A Newbies Guide to Hydroponic Part 1: Choose Your Space

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 Systems

One 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 room or area of a building as a dedicated grow area.

There are pros and cons to both approaches. Closed compact grow systems really nurture plants in a controlled way – and they’re great for a smaller number of plants. An open grow space is good for when you want a lot of production and you’re able to fill the entire space with the atmospheric conditions that you need.

Your choice is going to determine how you maintain your grow area. While closed systems often have a lot of tools to help growers figure out what’s going on inside, grow areas usually get maintained in a very hands-on way – again, using the whole room for production.

Thinking About Natural Resources

Another big element of this is understanding the resources that you already have in your building. For instance, some of the big Canadian hydroponics projects that we’ve seen, and quite a few American ones as well, feature buildings with open glass window spaces where natural sunlight comes in. Here it’s possible to get away without buying a bunch of grow lights, and just use the power of the sun to deliver what plants need.

However, using natural resources goes beyond just using sunlight. There’s also the possibility of utilizing the interior temperature or humidity of the space as it is affected by the outdoor environment. Whether or not you need dedicated air handling equipment like vents and fans is going to be a major part of your hydroponics design process.

Power Sources

You also need a good amount of power to run your hydroponics garden. A lot of this power is going to get used by pumps that will route water throughout a hydroponic space. Here again, you have the specific question of whether to use natural resources or rely on an electrical power grid. Lots of growers are now hooking up solar panels and batteries to their hydroponic garden – in that case, even if they do have grow lights, they can use solar power to provide energy for those lights. They can also run pumps and air handling equipment off of solar power. Other growers may use generators or localized solutions, but quite a few just hook up hydroponic equipment to wall outlets so that they are drawing power from the traditional electrical grid.

These are just a few of the questions that you’re going to answer when starting up your first hydroponic garden. All of this happens before you ever introduce the plants, which is what we’re going to talk about in the next post. Have fun and happy gardening!