Plant Gardens 101

Hydroponics in space using LED light

If you have scoured around the Internet at all lately or kept up with the technology blogs, you will have an absolutely seen articles written about NASA using hydroponics to grow plants hydroponically in space. The idea of being able to grow your own food in space is incredible for what it can offer astronauts on long journeys taking many months or years. For future development missions of Mars, as well as possible development for life on the moon, as well as onboard the international space station. In the near future astronaut farmers will be able to use hydroponics aboard the space station or their space vessels to grow their own food, and not have to be reliant upon earth for refueling of food and nutritional items. The astronauts will be growing their own food with hydroponics in space. This would free up additional spacecraft hulls so that they can bring in other items and not waste valuable cargo space with food when astronauts could be growing their own fresh fruits in space with hydroponics.

The LED light is researched by NASA currently because that type of lighting system uses very little electrical power and can be run off of small batteries. This means that this type of LED lighting when used in combination with hydroponics will consume very little battery power and allow many hydroponic systems powered by LED lights to grow a wide variety of fresh produce and vegetables in space or aboard space station with hydroponics. A typical LED light bulb lasts from 8 to 10 years under heavy use and will not have any heat byproduct to deal with, such as normal traditional high pressure sodium or metal halide light bulbs that are commonly used in hydroponics application. The high energy draw and heat put off by these types of high-powered lights would not be a viable option in a aboard a space station or spacecraft. However the LED light can be very effective for plants grown in hydroponics because it LED lights is as bright to the plant as an HPS light is to our eyes. (more…)

CO2 will greatly increase your yields when growing with hydroponics

Hydroponics has become very popular lately among indoor farmers. Hydroponics is simple. Hydroponics is nothing more than growing plants with water instead of soil. The water is pre-mixed with hydroponics nutrients that will give the plants roots all the fertilizers they need to grow big and strong as if they were in nature. Hydroponics nutrients are similar to the fertilizers that are found in nature from the earth. Plants grown hydroponically using nutrients in grow bigger and faster than plants in nature using fertilizers and that’s because hydroponics spoon feed a plant everything it needs to grow at very fast speeds.

When plants are growing in a hydroponics application such as a nice hydroponics grow box for instance, plants will receive much light per hour than they would ever receive in nature. This is because you can keep a light in the hydroponic grow box system on longer than the sun would naturally stay up in nature. The plants are being spoon-fed exactly the right amount of lighting in high dosages. On top of that you have to consider that plants grown hydroponically also receive a high amount of water and nutrients to the root system. (more…)