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How much quicker is hydroponics compared to traditional gardening?

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For some growers, speed is the name of the game.

If you're one of these types, you may want to know about how to speed up your crop cycles with hydroponics. You might be wondering about how hydroponic growing is different from traditional soil-based gardening, and how it can help you be more efficient to generate more fresh produce over time.

Hydroponics will not make plants mature faster than they would in soil, although some growers have been able to induce early flowering for harvests. Instead, there are a number of practical ways that growers can grow quickly with hydroponics, mostly through micromanaging the process and creating different types of environments for plants.

Germination

Hydroponic plants can be germinated anywhere. They can be germinated in soil, or in layers of damp paper towels. Either way, growers can set up a separate germination table indoors to start the germinating process early. By contrast, with traditional soil-based methods, you had to wait until last frost just to plant the seeds -- so you were getting harvests later in the summer. But in hydroponics, because it's an all-indoor process, you have a year-round growing season that really increases how much you can grow within a year.

Transplants

Plants that are germinated early can continue to grow until the grower wants to transfer them to the hydroponics environment. You can think of your major hydroponics grow box as a type of “main stage” grow mechanism. You shuffle growing plants in and out of the system, to allow for a greater number of crop cycles over time.

It's a myth that you can't transplants soil plants to hydroponics and vice versa. You can, although in some cases it may require extra care for the root structures. So by moving plants from one station to another, and maintaining multiple stations at once, you dramatically shorten your time for harvests. For example, say you have a harvest goal for July. You may start your seeds in March, transplant them in May, and harvest early in July. At the same time, you can be growing another batch of seeds from May through July, to put inside the grow box as soon as you harvest the last crop.

Continual Harvest

There's also the process of deciding when to harvest plants. Many green plants can provide harvests over 1 to 2 months or even longer. So it's up to you as the grower to select the strategy that will allow you to grow as much as you want. Again, though, with hydroponics you have two things on your side: a year-round growing season, and the ability to multi-stage plants for quicker harvests.

For more on the ins and outs of hydroponics, check out Dealzer’s website and learn more about how to start today!

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