Indoor Hydroponic Vegetable & Herb Gardening

Posted by bsledlee on December 16th, 2013

There's a new technology being developed over the Internet that will delight apartment plant lovers and locavores alike. It can double your plant space and allow you to grow food indoors. And it can bring a solid dose of nature into your home with all its attendant benefits: Clean air, a sense of aliveness, silent companionship, the fresh color of green. If you like plants, new technologies, and have limited growing space, hydroponic window gardening may be for you.

Hydroponic Gardening

Hydroponic gardening is the practice of growing plants, especially food crops, without the use of soil. Instead, plants are set in sand or another kind of non-nutritious medium to hold the roots in place, or just planted through small holes in a container with space inside for roots. They are fed with water laced with worm castings or another kind of fertilizer or, in some systems, by pond water in which fish are being raised (aquaponics).

This is a system used by the Aztecs in ancient times, when they planted crops on straw mats covered with a thin layer of soil, and floated them in the lake to grow in the nutritious lake water. More recently, NASA has been experimenting with hydroponics for many years to figure out how to grow crops in space ships, space stations, and on other planets, like Mars.

"Hydroponic" means making water do the work (hydro=of water, ponic=labor). Because water can be transported easily through tubes, the hydroponic way of growing usually involves the use of pumps to send water through tubes to a number of plants in pots. Plants grow healthier this way than in soil, because nutrients are already dissolved, hence more readily available to plant roots. As long as they have enough light, crops you plant this way grow faster and have bigger yields than they do in soil.

In deference to the desire to minimize the use of electricity, many growers have been experimenting with using the power of gravity to transport water by locating plants on top of each other. That way they can pump water to the top plant and let it drip down from pot to pot naturally. Excess water from the bottom plant/s is direct through the feeding system and up to the top plant again. This also minimizes space, making it a great way to grow plants in an apartment or condo.
Indoor Window Garden

It was a short step from horizontal outdoor hydroponics to bringing the system indoors, and installing it or something like it in a window with lots of light. Crops could be grown indoors with such a system (as in a greenhouse), as could herbs and flowers. With the system set up vertically, it didn't take up much room, yet gave each plant enough light to grow well.

Windowfarms is one entrepreneurial company that resulted from adapting the technology to urban living. They set up a system using inverted plastic bottles, tubing, and an air pump that could be installed in a well-lit window of a city apartment. They experimented with different types of crops to find out what would grow best. After looking to see what they could do to improve the system, they asked for help via the Internet with improving it further.

Indoor Window Garden

It was a short step from horizontal outdoor hydroponics to bringing the system indoors, and installing it or something like it in a window with lots of light. Crops could be grown indoors with such a system (as in a greenhouse), as could herbs and flowers. With the system set up vertically, it didn't take up much room, yet gave each plant enough light to grow well.

Windowfarms is one entrepreneurial company that resulted from adapting the technology to urban living. They set up a system using inverted plastic bottles, tubing, and an air pump that could be installed in a well-lit window of a city apartment. They experimented with different types of crops to find out what would grow best. After looking to see what they could do to improve the system, they asked for help via the Internet with improving it further.

Hydroponic Garden Product Development Strategy

Windowfarms recognized that they had a unique product that could easily be captured, patented, and manufactured by a corporation intending to market at the highest price possible. In order to prevent that from happening, they created a Facebook page and posted the project with an open request for help.

This "commons development" strategy is spreading fast across the Internet, with sites of many different types (movies, music, politics) inviting anyone, who has the skills and interest, to work together online to create something new.

Ready to Grow a Garden Indoors?

As you can tell from the parts listed above, this system is fairly easy to set up. Windowfarms and other entrepreneurs have made it even easier by developing hydroponics kits for sale. Some of them you will find in the links below. Windowfarms also has diagrams on their website for how to build your own.

Here we recommend a led grow light manufacturer for you - Bysenled Lighting.

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bsledlee

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bsledlee
Joined: November 11th, 2013
Articles Posted: 19

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