Gardening with water: Heather and Jason Griffis explore the basics and benefits of soil-less gardening.

When you think of hydroponics, scientists in lab coats or Disney World's exhibit at EPCOT may come to mind. Then you may think that this technology is brand new and that you need to be a botanist to successfully garden hydroponically. Actually, hydroponics can be traced as far back as Egyptian times, with their incredibly lavish floating gardens. With a few tips, anyone can harvest up to 100 times more tomatoes, for instance, in the same amount of growing space using 90% less water and with relative ease and cleanliness. How is this, you ask?

Hydroponics comes from the Latin words hydro, which means water, and ponos, which means to work. The idea behind hydroponics is that if you can provide a inert soil-less substrate, such as rockwool or perlite, and feed it with a high quality hydroponic nutrient and water solution, either timed or constantly, your plants will grow faster and produce more fruit. How? Your plant's roots are not required to expend lots of energy on a massive root system to find food, and the air to water ratios in the soil-less media are much higher, which plants like.

There are severed different ways to garden hydroponically, but the common denominators between the methods are the water, the hydroponic nutrient, and the soil-less substrate. Generally, you will choose a method that matches the type of crop you are growing. For instance NFT, or nutrient film technique, would be used for smaller crops, and a top drip system would be used on larger crops. If all of this sounds Greek to you perhaps you should try the simplest and perhaps most high performance method, water culture. Water culture is as simple as putting an aquarium bubble stone attached to an air pump in a tray of nutrient rich water. Just add your plants in the tray and watch them explode.

The novice hydroponic gardener must also be made aware of the pH of the water and the amount of nutrients present in the water. To test pH, you can get a digital meter for about $50, or you can get litmus paper or a dropper kit like the ones used for pools. Generally, plants like the pH to be between 6 and 7, however some plants like it lower or higher, so find out what your plants need. Measuring the amount of nutrients in the water takes a meter that you can get for about $100 (cheaper meters are much lower quality). This meter will measure the TDS, or total dissolved solution in the water. These meters cannot tell which elements are actually present, rather they measure all of them combined. The amount of total dissolved solution needed will vary depending on crop. Lettuce, for instance, likes a 400-600 ppm range while tomatoes will need 2200-2600 ppm.

In closing, hydroponics can be as simple or complex as you would like it to be. There is a ton of information out there, and even a couple of magazines devoted to hydroponic gardening, so take this seed we are offering you and plant it. Just don't use soil.

Heather and Jason Griffis have been gardening hydroponically for eight years. For more information, contact Jason at Atlanta Supply, 1-866-hydrogro.