How to Understand the Meaning of SIPs

If you're in the growing world, you may be hearing a lot of something called submerged irrigation planting or SIP. You might be thinking about how this relates to the general hardware products industry overall, and how to evaluate and choose between new options for plants.

The essential thing to understand is that SIP has borrowed concepts from hydroponics and used them in very similar ways.

The definition of a SIP is simply where there is water and a pump underneath some other type of media for the purposes of irrigating plants. Does that sound like hydroponics? It should. There is the same focus on having water immediately available to the plant roots. There is also the same allowance for indoor growing. You might see growers working with SIPs and putting them in a simple Tupperware container. This is the same kind of thrill that hydroponic growers can get from using simple household materials to set up plants indoors.

So why haven't people called SIP hydroponics? The answer, for some industry insiders, is in the consumer markets for these kinds. A few weeks ago, we saw a post that was written a while ago from someone working in hydroponics, talking about why they used to be reluctant to call SIP hydroponics. The writer explained that in the past, he'd seen hydroponics as a kind of specialized thing for marijuana growers, in what was then a largely illegal industry. By contrast, other similar methods seemed more toward the kind of urban gardening that families used to grow food.

A few things have happened since those times, though. First, hydroponics has taken off in a big way. People have realized the effectiveness of the indoor hydroponic method in general. And also, the hydroponics industry has become more diverse. People aren’t just growing controlled substances. They’re growing lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers and anything else that you can think of that would grow in a regular garden.

Basically, SIP is just a kind of bubbling irrigating piece that sits underneath some type of covering media. Yes, that medium can be soil. But it can also be clay pellets or any of the other stuff that you put into the average hydroponics plant pot.

So think about how to integrate any of these ideas into a strategy to grow personal produce in a home or office space. Ask Dealzer what we can do to support your goals and sell you thethings that you can use to keep achieving with hydro.