Hydroponics Ideas, Tips & Guides

I have always been an organic gardener, so the fact that my hydroponic kits are currently fuelled by chemical fertilisers irks me somewhat. The main problems with chemical fertilisers (from my perspective) are the pollution they cause once they’re out in the world, and the energy required to make them. While the former is not an issue in my indoor garden (I give any wastewater to houseplants or plants in the garden), the latter most certainly is. So I would like to move to a more sustainable fertiliser solution in the future.

Header image: ifarm.fi, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This week, Gardeners Off World watched as the latest SpaceX launch (CRS-19) delivered more exciting experiments to the International Space Station (ISS).

We’ve had the Hydroponicum for over a year now. It has kept us supplied with salads and stir-fry veg, and I’ve grown one or two more experimental crops as well. Not everything I have tried has been successful. My spinach bolted (I’m not sure why, and I haven’t tried again yet). Alliums don’t seem to like germinating in the hydroponic seedling tray, and coriander downright refused. Coriander seedlings will grow hydroponically, though, so I may try allium transplants at some point.

At New Year, the AeroGarden blasted off on a new mission – to grow fruiting veg. It started with a crew of three – two peppers and a tomato. The seeds germinated quickly, and the start of the mission went according to plan.

It has been a month since we set up the AeroGarden and started our journey into space gardening. It came with three herbs – basil, dill and parsley. The basil was the first to burst into life and has been the fastest growing. I trimmed the top of one of the young plants at the end of July, and it’s probably ready for another trim now. The parsley was the slowest to germinate and isn’t remotely close to catching up, but it is growing well now.

The original plant crew for the AeroGarden: Cuttings mission was garden mint, sage and rosemary. As I expected, the garden mint was the first to root, and is growing well – to the point of crowding the others out! Sage rooted second, and is putting on new growth. Rosemary was slow to root, but has now done so and is starting to show some new leaves!

Michael Dixon, University of Guelph

Growing lettuce on the Moon is a step closer, as a French start-up has successfully grown lettuce in simulated lunar soil.

At the beginning of the year, I set up a new mission in the AeroGarden, growing two peppers (Popti and Redskin) and a tomato (Veranda Red). Ten days later, I had two tomato seedlings, which I had to thin to one. The peppers were a bit slower, but by 19th January they had germinated (and been thinned) too.

Hello, and welcome to Gardeners Off World, your round-up of interplanetary news and views. NASA’s Christina Koch returned to Earth yesterday, after spending 328 days onboard the International Space Station (ISS) – the longest single spaceflight by a woman. Koch participated in three expeditions – 59, 60 and 61 – during her first spaceflight. ESA’s Luca Parmitano and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov came home on the same flight.

What did you get for Christmas? Hopefully something good, something seedy and something spacey! 

Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores cultivating the cosmos, planting planets and sowing seeds in space. The second episode of Gardeners of the Galaxy includes a look at the current state of plant experiments on the International Space Station, a rundown of the missions on their way to Mars and a sneak peek at the future of space chillies. And there’s a seed giveaway too!

The sun is shining this morning, but the forecast says there will be more rain later. And more rain and wind tomorrow. The weather so far this year has not been conducive to gardening, and that “must sow seeds” feeling hasn’t kicked in yet. I did manage to nip outside for five minutes last month to sow broad beans in modules, but that’s as far as I got.

Not long ago, I was summing up our first two months with the AeroGarden, our ‘space garden’. I noted that, although it’s a really good way to start small batches of seedlings for the larger Hydroponicum, in its seed-starting configuration the noise it makes drove us potty.

A couple of weeks ago I started a fertiliser trial in the hydroponicum, pitting Hexafly frass against my regular Ikea feed. Today the plants look like this:

It’s two months (nine weeks, actually) since our space garden landed, and Ryan and I became pseudonauts. For the first seven weeks, it grew the selection of herbs it came with – Genovese basil, dill and curly parsley. The basil was the quickest to grow, and the most vigorous. The dill was second and grew tallest. The parsley… well, at the end of seven weeks it was just about getting going.

In March 2020, young people across the UK will gather in Birmingham for The Big Bang UK Young Scientists & Engineers Fair  – a celebration of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). The event is free to attend, and you can register now if you want to go.

As it is National Allotments Week, I thought I would share the progress we’re making with our hydroponic indoor ‘allotment’.

On 21st November, the AeroGarden started making more of a noise than usual, emitting a high-pitched whine. When I showed Ryan, he immediately spotted that the pump was barely making any bubbles, and diagnosed a blockage in the aerator.

If you look at the lists of crops that researchers suggest for space gardens and Martian farms, tomatoes are always on there. However, the first fruit NASA is aiming to grow on the ISS is a chilli pepper. I thought it would be fun to see how dwarf tomatoes and sweet peppers grow in my little space garden.

One of the things I look forward to each December is the new Heritage Seed Library Catalogue. The HSL is Garden Organic’s project to conserve vegetable varieties that are not widely available, and it includes old favourites that have disappeared from commercial catalogues as well as more unusual vegetables. It was through the HSL that I originally encountered achocha.

Ryan and I have had a couple of spaced out days – we went to visit the Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank and came home via the National Space Centre in Leicester. Of the two, the Space Centre is more interesting for adults, but both destinations suffer from being a popular choice for school trips.

In December 2019, I had the idea that I would like to try growing heritage salad leaf varieties in the Hydroponicum. Looking through the Heritage Seed Library Catalogue, I chose:

The media likes to say we’re in a second space race, or the second space age, referring to the commercialisation of space exploration. Personally, I prefer my Second Space Sage.

For the last week or so, Ryan and I have been working on a new project. It’s finally ready to launch – my new podcast about gardening on Earth… and beyond!

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Last summer, Ryan and I popped on our face masks, slathered our hands in sanitiser and braved a trip to pandemic-era Ikea. There were a few things we needed, and I wanted to stock up on consumables for my Hydroponicum.

Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! In this episode, Emma explores some exciting interplanetary plant news and talks about two projects growing in the Orbital Garden – heritage hydroponics and space chiles.

Weathering the worst of an Antarctic winter, a shipping container may hold the key to feeding astronauts in space. The EDEN ISS greenhouse was shipped to the German Neumayer Station III Antarctic station in 2017. It sits on extendable stilts to cope with the snow accumulating underneath. On a clear day, the views are breathtaking. At other times, the crew need a rope guideline to find their way from the greenhouse to the station. During the worst blizzards, EDEN ISS is fully monitored and operated from the control centre at the DLR Institute of Space Systems in Germany.

When ESA’s new Vega C rocket blasted off from French Guiana for the first time, on 13 July 2022, it carried an Italian garden into space.

Header image: ifarm.fi, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Remember EDEN ISS? It was a greenhouse built inside a shipping container that spent several years in Antarctica. The idea was to help develop controlled environment agriculture technologies for use in hostile environments on Earth, the International Space Station (ISS), and future spacecraft and Moon/Mars bases.

It’s nearly four years now since I became a hydroponic gardener. The AeroGarden Sprout is a distant memory, a sub-optimal design that was constantly gunged up with limescale and made a tremendous amount of noise. But my much simpler Ikea system is still going strong (despite being discontinued). I use fibre plugs as seedling starters, and a perlite/vermiculite mix for larger plants. And I’m about to run out of stockpiled Ikea liquid feed, so I have a new one from Fertile Fibre to try.

Header image: SINTEF researcher Galina Simonsen with hydroponic plants at the CIRiS/NTNU Social Research Centre in Trondheim. Image credit: Jana Pavlova

We link to vendors to help you find relevant products. If you buy from one of our links, we may earn a commission.Limited space can put a serious damper on indoor gardening, but hydroponics