Seasonal Hydroponic Growing - It's Pumpkin Time!

As the weather turns cooler, you might start to tailor your hydroponic grow schedule to the season. In that case, how about some pumpkins?

As summer turns into fall, growers might want to start growing certain crops for the season. We see people planning nothing but pumpkins. Why? Because they’re bright orange reminders that we’re about to enjoy warm sweaters, hot cider, Halloween and all of those things we love about fall.

Growing Pumpkins

One of the biggest things about growing pumpkins is having enough space to support them. For these kinds of crops, a small compact grow box just won’t do. That is, unless you're able to snake the vines out of the plant pots and let them spread across the floor or other surface.

In fact, that's one of the biggest parts of any strategy for fall pumpkin growing in hydroponics. You end up separating the plant root environment from the plant stem environment -- you set up a specific little spot for the plant's connection to the irrigation system and everything else, and you let the vines go their own way. In fact, we've even seen people tie their hydroponics system to a wall, making a tunnel to let the actual pumpkin vines grow across an outdoor crash space and use natural light. It's a kind of hybrid combination where the plant roots are within a closed, micromanaged system, but the pumpkins grow wild outdoors.

Gourds and Other Squash

You can also try a set of decorative gourds or other similar plant varieties. Again, though, you'll need space. Even for culinary squash like regular yellow cooking squash, these bush-like plants are going to need quite a bit of space. Cooking squash and zucchini can actually grow well in a bucket system, where each plant gets its own 5 gallon bucket as a container.

Corn

Corn isn't the most popular crop in hydroponics -- partly because of the space that it needs to grow vertically. But you can pursue a kind of 5 gallon bucket system for these crops as well, or even set the roots in PVC piping along the floor. That would get you either decorative corn for autumn wreathes or other decorations, or sweet corn for a Thanksgiving meal.

These are just some of the ways that hydroponic gardeners ring in the fall season. Think about how to dress up your hydroponics system for autumn by building some of these larger crops into your grow plan.