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Quite often, you feel the urge to grow veggies and maybe herbs at your backyard, but have you ever figured out putting up a hydroponic garden? Hydroponic is ideal for production of medicinal and culinary herbs. Perhaps the best part about these gardens is that herbs not only grow faster, but also have more aroma than the ones grown in a conventional garden. According to research, the herbs can be 20 to 40% more aromatic over the ones grown in the field. And if you want a consistent high quality produce from a small space, this is the way to go.
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IF YOU ARE AIMING TO use this method at home, then a small Ebb and flow system is the ideal option. Here, the plants will be held in a flood table, inside plastic pots, and then the reservoirs will be positioned beneath. A submersible pump can be run on a timer to get rid of the waste gases as well as supplying the roots with water rich in nutrients. Once the timer is off, water will withdraw back to the reservoir, and pull fresh oxygen to the herbs’ roots. You can do this after every fifteen minutes, three or four times in a day.
With the herbs almost primarily vegetative, using grow formula nutrient rich in high nitrogen and relatively lower phosphorus is always an excellent ratio to work with for most of these herbs. Usually, a low-to-medium measure of electrical conductivity for measuring the strength of nutrients can be handy. Any measure from 1.2 to 1.8 with a bit of acidic PH at around 5.8 to 6.4 is a great deal when growing culinary herbs. If you want to keep the measurements of these aspects, you can always go for PH pens and EC meters, which won’t eat into your budget.
When growing herbs indoors, most of them require full spectrum light with an abundance of blue towards the end. You can go for T-5 high output fluorescent or metal halide lights, they always work wonders in this settings. If you can get a new 315 watt ceramic type metal halide or a 400 watt HID light system (HPS), you can be able to cover up to 4 x 4 foot square area. If you are going to use a 1000 watt HID light system, you will have 6X6 feet square covered. It is advisable to keep the lighting system about one foot to a foot and a half over the tips of the herbs, and then raise the lights with the growth of the plants. Especially for the fluorescent lamps with high output like the T-5, you can place them closer to the plants as they run cooler.
An oscillating fan can also help in your herb garden, as ideal air movement will ensure the plants are cool and have sufficient supply of carbon dioxide, which helps in photosynthesis. Keeping the temperature at about 70 to 75 degrees and a relative humidity of about 40 to 60% can be a great idea.
Plants can be tough enough to withstand difficult conditions sometime, especially when it comes to the environmental conditions and fertilization. It is believed that too much attention to detail into these aspects might weaken the plants. So you can give them a little stress to ensure they harden, but care is necessary though.