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Mother's Mini-Manual Hydroponics - Animal Forage |
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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!
Author: Mother Earth News
May 22, 2008-GoogleNews
Hydroponic
sprouting for animals is popular all over the world with farmers,
ranchers, horsemen, and zoos. It is a compact, simple, and cheap way to
produce high-quality green forage for house pets or farm animals. A
space 20 feet long and 8 feet high can turn out a thousand pounds of
greens every day, all year round. Any kind of grass or cereal grains
can be sprouted—rye, oats, barley, alfalfa, etc. The nutrient solution
increases the food value of the final product. It takes about seven to
ten days to go from seed to an eight?inch mat of greens, packed with
vitamins and minerals. Here's how you do it: Sprouting is done in
trays about 3 or 4 inches deep and any convenient length and width. The
bottoms are lined with a thin layer of absorbent material such as
burlap, foam rubber, or edible paper. Soak your seed overnight in plain
water, then spread it generously and evenly over the bottom of the
tray. Keep the bottom moist but not soggy with a half-strength nutrient
solution. Keep the tray in a warm, semi-dark place for a couple of
days. Then, when the sprouts are about half an inch high, let them have
light. Add the weak nutrient solution from time to time but, after the
sixth day, use plain water. When the greens are ready, just peel up the
entire mat and watch your animals gobble it, sprouts, roots, seeds, and
all. If you start a new batch every day or so, you can harvest a
steady supply. Trays can be stacked and grown compactly in racks. With
a little thought and planning you can set up a very compact and
efficient feed production unit. Sprouting works best at a
temperature of 65° to 70° F. If the weather turns very cold, you will
have to provide artificial heat or quit. A lot can be done in some warm
corner of your house, but in order to do large-scale production in cold
weather, you must use a well insulated and heated structure. At
first thought, the practice of growing plants in an inert medium (such
as gravel), feeding them periodically with dissolved nutrients, and
then draining away the fertilizing solution to aerate the roots seems
downright "unnatural". But people all over the world—from India (where
folks frequently feed themselves from discarded containers filled with
rubble) to the Netherlands Antilles (where large hydroponic farms
operate with distilled seawater on otherwise useless agricultural land)
to the good ole U.S.A. (where even famous organic gardeners,
such as Eddie Albert, endorse hydroponics)?are finding that the
arrangement does, in fact, have many practical advantages over
"ordinary" soil cultivation techniques. Take, for instance, the
fact that hydroponics gardeners can often obtain a greater crop of
tasty and nutritious foods (or of healthy ornamentals) from a smaller
space simply because the amounts of nutrients given to a plant and
the times of those nutrients' application can be controlled and
adjusted and tailored to meet that particular plant's specific needs. Read more ...
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