I've been learning a thing or two about how to take advantage of hydroponic gardening, without a full hydroponic rig. (I'll document HOW I'm doing this in this post.)
Advantages of hydroponics, compared to growing in dirt:
• Starts are reported to grow MUCH faster.
• If you set them up right, they don't need watering nearly as often, which means less work for me.
• I'm led to believe that I can leave peppers and other (small) veggies in these small hydroponic containers forever: no need to up-pot. (I'm guessing that tomatoes will be too big, but we'll see.)
• I can grow stuff in the winter. More specifically, I can work on growing stuff in the winter.
• It's new and different and cool. I get to try new things.
Disadvantages of hydroponics, compared to growing in dirt.
• I'll need to be careful transplanting hydroponically started plants into dirt.
• I don't know how to make hydroponic nutrition, and buying them is more expensive than making compost from grass and leaves and chicken poop.
• A full hydroponic system (which I do not have) will be far more complex than dirt gardening.
So far I've started some tomatoes and some lettuce (romaine) in hydroponics pots. The real goal is the pepper plants, but they're being slow to germinate.
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