ADVANTAGES OF HYDROPONICS

Advantages of hydroponics...

And here they are:
 

PERSONAL PLEASURE

FARMING FOR URBANITES

• Do you live in a condo or high-rise apartment? No piece of earth to call your own? Not even a patio? Then hydroponics is the answer for you! Fresh, tasty veggies or culinary or medicinal herbs from your spare bedroom... or even a closet.
   
• If you're confined to a wheelchair, hydroponics is the perfect way for you to enjoy a garden. The planting beds are traditionally placed at just the right height for easy access. What a superb and satisfying hobby (or even vocation) this would be for you!
   

EMOTIONAL BENEFITS

Advantages of hydroponics...

• Hydroponics is a soothing, satisfying, stress-dissolving hobby. It's an escape. Put a chair right next to your unit. Tend to your babies, train them up vines and talk to them. Play classical, jazz or new age music for them. Or even hard rock if you want to. Who cares what people think?    
        
                     
                     
• Hydroponic gardening puts you back in touch with nature in a delightful way. And don't forget the "WOW" factor... your friends and family will hold you in awe for your impressive agricultural achievements.
   

A LABOR-SAVING DEVICE

• Here's the best part of all: NO WEEDS!!! If you've ever had a soil garden, you will understand how liberating this is. No weeds, no weed killers, no back-breaking labor, no despair when you come back from vacation to find an overgrown weed patch where your melons used to be.
   
• There's also no tilling, plowing, hoes, wheelbarrows or bags of manure to deal with. Ugh!
   

FOOD FOR THE FUTURE

Advantages of hydroponics...

SUPERIOR TASTE & NUTRITION

• When home hydroponics first emerged on the scene a few decades ago, honestly, the produce was not that tasty. But that's all changed due to modern methods and superior nutrients. Grocery-bought vegetables have been bred to ship tough, last for weeks, and look great on the shelf... but they are bland! Blah! Tasteless! Hydroponic veggies are more delicate and tender... and they taste great!
   
• It's been proven that hydroponically grown vegetables can have up to 50% more vitamin content (particularly vitamin A, all B complexes, C and E) than conventional crops*.

CONSISTENCY

• With soil-based gardening, you are at the mercy of soil quality, the wind and weather, bugs and soil-born diseases. With hydroponics, you have much more control over your garden... with more consistent results.
   
• Hydroponics also lends itself beautifully to automation (auto pilot). Set it and forget it! Well, not quite...

AS GREEN AS IT GETS

Advantages of hydroponics...

CONSERVATION

• You'll get a much higher yield from a hydroponics garden, and the growing cycle is shorter. Once you get the hang of it and learn how to optimize, you can expect 3 times as much produce from your indoor growing plot.
   
• We hear so often about the scarcity of water and the need to conserve it. Well, hydroponics only uses 1/20 to 1/30 the amount of water as traditional, soil-based gardening. It is recycled, and every molecule of water is squeezed to the max. You use less fertilizer, too. More money in your pocket.
   

EARTH-FRIENDLY GARDENING

• Soil-born insects, funguses, viruses and diseases are eliminated entirely in a hydroponic system. You usually garden inside, or in a climate-controlled greenhouse, so you won't have a plague of locusts descend on you, or sweet little bunnies munching on your prized buttercrunch lettuce. If you do have an invasion of whitefly or red spider mites, you can quickly take control of your compact garden and eradicate these pests easily, and almost always without pesticides. Now that's truly organic!
  
  
                     
   
• Your new hydroponic garden will likely remain totally pesticide free. And there is no phosphate-rich fertilizer runoff to pollute and choke the rivers and streams nearby. This makes hydroponics the most environmentally sound (AND GREEN) gardening method available today.
   

Advantages of hydroponics...

In the next section, Simon tells you the 2 biggest mistakes people make in their garden. It's time now to consider all the Disadvantages of Hydroponics.
 

(*Source: Hobby Hydroponics, 2003, Howard Resh).