over black landscaping-paper mulch, and each bore a brace of plump icebox watermelons-the best I've ever grown in New England's short growing season.

Melon vines spread too widely to carry to fruiting stage under lights, but hydroponics sure gave this year's small crop a marvelous head start. I'm already gearing up to give an extra-early hydroponic start next season to more exotic varieties of melon, morning glories, tomatoes, peppers, okra, and artichokes. What other long-season crops should I try starting in late February or March along with the celery? Or lovely big fat 112-day Southern butter beans? Mung type soybeans for sprouting ... or peanuts even? I have never yet had any of those beat the first frost in September.

I like to rotate nutrients when I change water every two weeks or so, alternately using (alone or in combination) an international brew, including: Gen'l Hydro's Flora system; a five-bottle mix of Bumper Crop nutrients augmented by Wegener's phenomenally effective 8-6-6 Liquid Organic Growth Promotant, imported from New Zealand by the Rambridge group of companies out of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and sold by Lee Valley. From Worm's Way of Bloomington, Indiana, I get Budswell tea brewed from worm castings mixed with guano from Jamaican cave bats and Peruvian offshore island seabirds; three-part Earth juice conjured from mixed guanos, kelp, feather meal, oat bran, bone and blood meal, rock powder and more in Chico, California; and Grow-Up that's concocted from crab and crayfish shells and cricket castings in the Spanish-moss-draped Cajun bayous of Louisiana. I augment each of these concoctions with a good dollop of Ohrstrom's Maxicrop or another brand of North Atlantic Ascophyllum Nodosum Kelp squeezings from Norwegian waters; it rates only 0.1/0.0/1.0 in N/P/K, but has been assayed, and contains all the trace elements a plant could ever use.

The cost of organic or chemical-based plant nutrient is between $20 to $30 a gallon. Parsed out at about five teaspoonsful (25 ml) per gallon of nutrient water, it goes a long way. I figure that if I'd used up a quart of solution every two weeks to grow my four watermelons hydroponically over three months time, the total nutrient cost would have been 18 3/4¢ I'd have spent more than that in worn boot leather walking to the truck to spend $6 in gas to drive to the store in town and back-to buy the melons all at one time for $2.50 apiece.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print