Alma Newton

A hydroponic system provides endless opportunities and a secure, well-engineered place to grow your veggies indoors. If you have ever spent any time building an indoor grow room, you know how much time, energy and money is involved. Usually these rooms, once built, are fixed in place and can never be disassembled and moved with ease.

Well imagine one of these scenarios- you have a plant you really enjoy that you'd love to have more of like a rose, you have grown some really brilliant variety of tomato in your hydroponic garden and you want more of it, you have a herb you cook with frequently and need more of it or you simply just want to grow plants you as gifts for friends and family.

Now we are retired (whatever that means), do we not still require a connection with nature? The smell of fresh herbs, the scent of growing flowers and a fresh tomato's special perfume? Where are all these wonderful sensory odours in the sterile environment of an institution for the elderly or permanent care facility? Not possible to have, you say? I disagree. With hydroponic systems and gardens in place, it is entirely possible.

Let's examine some of the basic Hydroponic Systems available to the home user.

Plants require different proportions of nutrients during vegetation and flowering stages. Current nutrient products are more advanced than earlier counterparts and now allow precise adjustments based on these growth stages. This means you can get a bigger bang for your buck by increasing yields in your produce crops with a little research.

First off – what is pH? It stands for the rather cumbersome potentiometric hydrogen ion concentration. Simply put, it is a measure of the acidity or alkalinity of a solution. The pH scale is from 0-14 and pure water has a neutral pH of 7. Anything that would be considered acidic is rated lower than 7 and anything considered alkaline is rated higher than 7. Pretty simple.

There are hundreds of different kinds of growing medium as anything that a plant can grow in is considered a growing medium. They range from organic (natural) mediums to man-made. What growing medium is the best?

CO2 is Carbon Dioxide. Basically it is made up of one carbon molecule and two oxygen molecules that are in a gaseous form at standard conditions for temperature and pressure. But enough of the elementary science - how is it important to hydroponics?

Thinking of Elder Care and the quality of life in those years which we common refer to as the Golden Years, you cannot overlook the importance of the value of continued self reliance. These are people, just like you, who for the vast majority of their lives have made decisions regarding day to day activities placed in an environment where this capacity is limited.

Fresh air is at the centre of successful indoor gardening. Outside, air is abundant and almost always fresh. C02 levels in the air over a field of rapidly growing vegetation will vary on how still the air is. Being outdoors, and subject to the warming and cooling of the day, the wind blows in fresh air.