​​What Is Hydroponics?

 ​​What Is Hydroponics?

Hydroponics comes from the ancient Greek formation of “hydro”, meaning water, and “ponics”, meaning labor. The water is doing the work here and enabling the fast growth of plants. 

At its core, hydroponics is a method of growing plants. But instead of using soil, hydroponics depends on a water-based nutrient-rich solution. The idea may seem like a novel “hack”, but has actually been around for thousands of years and helped to enable population growth as the availability of arable land decreases.

As we discussed earlier, the ability to not use soil and instead use organic substances like perlite, coco coir, rock wool, clay pellets, peat moss, or vermiculite has provided numerous benefits to growers everywhere.  Increased growth results from allowing the roots of each plant to come in direct contact with the nutrient solution. This is further enabled by the increased access to oxygen compared to its soil counterpart.