How Hydroponics Can Benefit Your Apartment Garden

Share:

How Hydroponics Can Benefit Your Apartment Garden

Staff Writer · Nov 4, 2010

For lots of beginning gardeners who don’t have an accessible outdoor plot, hydroponics is the perfect solution for helping to get home-grown herbs and vegetables to the table without using a conventional soil-based growing approach.

Indoor hydroponic gardening is catching on like wildfire wherever land is limited, including in many of today’s modern cities. With hydroponic systems, the need for soil and even natural sunlight is eliminated, and that means many more people and households can grow what they need for a vegetable based diet, while developing skills they can use for future growing projects.

Equipment Needs

When it comes to hydroponic gardening, there are two basic kinds of systems called active and passive hydroponics. In an active system, the nutrients get moved around to provide optimal access for plants. Passive systems are more like conventional gardening where plants soak up nutrients. Either of these kinds of hydroponics come in many different varieties of setups that incorporate the basic principles of indoor growing: nourishing plants in a limited environment that can provide a more protected growth process.

Benefits of Hydroponic Gardening

So what do people like so much about hydroponics? It starts with the idea that plants don’t need a lot of soil to grow.

Gardening Without Soil

In the old days, when plants were almost always grown directly from a plot of land, it was easier to control and deal with all of that earth. With today’s diverse gardening trends including raised beds, earth transplants, potted planting, and much more, soil has become a real nuisance for some gardeners. Moving soil from one location to another is never easy, and detouring around the need for truckloads of earth can make some projects a lot easier. There’s also less need to engineer the perfect soil through purchasing lots of bagged fertilizer or developing compost over a long period of time.

Easier Irrigation

Hydroponic plants can also be easier to irrigate. The active and passive systems designed to provide nutrition can include handy irrigation attachments that take almost no continual effort. As for lighting, grow bulbs can be put on timers to provide optimal timed lighting for plants. The ease of maintaining a hydroponic nursery has a lot of folks looking to experiment with this kind of indoor gardening.

High Yield with Hydroponics

Hydroponic gardening is also a trend that is known for an efficient yield. Studies indicate that hydroponic planting will often produce more yield in a shorter time than the equivalent conventional garden. Experienced planters who have tried different methods will often verify that their hydroponic operations beat out traditional methods as far as providing more yield more quickly, with less space, and often, with less cost.

Anyone interested in trying their hand at this new innovative gardening style can pick up simple beginner’s kits for about a hundred dollars, or maybe a little less. Alternatively, those with a mechanical bent can make their own designs and save money. Hydroponics is a kind of project that can be done almost anywhere, and the results can furnish a household with the greens they need to create a healthy overall diet without spending tons of money on organic vegetables at markets.

You might also like:

Moving into a new apartment or rental property can be both exciting and stressful. From packing up your belongings to coordinating logistics, there’s a lot to manage. However, one aspect that is often overlooked is what to expect on move-in day regarding the condition of your new unit. Surprisingly, according to recent surveys, a significant […]

Jessica Lee

 · Mar 12, 2024

On ApartmentRatings, real renters have the ability to rate and review their apartment communities based on their experience touring and or living in the communities. ApartmentRatings offers renters the ability to see what life is like at a community through a report card grade style format called epIQ. Every month we highlight apartment communities whose […]

Jessica Lee

 · Feb 28, 2024

On ApartmentRatings, real renters have the ability to rate and review their apartment communities based on their experience touring and/or living in them. ApartmentRatings offers renters the ability to see what life is truly like at a community through a report card grade style format called epIQ. Every month we highlight a major city across […]

Jessica Lee

 · Jan 31, 2024