Hydroponics for the Home Gardener: An easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide for growing healthy vegetables, herbs and house plants without soil. (Gardening)
Stewart Kenyon
Language: English
Pages: 61
ISBN: 2:00024562
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Revised and updated.
Hydroponics for the Home Gardener is an easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide to growing organic, healthy vegetable, herbs and house plants without soil.
Clearly illustrated with black and white line drawings, the book covers every aspect of home hydroponic gardening including: - Building a hydroponic system versus buying a kit - Plant propagation and indoor pollination - Outdoor hydroponics, recipes, and much more.
chunky soil to compete for nutrients. Instead, a hydroponic system distributes nutrients evenly to each plant. What's more, plants need air to breathe, and, unlike soil, a porous growing aggregate lets air circulate freely around them. Consequently, everything grows quickly and beautifully. Hydroponic plants grow faster, ripen earlier and give up to ten times the yield of soil-grown plants. These clean and pampered plants produce fruits and vegetables of great nutritive value and superior
Water that is too pure may have to be supplemented with slight increases of some trace elements, especially calcium and magnesium. If the water is very hard, you will need less calcium and magnesium but probably more iron, because iron becomes less available to the plant as the hardness of the water increases. For these reasons, it is a good idea to have an analysis done on your water supply at your local utility. If you obtain your water from a well or source other than a Public Works
Plant about eight inches apart. Nitrogen, phosphorus and iron are required in larger amounts. CELERY This is a great salad vegetable to grow. Celery does best on the cool side, and it dislikes temperature extremes. Plant about four inches apart and use the young stalks and leaves for your salad. It is best about two months old and pencil thin. By the time it is four months old, it is useful only for soups and stews. Don't uproot an entire plant; simply cut off a few stalks at a time. Larger
book that makes this claim, yet when I have the two side by side indoors, the tomatoes stop growing. (A list of "friends" and "enemies" will be found under the heading Companion Planting at the end of this chapter.) SQUASH AND ZUCCHINI these are grown in basically the same way as cucumbers, but remember how much space a zucchini occupies and plant eight to nine inches apart. Pinch the plant off after six or seven sets of leaves to keep the energy closer to the root system and to ensure fruiting.
Grown outdoors, lettuce should be kept in a cool, shady place after partial maturity. It doesn't need full sunlight. BOLTING OF RADISHES Like lettuce, radishes need a lot of light at the start, and your luck will be better outdoors than indoors. However, this is no reason not to try it inside. I would suggest that when growing radishes you devote a whole planter to them, or at least a single planter for root vegetables, and use only water for the first three weeks. Until the seedlings are well