Basic Hydroponics for Beginners

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Yolanda Vanveen and in this segment we're going to talk about basic hydroponics for beginners. Now you don't have to be a rocket scientist or even a horticulturist to grow hydroponically. And basically hydroponics is just growing plants in water not using any soil. And a lot of plants like tulips and tomatoes are grown and mass marketed growing them hydroponically. Even strawberries can be grown hydroponically. And so basically what happens is that plant is started from seed, a lot of times they'll just use a piece of tissue or paper, the seed with generate and it'll grow roots and they'll just set it right in water. And as the roots grow and grow, they get larger and then the plant begins to grow. Now the most important part of hydroponics is the lighting. So when your plants are first growing, you want to use a blue halide light because that cool light is the best, it's more like the spring type of light, it's a cooler light. So to get plants growing, they need heat but they don't want intense hot light. So as soon as the plant has grown a bit, has some stems and some leaves as a good root system, once the plants have a good root system and they have some growth, that's when you want to switch to the high pressure red sodium lights because it's most like the hot summer sunlight. And plants to get them to bud and to grow flowers, you need to have that hot summer light and they have to think that they're dying because really in nature flowers grow the growth of the leaves and then they get a lot hot summer sun, they know it's the end of the summer and they to regenerate so then they will bud out and make flowers to make seeds for the next year. So you need that hot red spectrum light to get the blooms. And so once you have the water and a growing medium and you have the lights and you have some plants, you can grow plants with hydroponics, it's that easy."