My First Dive Into Hydroponics
My First Dive Into Hydroponics
I knew about hydroponics for a few years now and I've been curios but didn't took any action towards starting my own little "hydro-garden". Well that changed today because today is the day when I started messing with hydroponics a bit. It's an experiment where a lot of things can go wrong and there might be a lot of trial and error.
What are hydroponics? For those unfamiliar with this term, hydroponics is about gowning plants in mediums where soil is replaced with water. This is shortest, simplest explanation I can give. You are basically creating a little water world of your own. NASA for example, has been researching hydroponics for a few decades, for reasons easy to understand, they intend to send a hydroponic system on Mars and plan to use LED lighting instead of natural light, this sounds very interesting!
The start of the Experiment
What I've done today was to prepare the tomato (the cherry variety) and radish seeds to germinate, made them a comfy bed of cotton in which they should start germinating, sprinkled them with a bit of water and put them to rest.
Tomato Cherry & Radish Seeds - Hydroponics
People usually use a mineral wool as the medium of choice in which seeds germinate and develop their strands of roots but I chose to use cotton wool instead. I want to keep things as simple and cheap as possible, cotton wool is readily available, most people have in their homes, mineral wool (made by Rockwell) is a bit harder to get and much more expensive.
Cotton Bed for Seeds - Hydroponics
The box that I used is nothing fancy, is just a box that was laying around and having to purpose. The ratio between tomato and radish seeds is 3:1, which means that I'm hoping and betting more on tomato seedlings to grow up rather than radish seedlings.
This is about it for now, I have to wait a few days and see what will come out of this experiment. I will have to keep the seeds moist so they grow up, for this I'm spraying a mist of water over them from time to time. I will probably write more about this experiment if the seeds will germinate and I will continue to phase two.