Gardening is like a story. It has a beginning, middle and an end. That would be propagation, growing and flowering. In my experience the simplest story is by far the best one.
Your approach to getting the best yield indoors, is to start by giving yourself knowledge. There are any number of very good books out there as well as the internet and practical advice from hydroponics retailers. There is nothing worse than getting “my buddy” syndrome from the get-go. This is your garden with your sensibilities. Start the story on your own and finish is there as well.
I Have never heard it put better: plants eat light! In Wade Davis’s brilliant adventure book, One River, he discussed this point with his fellow botanist, Tim Plowman. Anyway, light is the most important nutrient. so an appropriate horticultural bulb should be purchased. Not a street lamp or yard light. Horticultural bulbs are made for plant’s taste buds. Your money should be put here first.
Now that you have light, you have heat, so your exhaust fan system should correlate to the size of your bulb. Usually a 400 watt bulb should have about 250 to 300 CFM and 600 or 1000 watt bulbs should have between 400 and 600 CFM, for proper air flow and heat dispersion.
On to water. Try and steer away from soft water. It’s softened with salts and sometimes hard or well water creates their own problems. So, you may want to add distilled or reverse osmosis water to dilute salts or high mineral concentrations. Water..it’s us, it’s plants, it’s great growth.
Potential hydrogen. This applies directly to water and the plants ability to uptake nutrients. Proper PH can be achieved with a PH pen or colour coded agricultural drops. Use phosphoric acid to bring your PH down or in some cases you will need potassium silicate to bring the PH up. Anywhere around 6 on the PH scale (give or take a point) is a good place to be. Don’t use pool, hot tub or aquarium indicators.
We live in a world of parameters. We evolved in these parameters with plants. A nice day to you is a nice day to a plant. 78 degrees F, 60% relative humidity, nice and sunny with good food and drink.
I work with a Tech school in Stratford Ontario. There, we have 135 running feet of NFT trough with six agricultural metal halide bulbs and two 50 gallon reservoirs. The systems run on two separate sides. One for high nutrient plants (tomatoes, peppers and beans) while the other side is for low nutrient plants (basil, coriander, lettuce). The reservoirs are monitored every day by the students and the parameters are adjusted accordingly. We have always used a two part nutrient solution and I can’t say enough about it. For the ease of use and the money, we would’t go any other way. Here at the school, the garden is checked every day. In your indoor garden this should also be the case. A good work ethic goes a long way in any garden, in or out. You can’t take a handful of seeds, throw them over your shoulder and walk away. For a good yield, it takes work. Enjoyable work! It never ceases to amaze me how it becomes an automatic routine after just one semester. Horticultural students go ahead and start up the next semester on their own, after the story is realized. Not to mention the reciprocity of students to each other. Seniors teaching and communicating with juniors. We like to teach the 7 growth limiting factors in indoor gardening. They are: light, water, PH, Co2, nutrient, temperature and humidity. Any one of these factors that lack attention are a weak link in the chain.
When everything is up and running smoothly and all the basic needs are taken care of (light, water, food, airflow) there are essential additives to give and maintenance spraying to do. At the school, we add compatible products to the reservoirs such as humic acid, fulvic acid and complex sugars. Humic acid is used during growth. Fulvic acid and sugars are added during flowering and fruiting stages. These organic solutions enhance nutrient uptake and allow the plants to pack energy to the fruit. Pine oil, kelp and neem oil are sprayed in rotation during the week as well as insecticidal soap twice a week, to ward off bugs. Anyone with an indoor garden should spray for pests as a maintenance program. If you pretend you have bugs you won’t get bugs. It’s something I learned early on after suffering mites in the indoor garden and later, white fly in the greenhouse. In saying that, two weeks before harvest don’t spray anything. Nothing will establish and hurt your plants in that time frame. Simply put, spraying gives you piece of mind.
As the gardening story moves in it’s circle, rotating bulbs every three crops, changing the reservoir every week to replace nitrogen, topping up the reservoir during the week to maintain PH….all these efforts keep the garden running at it’s optimum.
As an added treat, carbon dioxide can be added but only add Co2 after your garden has been fine tuned. Adding Co2 changes the ball game a little. Everything gets a little more labor intensive as nutrient levels, growth, transpiration and temperature increase.
Purchasing a digital temperature and humidity monitor with high and low readout will let you know in a 24 hour period, what those parameters are. You should strive for no lower than 68 degrees F and no higher than around 83 degrees F. Outside of this range the plant will have trouble metabolizing.
There are differences in garden systems that may be initially confusing. But in reality all the different systems that spray, flood, drip or flow are just different ways of getting nutrients to the roots. All systems have benefits and draw backs. These are best discussed with your local hydroponics merchant.
Dirt…dirt, dirt, dirt. Leave it outside! When you bring dirt or any potting soil mix indoors it turns to clay, will not water evenly over time and just becomes problematic. Not to mention, all the living organisms that break down organics to water soluble nutrients perish after a couple of weeks. So you end up with an inert, inferior medium anyway. Soil less mixes or CoCo fiber should be used indoors. These products stay wet longer (some up to 30%) so you don’t water as often and the medium stays nice and ‘airy’ at the roots. You will only use nutrients half strength every other watering and it really is much less work than a reservoir system since you’re not changing water, topping up water or having to pay attention PH so intensely. I’ll say it again: a two part nutrient solution (Grow and Bloom), watered into soil less mix or CoCo fiber is a fine way to grow. I started this way and it simplified the story for me. No secret to watering and feeding. It let me concentrate on the environmental matters more.
So, summing up, there is no better way to start the indoor gardening process and getting results than putting the story together first. Read books, get on the net, talk to a hydroponics merchant and keep it simple. I can tell you from experience, less is more in gardening and music. By knowing the story, this will turn out to be an enjoyable endeavor. Like music, gardening is a wonderful ethereal right brain pursuit.
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