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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 …

When you have a lot of your hydroponic gear thought out, and you're in the midst of installing reservoirs, tubing, lighting and everything else you need to make your plants grow, one of the next big steps is thinking about germination.In a lot of cases, hydroponic gardeners choose to germinate their own seeds rather than buying seedlings. One reason is that germinating from seeds is much less expensive -- other reasons have to do with the particular setup of hydroponic systems, where trans …

So one of the first things that you’ll have to do with hydroponics is strategize and engineer your overall garden space, so that you will know what you have to do to support plants.This involves a lot of different kinds of thinking about plant biology and the resources that you have to start off your first hydroponic garden.Closed or Open Grow SystemsOne of the biggest choices that you make is whether to have a closed grow system cut off from other interior space, or to use a particular ro …

Want a real world idea about how hydroponics really works? Take this case study from northern Virginia.TrueFarms is a farm operation specializing in hydroponic lettuce and a few other crops, located in Haymarket, Virginia, in the northeastern part of the state. Here, a husband and wife team are making history with vibrant cultivation of different varieties of lettuce in a hydroponic greenhouse farm.The farm’s website shows that the owners started out in 2009, acquiring the land that woul …