With traditional gardening methods, soil provides a plant with nutrients, and anchors a plant's roots. In a hydroponic garden, you provide your plants with a complete nutrient formula and use an inert growing medium to anchor the roots.

Many Advantages

Hydroponics is ideal for growing plants in a greenhouse or other indoor setting.

It offers many advantages over soil gardening indoors. It's cleaner, there are fewer pests, plants grow more quickly, nutrients can be more easily controlled, and plants can be grown more closely together.

The energy that a plant normally devotes to root growth searching for food and water goes instead to leaf growth, since water and minerals are delivered directly to the plant's roots. As a result, yield per square foot is considerably higher in hydroponics, an important consideration when growing in a limited indoor space.

Hydroponics is not new

Hydroponics has been around for thousands of years. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon and floating Aztec gardens used hydroponic techniques. But modern applications began only in the 1930s following research at University of California.

This space-age technology will play an important role in future food production. Some large commercial greenhouses in Canada already produce an increasing amount of hydroponically grown lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes and salad greens every year. Much of this produce now finds its way to your local supermarket.

Types of systems

There are many different types of systems. The one that is best for you depends on what you want to grow, how much space you have available, whether or not you will want to expand your garden in the future, how much time you have available for maintenance, what your budget is and so on.

If you are just getting started,  read as much as you can, and start on a small scale actually growing a small crop to get hands-on experience before getting ambitious. Similarly, don't attempt to build your own system until you have some successful experience using a proven system.