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Hydroponics FAQ

What exactly is hydroponics?
How long has hydroponics been around?
I'm a scientist. Why should I care about hydroponics?
I'm a gardener. Why should I care about hydroponics?
I'm neither a scientist nor a gardener. Why should I care about hydroponics?

What exactly is hydroponics?

Hydroponics is the growing of plants in water instead of soil. To do this successfully, the water must be enriched with nutrients and sometimes oxygenated. Also, the plants must be placed in some type of inert medium like sand or Perlite (like we used) to anchor the roots.

How long has hydroponics been around?

Hydroponics has been around for over 70 years. One of the first scientists to experiment with hydroponic culture was Jean Boussingault, who grew plants in containers with sand and coal, feeding them with chemical solutions of known makeup. Around the beginning of the 1930's, Professor W. F. Gericke saw commercial potential in Boussingault's techniques and began to use them to grow vegetables, flowers, and other types of plants. Since then, hydroponically grown vegetables have been very important in America's history. For example, in 1939 the American army and British Air Force installed hydroponic units in their military bases, and Allied troops ate hydroponically grown vegetables during World War II.

I'm a scientist. Why should I care about hydroponics?

Scientists can use hydroponics to test how different nutrients affect a plant. With hydroponics, a scientist can measure exactly how much nutrient the plant is getting and can give the plant a deficiency or overabundance of a certain macro or micronutrient and determine precisely how it affects the plant's growth.

I'm a gardener. Why should I care about hydroponics?

Hydroponics can be very important to farmers and gardeners who want complete control over their plants. Many factors can affect plants that are grown in soil out in the fields. For a plant to receive a well balanced diet, everything in the soil must be in perfect balance. Rarely, if ever, can you find such ideal conditions in soil due to contamination and biological imbalances. But with hydroponics, water is enriched with these very same nutrient salts, creating a hydroponic nutrient solution that is perfectly balanced. And since this hydroponic nutrient solution is contained, it does not harm our environment as does runoff from fertilized soil. Also, very little water is lost to evaporation in a hydroponic system, making hydroponics very useful in drought stricken areas. Additionally, plants can be grown hydroponically inside greenhouses to protect them from pests; this makes harmful pesticides unnecessary.

I'm neither a scientist nor a gardener. Why should I care about hydroponics?

Even if you are neither a scientist nor a gardener, hydroponics can be important to you. There are so many benefits to hydroponics that it will probably become the agriculture of the future. Each day, more facts are learned about this type of farming, and soon we will know enough to make it the most efficient and effective way to grow plants. You too can benefit from the knowledge of hydroponics and could even start an amateur flower garden or vegetable garden from the information in our web page.

Source for entire FAQ: Casana, Maritza. maritza_casana@hotmail.com. "Práctica de producción de hortalizas bajo la técnica de hidroponía en agua y perlita." 7 Jan 2001. Personal e-mail. (14 Jan 2001).

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