Hydroponics: Growing an appreciation for plants | Hacker News Reader

Hydroponics: Growing an appreciation for plants

bunniestudios.com

252 pointszdw99 comments

> For me, hydroponics really drove home how remarkable plants are: from a bin containing nothing but water and salts, a fully-formed plant emerges.

I feel this is a remarkably underappreciated feat of nature. Some people compare a plant seed to an SD card containing the drawings for a skyscraper. This is an unbelievable understatement. The seed does not just contain the genetic material describing the final object. It also contains information about the whole assembly process, and a very robust one in many cases. It also contains the information about all the tooling needed for the assembly process. And it also contains the initial basic tools to make all that happen. This is truly remarkable. Nobody would dream of putting an SD card into the ground and seeing a skyscraper grow. It's obvious that you need external tooling, knowledge, skill and materials (that have to be externally created from raw materials) for all of this to happen. Plant seed? Everything included.

What I find sad about this article is that it needed hydroponics for the appreciation for plants. Hydroponics is a very sterile and artificial way of growing plants, removed from their actual environment and only showcasing a single aspect of growing a plant. My appreciation for plants comes every time I step out into nature. Just take a step into a forest, you don't even need to move to see lots of wonders of nature around you. The complexity of all living things nature has to offer, from the molecular level all the way up to complex interactions in the ecosystem, that really dwarfs your k8s setup by orders of magnitude.

Tech people sometimes need to be a bit more humble. (To which this article contributes. I like that.)

You may find this idea interesting: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seed_Factories

Minor nitpick: The genome does not describe the final object, but only the assembly process algorithms.

I don't even think it describes the assembly process. More a base template or seed data for the assembly process to act upon.

As a systems person, what I really love is how this miracle you describe is itself just one small cog in vast machine of inter-dependent miracles. A plant growing from a seed is meaningless outside the context of soil, liquids and gases in the ecosystem, each part of some other life cycle.

This was brought home to me when a bachelors student presented a final year project for an "Aquaponics" [1] controller system. I'd never heard of such a thing but I was blown away by how far you can take control systems engineering in your own garden shed. Once you add fish, nutrients, acidity, micro-organisms and whatnot into the monitoring equations even the most simplified model takes on a majestic level of complexity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaponics

This is why I am so fascinated with closed loops systems such as aquaponiocs. If we can create a closed loop sustainable system in the small scale, we can then decentralize it to avoid the inevitable cause of the first likely long term international 21st century food crisis: monocultural devastation.

It also has space exploration implications.

The mostly failed Biosphere 2 project of the 90s, and the 1996 movie Bio Dome starring Pauly Shore, are relevant to those ideas :)

In all seriousness I do think it’s fascinating, and am interested in any developments since then

You may enjoy reading about Lunar Palace 1, China's latest experiment with regenerative life support systems:

https://www.space.com/40610-china-mock-moon-mission-lunar-pa...

Or BIOS-3, the Soviet Union's experiments in this area during the in 1970s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS-3

The EU has the MELiSSA program, which has a nice website and lots of meetings but no human-scale enclosures of which I'm aware:

https://www.melissafoundation.org/

Amazing links. Thank you for posting.

> Tech people sometimes need to be a bit more humble.

Not sometimes but very often IMHO and not only a bit but a huge amount of humbleness is needed.

Would it be possible to artificially create a seed that grows into a house or building?

Maybe if we ever figure out true, self replicating nanomachines.

Most certainly yes. But the best way we currently have to get that seed is manufacturing environment that rewards building-shaped trees and waiting a couple million years.

They already do.

Oh, wait, you mean a house for people. Sorry, my mistake.

> What I find sad about this article is that it needed hydroponics for the appreciation for plants. Hydroponics is a very sterile and artificial way of growing plants, removed from their actual environment and only showcasing a single aspect of growing a plant.

In the end, the result was still the same - an appreciation for plants. I find it quite fascinating to see the wonders of nature taking place within the artificial environment. It provides such a stark contrast and there is something almost magical and transformational about a formerly purely artificial environment suddenly being awash with the natural. I think one can appreciate the unique characteristics of hydroponics, and also still respect and appreciate the wonders one finds in nature.

The seed is also recursive, in that it contains all the instructions necessary to get the resulting plant to produce more of the seed.

> to get the resulting plant to produce more of the seed.

Not _exactly_ the same seed, but _a_ seed that can (maybe) grow again.

Not only that - the majority of the structural material in a plant comes directly from the air! (Plants use a bit of water to convert CO2 to cellulose and O2)

There is a tangible difference between growing and nurturing something yourself, and seeing it do its own thing in the wild. Sure, nature is magnificent in its own right and displays that almost every time we walk out the door. But setting up your own system, whether it be a soil based system or hydroponics, gives a better sense of understanding and an appreciation for the actual process and end result.

FWIW I run a small hydroponics system off my porch and its amazing to see all the small changes that happen over the course of a day/week. Everything from water temp to nutrients levels to PH can change the outcome dramatically! And then there really is a sense of ownership/responsibility for the thing.

Thankfully I took a horticulture class in high school. We had a huge green house at the school. It really gave me an appreciation for plants. I have 2 plots at a community garden and a couple small ones at my house. Watching seeds grow is fascinating.

> from a bin containing nothing but water and salts, a fully-formed plant emerges

From water, salts, and a crapton of airborne carbon. The plant takes electrons from the water and adds it to carbon dioxide to make glucose. Most of the plant is the carbon, so the plant is mostly made from air.

> the hardest part was figuring out what, exactly, I had to add to the water to get the plants to flourish.

If you don't want to engineer it from first principles: MasterBlend Tomato[1]. Plants love this shit. I've grown a lot of plants hydroponically using this blend, and also use it to water/feed my soil plants.

> Mix 8 oz. of 4-18-38 in 100 gallons of water along with 5 oz. of Magnesium Sulfate. Completely dissolve. Then add 8 oz. of Calcium Nitrate and completely dissolve.

(At a smaller scale: it's about 12g 4-18-38, 6g Magnesium, and 12g Cal Nitrate per 5 gallon bucket.)

[1]: https://www.masterblend.com/4-18-38-tomato-formula/

Commenting just to save your comment in my history. Gonna use this one some day.

Thanks for the great tip! (Hydroponics/gardening)

Just FYI, you can "favorite" comments to save them. Click on the timestamp of the comment, and then there will be a "Favorite" option along the top.

Thanks!

Also fyi: favorites are public

Self taught alert! I haven't gotten into fermentation of food waste yet, which would be very effective. But I make my own liquid fertilizer from food waste by passing it through the digestive system of maggots. Although this isn't very "bio available" because of more "complex" biomolecules, I have been getting fantastic results so far with greens, beans, cabbages, etc.

I followed the following [0] video for making a simple liquid fertilizer setup using 2 paint buckets (not in English but easy to follow). The advantage IMO is that risks associated with things like overfertilisation are minimised.

[0] https://youtu.be/7vEpf20_9dA

Here's my quick intro to hydroponics.

If you want bridge your grow with automation and coding I recommend everyone take a look at

https://github.com/kizniche/Mycodo

If you're looking for instrumentation/controllers for your grow (CO2, PH, TDS, EC) I recommend:

https://atlas-scientific.com/

If you're indoor and need lighting, build your own LED based lighting. Use the Samsung LM301B or LM301H led. I shopped https://atreumlighting.com/ for my last DIY kit and my light fixture came out perfect.

If you're buying nutrients or supplements, always try to get them in powered formula. Liquid based formulas are typically more expensive because you're paying to ship the water around and water is heavy. Most nutrient lines provide a feed schedule and dosing. When doing nutrients, less is more, never give your plants too much fertilizer, you will damage your grow and burn your plants.

Yes, I'm growing cannabis, you can see some of the fun we've had over the years at:

https://www.instagram.com/fantasygrowtent/?hl=en

Thank you for sending me down the rabbit hole of automating my RDWC system :-) Seriously, it's the blending of many hobbies into one! I've been eyeing the Atlas Scientific Whitebox T1 now as it seems to allow me to start small, learn, and add new sensors/probes.

No problem, glad it was useful for someone. It really is so many different hobbies and sciences all wrapped into one, it's easy to get entralled. Even getting a system like RDWC which is what I run too, airtight is an adventure. All of the atlas gear is great from a DIY and budget perspective, you'll end up with professional grade feedback about your environment.

Hydroponics should be taught to schoolchildren in the first grade in every school. It’s a wonderful way to convey science and for kids to see the fruits of their experiments.

Playing devil's advocate .. it will also get the kids more disconnected from the natural environment that we're embedded in, after all. You know those statistics of so-and-so-many kids out of 100 don't know where beefsteak comes from, where milk comes from or how potatoes grow? Since all they see is the result in the store? This gets worse when the kids change from lack of knowledge to thinking plants grow in glass pots without soil.

Hydroponics may be fun for hackers. But it's a bastardized form of growing plants, that happens to work, but it's a terrible way to convey science (if not taught very carefully and embedded in a much larger picture with actual nature).

Schools should visit more farms instead.

I'm not seeing a binary here. My first impression of growing a plant was in a small styrofoam cup in a classroom. This impression in no way tainted by understanding of the science or reduced my appreciation for nature. In fact the experience did the exact opposite. We should all think less in 1s and 0s. Why not take kids out into nature and also introduce them to hydroponics? Can it not be both?

Visiting farms is nice to get an impression of how the real system works, but IMO it does little to help You understand the principles. You have to know those ahead to be able to grasp what the farmer actually does and why.

Seeing a growing a plant in a glass from a seed over multiple weeks does just that.

Once You understand / see for yourself why plants need water, air and nutrition, You'll see that farm in a completely different way.

There is nothing natural about farms either.

Schools should drop children in a forest and let them fight bears for berries. If it was good enough for 40,000 generations of hominids it's good enough for me.

Berries aren't available year round, so we should at least tell them to try eating leaves and roots.... /s

Does anyone have any decent guides on how to get started with hydroponics? I was looking over youtube videos but they are all confusing to me, so many different types of hydroponic systems and every video is like 'just buy these random pipes and pumps and stuff that are not available where you live and construct some weird ad-hoc setup'.

I have been trying to grow chilli peppers indoors with moderate success, although working with soil is annoying and messy, and I have somehow gotten some fungus gnats which are such a pain to get rid of once they get into the soil.

Clay balls, air pump, air stones, tote with water in it one or more holes drilled into the top to hold the baskets with your medium (clay balls). That's what people call DWC.

You can run into issues with water temperature which are mitigated by using something like hydroguard (beneficial bacteria) or running a setup with a water cooler (which requires more pipes and pumps and stuff).

Obviously since your plants are no longer growing in soil, which holds nutrients for some time and doesn't need constant fertilization, you now have to mix nutrients into your water solution, along with pH adjustments as needed depending on what you are growing.

It's not that complex and can be really, really fun to figure out.

I hear letting the plants dry out fully between waterings helps get rid of fungus gnats. Let them dry until the pot is obviously super dry when you pick up the plant.

https://youtube.com/c/Hoocho

For the fungus gnats -- Try 'Mosquito Bits' a biological way, using bacteria, of killing them while they're larvae in the soil-- Bti(Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis) produces toxins which are effective in killing various species of mosquitoes, fungus gnats, and blackflies, while having almost no effect on other organisms. They're very effective.

Interestingly, it was first found in a stagnant pool of water in the Negev Desert. (perhaps the only place found to naturally occur)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis_israele...

Start super basic, grow an herb or something like that in a cup of water. Go to a store and get one of the small potted herbs, take it out, clean the roots with water and stick it into a cup. This is super satisfying to see from a process stand point and a quick/easy win. After that start learning about different methods, and what each type of plant needs to thrive.

Hoocho's YouTube channel is great, already recommended below!

Fungus gnats only reproduce in the top layer of the soil. Keeping the top of the soil dry, by watering from the bottom helps a lot. You can also sprinkle diatomaceous earth on the top of the dry soil to kill them through dehydration.

> Fungus gnats only reproduce in the top layer of the soil

I had a bad case of fungus gnats, but they were in the bottom of the soil. My pots had drainage holes, and the gnats would fly in and out from there. Thankfully they were ZZ plants, which are fairly tough, so I'd only water once a month when the pots were bone dry, and after about 6 months the gnats finally faded away.

You just need a bucket with a lid that will keep light out of the hydroponic solution (to prevent algae growth), some sort of strong light (the sun works, obviously), nutrient mixture, and I'd highly recommend a small air pump and aquarium air stone. You suspend the plant in the top of the bucket by cutting a 2-3" hole in the lid and using something called a "net cup."

Hydroponics are a lot more pleasant than soil indoors, in part due to the lack of pests like fungus gnats.

This is a good write-up. Note that anyone pondering using indoor hydroponics to grow appreciable quantities of food should think on this first:

> "It’s been less practical to grow bulk vegetables, such as spinach. Brazilian spinach has been fairly successful in terms of growth, but it takes about a month for a cutting to grow to maturity, and we need about four plants to make a salad, so we’d need several racks of bins to make a dent in our vegetable consumption. Also, in general our herbs have had less pests than leafy green vegetables."

Growing food is a pretty complicated, and often underappreciated, skill. Humans learned to control fire and make tools well before, i.e. many thousands of years before, the first farmer-based civilizations began to appear.

Producing an appreciable amount of food indoors in a cold climate in the winter months might require several thousand watts of lighting, a fairly large space, signicant amounts of nutrients, and decent control of airflow, temperature and humidity. Constant daily work and inspection is required to avoid insect infestations and mold outbreaks (cleaning is critical). Many flowering and fruiting cycles in plants are highly light-period-sensitive so that has to be carefully managed as well. Expect to put in hours of labor every day, without fail.

As a result, most simple indoor hydroponics setups are geared towards things like lettuce which just produce leaves. If you can manage to get good yields of things like tomatoes, chilis, strawberries then it's quite the accomplishment. Some people even manage potatoes and carrots, which seems to be the trickiest of all (root development being the issue).

Outdoor hydroponics is a lot easier with full sunlight, and while many people will say 'just use soil' in many areas good soil is hard to come by. Indeed, some people say the most valuable and arcane farming skill is the generation of high-quality soil (which requires the composting arts, plus knowledge of mineral substrates).

> Expect to put in hours of labor every day, without fail.

This is absolutely not true.

I have a home hydroponics setup in my garage on two tiers of a home depot storage rack covering about 24 sq feet. We eat the equivalent of $10-15 worth of leafy green veggies and herbs every single day. The produce I grow is far superior in taste and more diverse than what is available at the grocery store.

My maintenance includes every 3 weeks topping the water/nutrients and checking pH. This could be extended to 5 weeks or more if I went from DWC to Kratky method, basically just turning off some of the circulation pumps. I probably spend about 10 minutes a week pruning, adjusting air circulation, etc. Everything is controllable from my phone (water pump, aeration, lights, etc).

That sounds like a nice setup. I once worked with a system that was about 10X bigger and geared towards fruits a & flowers, it required a lot of management, but was quite productive. Cherry tomatoes are a good option, they mature fairly quickly.

> Constant daily work and inspection is required to avoid insect infestations and mold outbreaks (cleaning is critical). Many flowering and fruiting cycles in plants are highly light-period-sensitive so that has to be carefully managed as well. Expect to put in hours of labor every day, without fail.

I don’t have any experience with industrial-level hydroponics, only my ~40 plant indoor system, but these problems might only be ones of scale.

The only pest I need to deal with is fungus gnats which “Mosquito Bits” added to the reservoir solves completely for a few seconds of effort every month. If you spot algae starting to bloom in the reservoir just toss in a touch of 3% H2O2.

LED lighting and water pump are managed by timer switches with day/night phases.

For maybe an hour or two a month of effort, I get to supplement my meals with food harvested from 20 feet away that were almost entirely grown through automation with less water than a single shower takes. It feels like sci-fi to me! I’d encourage anyone who is considering it to take the leap.

I've been playing with hydroponics for the past three years outside. It became my lockdown project. [0] I tried four different methods: not-exactly nutrient film, kratky buckets, ebb and flow, and areoponics. I personally, couldn't get the buckets to work, but most people do. Probably just mistakes on my part.

This year it's been strawberries, eggplants, cucumbers, and kale. It's not hard. just check the water every day and top it off it if you need to. (You'll lose water due to transpiration during the hottest months.) Change the water ever couple of weeks.

I know I'm not being the most efficient with it. Like I should check the pH levels, and electroconductivity, but I don't. I did the first year, but I haven't checked this year at all, and it works fine. If I was doing this for a job, or was a bit larger scale, I would, but it's not really worth it, especially since what I'd really want is a mass spectrometer or something to identify specifically which nutrients need added, instead of just when to chuck the whole water supply and start again.

My main advice is make holders for small plants (i.e. Things in 3 inch net cups) if you're using ebb and flow, or simply keep the biggest plants in those. Otherwise, they'll flip, and you'll lose the plants. (This becomes obvious after an hour or so., so it's not really that useful.)

[0] https://twitter.com/jonathankoren/status/1265181119508439040...

Simple soil, with occasional watering and feeding works quite well - without all that faff.

Plants are no less amazing as a result.

After getting into it, there’s so much BS and questionable advice.

Gets easy to overthink it and ignoring that people have done this for thousands of years or more without any of the resources or things to add that we have.

If you have the outdoor space, just get some seeds or seedlings and start and figuring it out as you go is the best way imo.

Growing cannabis outdoors last year was a very interesting experience. I want to move into growing indoors under controlled environments, but I figured that as a first step/MVP 'spike' if you will, outdoors with autoflowers would be a low cost test to get familiar with the process. No lights or exhaust setups, just sunlight and the rest of mother nature.

It was tough. Humidity. Insects. Mold. Are they getting enough light? Too much water? Not enough water? Am I amending the soil correctly? Am I giving the right nutrients at the right periods of development? In Michigan we're able to grow up to 12 plants, so I had quite a few. It was definitely a labor of love.

I also became so appreciative of plants during this period. Every morning I looked forward to waking up and checking on them, adjusting the air flow, watering, attacking any pests, and of course admiring all of their new development. I would talk to them sometimes, they really became good friends. I would tend to them in the evening, with my dogs wandering around the yard with me. I really enjoyed the cadence/structure that it gave to my life.

In the end, my harvests were absolutely terrible. I went out of town right at the tail end of my first crop and they were lost entirely to botrytis. I don't think I was giving them enough food throughout their lifecycle either. A second crop for the tail half of summer never got enough light due to the way my property is laid out, so I would move them in the afternoon to an area with more sun. All of these factors combined - they were weak plants and didn't fully develop.

But alas the experience was great. It was a complete failure at first glance, but I learned so much about how plants grow (specifically cannabis), their structure, temperament, toughness, etc. Now I feel totally prepared to transition to indoor growing, so that is the silver lining. I'll probably start out terrible with that too, but practice makes perfect.

What a good story, and a good mindset to have. A great deal of learning comes with failure and I've learned to look forward to messing things up over the years.

I recently started painting models. I wasn't happy with the brush look so I went with airbrushing. Thinning paint to the correct consistency for the tool is a pain. Priming parts is not only required but time consuming. Testing products and finding brands that produce good results is a headache. I learned the hard way even a mild topcoat can keep your work from getting destroyed by just touching it.

I had my first successful paint job just the other day. It's not perfect. I threw out three complete failures getting to this point but I have learned so much about the process and gained an appreciation for just how hard it is for all those people on Youtube to get it right.

Cannabis is a gateway drug... to gardening.

lol it’s true - and they say if you can grow tomatoes you can grow cannabis

I’m getting stated into hydroponics myself as well (and 3d printing) after following Hoocho’s YouTube channel for a while.

I just planted my first plants in a 3d printed modular tower, like the one in this video: https://youtu.be/cjX4U6lGAt4

I’ve had the same system running for about a month now, and it works great. If you’re not short on space I’d probably do the horizontal versions using PVC pipes (for more even sunlight across everything) but I’ve got my tower sitting in the corner of our sunroom and is happily growing most our herbs.

Hoocho is a great source of information in general too.

While I appreciate the hacking potential here .. I fail to see the point beyond it. You won't save any money over buying the salad at an expensive organic store. You won't help the environment (all the plastic and heating and electricity for artificial lighting won't ever be compensated by you saving on pesticides). You won't scale this up to become self-sufficient.

Just get a garden and put the plants in soil. Sure, they may not be as "perfect". But you can have more of them to compensate. Sunlight and rain will do most of the work, use some home-made compost for nutrition, done.

So, what's all the fuzz? Feels like hydroponics, especially with all those 3D-printing gadgetry, is bringing you further away from nature, not closer.

On the topic of growing vs buying plants, well of course buying plants is going to be cheaper. There are economies of scale at the very least. You're probably not going to be growing your own plants because it's cheaper to do so.

On the topic of hydroponics; limited space is one factor. Hydroponics can be bent to fit your space in a way that soil based often can't. Once you start trying to make like vertical planters or something you're probably spending as much money on frames or shelves as you would on a hydroponics setup and you've still got to haul water to your shelf of planters and water them all individually.

For hydroponics I just have a bucket on the floor that I can fill with water, and it will automatically water the plants that are well above my head. There's just a lot less physical labor involved in filling up a bucked once a month than in trying to water a bunch of individual plants.

You've got to remember that for the most part these are happening indoors, in people's living spaces. If those same people had a large yard they might be using raised beds and irrigation. It also frankly take a lot less thinking, I don't have to worry about pest control or if the sun dried out the soil earlier than I expected so I need to water more, or pretty much anything related to climate.

Personally I have one of those 3D printed hydroponics towers, an automatically irrigated soil planter, and regular house plants that I have to water manually. Of the three the ones I have to water manually tend to have the most issues, issues with root rot or under-watering, issues with nutrient unavailability (I've gotten better at recognizing when they need some artificial fertilizer but it is a skill), etc.

The best is probably the automatically irrigated soil planter box.

Well the hacking I think is the biggest draw.

Other than that I'm looking into this cause I'm frequently away for 4-5-7 days with no one to water my plants and also live in a small apartment(in the EU) so don't really have a nearby garden as an option.

> bringing you further away from nature, not closer

Yep, I agree, however, I also feel soil is more perfect/magical than hydroponics and less fun if you want to hack around on a small scale.

I still prefer a garden but it's just not viable at the moment.

"Just get a garden and put the plants in soil."

I don't have a yard.

Hydroponics can be set up in my apartment. Not to mention that it can work all year: Lighting is important, since I'm pretty far north in an attic apartment with bad lighting.

Theoretically, I might be able to rent a plot 1.2km away, but I would have to carry my tools and things and honestly, it makes it all that much more inconvenient.

I'll also mention that I do not have an expensive organic store around, though most stores sell a bit of it. All of my produce is expensive anyway: I*m in Norway and a lot is shipped in. Varieties grown at home aren't attractive because of these things, though. You get different tastes growing at home. Tomatoes, for example, are generally better.

Also: Folks use these methods to grow pot, and I completely understand not growing it where others can steal it... if you are even lucky enough to live where growing outside will not land you in jail.

You can definitely grow certain things in hydroponics that are a LOT cheaper than buying in a store, just saying.

> While I appreciate the hacking potential here .. I fail to see the point beyond it.

That could be said for 90% of the stuff on this site though. It’s just a hobby, it’s fun to tinker and learn.

I’m definitely trying the horizontal, PVC-based setup when I have a more permanent place. I’m moving out of my current house by the end of the year so having something modular that I can disassemble and put inside of a bucket made sense to me

Does PVC leach anything into the water, especially when exposed to full sunlight/UV?

Apparently, there are several kinds of PVC and only some of them are properly food safe. See more here https://www.howtoaquaponic.com/designs/is-pvc-food-safe/

Thanks! That's quite the dire warning about PVC cement. Maybe I'll stick with silicone tubing for my first setup.

> I figured I’m pretty handy with a soldering iron, so maybe I could give a go at building a system like his

A bit of an understatement, considering he's the one who first hacked the xbox[1], partly by soldering a sort of daughterboard directly onto the fine pitch traces of the high speed bus.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Xbox-Introduction-Reverse-Eng...

I was recently in Jackson, WY and saw this cool hydroponic farm. The business employs people with various disabilities, which is really cool. While I was not there at a time when I could get a tour, a very nice employee provided some information. It was fun to look through the windows at the equipment.

https://verticalharvestfarms.com/locations/jackson/

Funny coincidence, came across the word Hydroponics in an Asimov short story yesterday. I thought it was made up. You learn something everyday..

This is a great article that tackles this topic the way I want: with a commitment to SI units.

Are there any "gold standard" books or learning materials for hydroponics, like an O'Reilly guide? I've read about many individual setups, but have yet to find a comprehensive manual.

It’s one of those things that you can easily learn from books, but is best learned from other hobbyists. I learned directly from someone else, hands on, and my understanding of the technical aspects only came later. If you don’t know anyone who does this, just hang out at your local hydroponics store. The people working there will get you set up and running in no time. You can also save a lot of money searching for DIY solutions.

I suggest having a strict low budget to start, in case you figure out later that this isn’t for you, and building up to more gear later if you like it. That way you won’t throw away a lot of money. Just start really small. You can really get an entire setup going for under $100 if you know what you want to do. You can construct a very small ebb and flow system for this amount of money.

I should point out, that hydroponics is not the ideal situation for every plant. A good example of this is found in the linked article. The author of this article talks about how much they like sage, but this is one plant that does not do as well in hydro as it does in soil, and I found it extremely odd that they wasted all that time trying to grow it this way.

I’ve personally grown massive amounts of sage in a soil filled container both outdoors in San Francisco sun conditions, as well as indoors near a sunny window; I harvested more than I could ever use. It would be a complete waste of time to go hydro with this. I kind of feel bad for the author, because this is something another hobbyist could have told them before they did this.

Thanks for the in-depth reply! I guess I'll start out by copying some Hoocho videos.

>I should point out, that hydroponics is not the ideal situation for every plant.

Yes, I've also garnered this impression. On the bright side, the difference between hydroponics and a soil-filled container with automatic irrigation seems quite small.

What an amazing post, loved it. I feel inspired to start my own now

Whenever I've tried this, the plants rot in the water. What am I missing? Should I be using a filter? boiling the water first?

The water needs to agitated and aerated. An air pump works great.

That, or pumping the water to create circulation.

This, and keeping the roots in the dark (which decreases algae growth in the water)

Normal compost soil ;)

Corporate firewall blocks the page for me, so take this. https://web.archive.org/web/20220809224134/https://www.bunni...

:-O what...whyyy....

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ that thing often works in mysterious ways...

> with a 15uL per week bump for iron-hungry species like spinach.

Nitpick: Spinach and iron is a chronic myth. http://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/30230/1/7987_Sutton.pdf

The additional micronutrient is not added because I pre-supposed it would need more based on the plant's reputation, it's based on what it needs to stay healthy.

It is empirically determined by watching for chlorosis on the edges of the leaves. Not enough, and the leaves grow pale; too much and the plants are poisoned. Observations showed that brazilian spinach developed chlorosis if I did not give it a bump of iron compared to the other species.

That being said, there are plenty of confounding factors so you're also correct that one may not simply conclude it is iron-hungry just because it needs more micronutrients to stay healthy. It could also be inefficient at uptake, could be a pH problem in the water, or it could be growing at a faster rate, etc. etc. A more accurate reporting of my experience would be to just say a "15uL per week bump for species like spinach" without opining on a causation.

Readers should be aware that the article is riddled with problems like this, and should not be cited as any authority on botany. For example, I also haven't taken samples of the things growing around the roots and examined them to ensure they are mycorrhizae, although I assumed they are. They could also be bacterium or any other number of phenomenon.

This is a fantastic comment and it's clear you're an experimental scientist.

Ahhh, sorry. Unfortunate for me that you chose spinach for your example! Thank you.

I'm actually thinking of setting up a large scale dutch bucket tomato farm in the future. I'm doing a POC next season and plan on improving it over the coming years. The dutch bucket system seems to be the way to go. My goal is to do this when I retire so I can keep active.

Woah! I'd never seen a bunniestudio post on HN front page. I've been a fan of Andrew "Bunnie" Huang for a very long time. Happy to see this here.

? https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bunniestudios.com

Thank you

This is a great video for anyone that's interested in getting into hydroponics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyqykZK2Ev4. I loosely followed it to build my own system.

That seems incredibly complicated, you probably don't need anything that complex unless you're doing research.

It’s not complicated, it’s a DIY automated system for people who don’t want to spend the money at the store for similar components. It teaches you how to build every component needed to run hydro with very little maintenance and is completely self-contained. It’s perfect.

Is aeroponics yet possible? Any good resources for it?

Orchids, Air plants...

Aerofarms is a company that uses it, they have more than one 100K+ square foot facilities.

Sure, just use misters instead of flowing water. The end result is the same, you get the growth medium (often just clay balls) wet. I don't think there's really much of a practical difference between aeroponics and hydroponics.

Basically just use some brass mist nozzles and make sure that the growth medium your plants are in (probably clay balls) stays moist. That's literally all there is to it, it's just another way to deliver water to the plants.

Oh yeah. Just get a small storage box, drill some holes in the lid to hold the plants in net cups, stick a small water fountain pump at the bottom, and build a pvc manifold with some sprayers. Hook it up for a timer that's 5 minutes on, 10 minutes off, and you're done. It's super easy.

You do have to watch the water level. If the water level falls below the minimum pressure, the roots will quickly die.

https://twitter.com/jonathankoren/status/1292250185687416832

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