Hydroponic Gardens Are Great For Apartments

By Allison Agnock

Perhaps you love to garden but are frustrated because you live in one of the upper floors of a high-rise apartment building. The biggest hurdle to overcome is the fact that you have no soil in which to grow plants, and lugging bagged soil up to your apartment would be no easy task. There is, however, an easy way to garden in an apartment successfully, and that is through the use of hydroponic gardening. Hydroponics is a method of growing plants without soil. You can start with a small homemade automated hydroponic growing system that can fit on a windowsill, and move up to a larger system if space permits.




One of the best reasons to consider growing plants in your apartment hydroponically is that this type of system is much easier to get set up than hauling heavy containers and soil up several flights, and the end result is fresh food for your family. To get started with a hydroponic garden in an apartment, you will need to know that there are two basic systems you can choose from: water based and media based. Medium is not soil, but instead could include composted bark, gravel, peat moss, perlite or vermiculite. Also, if you select an active system it will need electronic timers and pumps to make it function well, whereas a passive system doesn't rely on pumps and instead uses a wicking agent for the roots of the plants to access the nutrients.

Because the plants are grown in water, they receive no nutrients from the soil as they ordinarily would. Instead, in hydroponic plant gardening the gardener supplies the plants with nutrients by applying a nutrient solution to the roots via distilled water. The big three nutrients that plants need are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. There are other nutrients, called macronutrients and micronutrients, that the plants will need as well and will need to be added to the nutrient solution. Macronutrients are needed in greater amounts, and micronutrients in smaller amounts, but all are needed for plants to thrive.

One of the benefits to growing plants in a hydroponic manner is that they are less bothered from pests and diseases. Many plant pests live in the soil, so when you eliminate the soil you often get rid of the pest's habitat. Hydroponic plant propagation can also be accomplished without using a great deal of pesticides Another reason why this style of gardening is popular is it will produce more food than you could grow in the same amount of soil. You can grow the food in a spot where there is no soil at all, namely, your apartment. So have fun gardening and produce some great-tasting food with hydroponic plant gardening.

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