Winter Gardening With Hydroponics
There are ways to enjoy gardening during the winter months.
If you would want to make the investment, buying a grow box is one such way.
And an automated grow box is the ultimate way to go. Long hours at work? No problem! A vacation to someplace warm for a couple of weeks? Start packing!
The answer has to do with the nature of hydroponic gardening, the modern tools that are available, and how an automated approach can save time and effort, while possibly improving plant outcomes in a big way all while you are away or just too busy at the time.
Automation provides real-time nurturing
In primitive traditional hydroponic setups, the idea was that daily monitoring is good enough. If plants got low on some nutrients, experienced erratic changes in temperature or PH, or had some other kind of imbalance, the grower would come around and manually correct the issue at the end of the day.
Basic physics suggests that damage control after the fact is not as good as real-time fixes for problems. With automated monitoring and other tools, plants get what they need at the moment, not 12 or 14 hours too late.
Hydroponic growers don’t tend to dedicate 24 hours a day to the plants. They have jobs and families to raise. They have other things to attend to. Sometimes plant cycles take a back seat.
Automation takes the pressure off of the grower and gives plants more support, and so they don’t suffer from situations where gardening is really just an afterthought.
Take a vacation
A lot of growers who don’t have these modern automation tools end up worrying too much about crops. They’re in there every day trying to keep things on an even keel – they’re afraid to go away for a day or a weekend.
Modern automated tools change all that. With the best hydroponic setups, you can go on vacation, get pictures of your to grow environment for your smartphone, and watch as automated temperature, lighting, and pH value tools alter the plant environment on their own, without you being on-site at all.
Measuring Plant Conditions
In situations where growers do all the work manually, it can be tough to establish baselines and quantify changes to the plant environment. Many of the most advanced monitoring tools do this automatically, which helps when a grower has to take a trial and error approach over a number of cycles to give plants what they need.
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