Hydroponics?

Simply ‘Gardening without soil’. Hydroponics offers home gardeners and those new to gardening, a clean, efficient and convenient way to grow plants. No soil. No mess. Surprisingly, you can even grow more in less time.

Strange you may think – no soil - but when you consider that the hydroponics growing of food and flowers has been going on for years and is all around us everyday in our supermarkets, you might want to know more. Hydroponics growing techniques are responsible for the commercial supply of nearly all tomatoes, peppers, herbs and cucumbers, most strawberries and most of the flowers that you see available on the high street today.

It is believed that hydroponics first started in the ancient city of Babylon, but now many of the fruit and vegetables we buy from the supermarket are grown this way. It offers year round gardening as plants can be grown anytime and anywhere. It is a clean and time efficient way to grow as no soil to used, it eliminates digging and weeding and it uses water more efficiently. It is now well established that hydroponics can encourage quicker growth and increased yield, enhance flavour of crops and encourage healthy eating.

Now, hydroponics is becoming increasingly popular with the hobby gardener wanting to grow fruit and vegetables at home: tomatoes, herbs, chillies and even bananas on a banana tree! Whether you want to grow more tomatoes than you can in soil in your green house or cultivate chillies in your conservatory, hydroponics is there to be explored.

Aquaculture, one of the leading hydroponics equipment suppliers in the UK, has a passion for hydroponics and a mission to bring hydroponics gardening to homes in a big way. It’s a new gardening revolution about to blossom – it’s a horticultural brit pop explosion of new ideas and ways of doing things. The produce is natural, tasty, clean and easy to grow. It can be urban. It can be rural. It’s definitely fun and anyone can do it. ‘Hydroponics – join the gardening revolution’ evangelises new ideas for growing in the home and garden.

Hydroponics has been briefly featured in the media by BBC Gardener’s World and various gardening magazines, but it’s about time that the UK catches up to the US, where they have progressed over the last 10 to15 years to see hydroponics (or hobby gardening) become a national pastime and a mass market has been created through a new home-growing revolution. Hydroponics kits can now even be found as educational toys on the shelves of Toys R Us.

In the UK, National Curriculum modules in many schools, small farms and nurseries up and down the country now regularly use hydroponics to explain and discuss plant biology, horticulture and food production.

Together with a well respected traditional large specimen vegetable growing champion. In an event to showcase the benefits of hydroponics, Aquaculture hydroponics has teamed up with Mr Gerald Treweek - a champion grower with honours from the highly esteemed Royal Horticultural National vegetable society - to beat the current world record of 15lb 15 1/2oz.

Although Gerald has won several honours for his large and specimen category vegetables, he is still relatively new to hydroponics growing. Last year, Gerald used some of the growth promoters we use in hydroponics. These included mostly beneficial micro-organisms which can still be used in traditional soil growing, like most of our products. These micro-organisms promote healthy root growth and protect the plant from disease causing pathogens. The onion Gerald grew last year weighed a respectable 10lb 11oz.
This year, Gerald is fully embracing hydroponics where he has devoted one of his green houses for some of our systems. To grow an onion we need to use a media bed and the most suitable system to cultivate these vegetables is a Flood and Drain system. At regular intervals, nutrient solution (nutrient & water) is automatically pumped from the tank to flood the table and is then allowed to drain away. Therefore your plants receive all the water and nutrients they require as well as atmospheric oxygen directly to the root system as air is drawn in on the drain. The result is a large output of high quality plants.

The World Health Organisation has also citied Hydroponics as being one of the most important focus and development areas in food production in the 21st Century. Its non-reliance on often poor soil conditions in under-developing countries means more food could be grown, or an agricultural economy developed, if it were more widely used.

We’ve even seen hydroponics in Hollywood, featured in Space 1999.

Hydroponics is new to most people – gardeners and non-gardeners alike. It is there to be explored and demonstrated to the mass market so that they can appreciate and enjoy the tremendous benefits it offers.

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Check out http://www.aquaculture-hydroponics.co.uk