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One of the most common things that people do when thinking about hydroponics is to compare it to traditional farming. That's not surprising, given that humans have done soil-based agriculture for hundreds and thousands of years. Some of the more advanced societies have also done hydroponics, but what we’re most familiar with, in our Western civilization, is growing plants in the ground. That is, up until just a few decades ago, when people started to realize that you could do good plant cu …

One of the big issues with hydroponics is always the grow lighting that growers use. Grow lights have to have the right spectrum for plant support. They have to have the right intensity to really give plants what they need for photosynthesis. They need to work correctly and be placed adequately to prevent issues like plant burning.But what about grow light maintenance?We don't often talk about grow light maintenance -- it's something that tends to stay on the back burner as we focus on thin …

If you're growing for the first time, you may be wondering about yield. Obviously, this is one of the biggest questions in any hydroponic project - how much are you going to get out of the investment that you put in? How much can you get out of a certain grow space and a certain number of plants?Unfortunately, the average yield of a hydroponics project is pretty hard to come by. The overall yield relies on so many factors that it's hard to give you a mean or median. Instead, use some logica …

In the midst of helping plants through to maturity in a hydroponic garden, growers have to be on the lookout for some specific types of common problems that can quickly kill or devastate plants.Here are some of those things that seasoned hydroponic gardeners will warn newcomers about.Burning PlantsGrow lights that are too intense or too close to plants can cause some plants get burned. You may see evidence of singeing or burning on the tips of leaves or other areas of the plant.This big pro …

Once you have your plants safely in your carefully engineered hydroponic network, one of your major concerns will be how to feed them.Hydroponic science relies on a complex set of ideas about plant feeding. In addition to acquiring the right chemical makeup for nutrients, growers need to make sure that plants can digest the materials that are in their environment. Scientists have come up with a fancy word for this called ‘chelation.’In order to make sure that plants grow well, growers have …