Do You Need a Garden to Grow Vegetables?

The Hydroponic Garden--A Guide to Hydroponics
Hydroponics allows us to grow the plants, fruits and vegetables of our choice--even in limited space--without using soil. It's an amazing way to produce perfect specimens and offers TONS of advantages that traditional gardening can't come close to touching!

Do you really need a garden to grow your own vegetables and herbs? Not really. On a small scale, all you really need is a kitchen counter.

With hydroponics, you can grow your own food just about anywhere, even in a basement. All it takes is enough light, the right temperature, a grow medium to anchor the plant's roots, and a nutrient solution.

There are advantages and disadvantages to hydroponic gardening. Some of the advantages are that you can grow food anywhere, the quality of soil is not a factor, pest management is a lot easier and the need for pesticides is decreases, which is better for the environment. The plants are fed nutrients that can be controlled, which means faster growing plants that deliver a crop full of nutrition. Hydroponics also takes a lot less water, as little as 10 percent of conventional farming, which is attactive in areas that suffer from drought.

The downside is that if the plants are not properly looked after and the nutrient solution depletes, the plants will quickly die. 

Hydroponics is great also because it can be scaled from a small kitchen unit to a huge commercial operation. You can do it yourself, or buy something like an AeroGarden, which is all automated. 

For the hydroponics newbie, take some time to learn the ropes. It's a bit more complicated than just putting a seed in a pot of dirt and pouring some water on it. But we'll explore hydroponic gardening in future articles. 

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