By: Stephen Provis
Did you know that you can still grow your own beautiful
flowers and vegetables, without having to spend many hours
every week looking after your garden?
One of the biggest problems many gardeners face is never
having enough time to maintain their garden. There's always
weeds to remove, insects and other pests to take care of,
and steps to take to prevent plants becoming diseased. Even
watering the garden each day can be very time consuming,
unless there’s an automatic sprinkler system in place.
If you want a garden but only have limited time to look
after it, hydroponics is a great option. Hydroponics
gardening has many time-saving advantages over conventional
gardening methods.
Some of these advantages are:
1. No weeding required.
With hydroponics gardening, the plants are grown in a
solution of nutrients dissolved in water instead of soil.
You don't have to worry about weeds sprouting amongst your
plants, because soil isn't used.
2. Fewer problems with pests and diseases.
When growing hydroponically, you have less of the typical
problems with pests such as slugs, snails and caterpillars
attacking your plants.
Although the nutrient solution of your hydroponic garden
will have to be changed regularly, this only takes a
fraction of the time compared to conventional gardening
maintenance - eg. greenhouse gardening, where soil has to be
replaced between crops to prevent disease.
3. You don't need to spend time watering your plants.
Plants grown in a hydroponic garden have an unlimited supply
of water. You never need to be concerned that your plants
are getting too much or too little water.
4. Say goodbye to digging your garden.
Preparation of a conventional garden involves loosening the
soil to add oxygen for the plant’s roots to extract. Once again, as soil isn't used with hydroponics, this means
one less time consuming job for you to do.
Plants grown hydroponically extract oxygen from the nutrient
solution via their roots. The oxygen can quite quickly be used
up, so it's important that it's replaced. The way
it's replaced depends on which system is used. The most
common hydroponic system is the passive system, which uses
an aquarium bubbler to put oxygen back into the solution.
Plants can be grown rapidly without all the concerns of
regular gardening. Although a hydroponics system can take
some time to set up, you'll find it's well worth the
effort.
For more information on hydroponics and the advantages over regular gardening go to http://www.about-hydroponics.info/information-on-hydroponics.html
This article was posted on January 17, 2006
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Send items for the home and garden calendar to Bruce Steele at BSteele@Citizen-Times.com two weeks before the event. Or mail to Bruce Steele, Asheville Citizen-Times, P.O. Box 2090, Asheville, NC 28802.
