GARDENING
How to Grow Hydroponic Tomatoes without Equipment
My Experiment Using the Kratky Method, and the Lessons Learned
I love running experiments and wanted to see if I could grow tomato plants hydroponically, without the use of expensive hydroponic equipment.
For those of you who don’t know what hydroponics is, it is a technique of growing plants in a water solution rather than in soil.
Hydroponically-grown tomatoes are now seen in most grocery stores, although most tomatoes are still grown in the field. The benefit of hydroponics is that conditions can be controlled and tomato production per acre can be quite high.
Most of these hydroponic systems, however, require electricity and pumping units.
I wondered if I could grow tomatoes in water, without the use of electricity and a pump.
After doing a fair amount of research, I decided to give the Kratky Method a try. This is Wikipedia’s explanation of the Kratky method:
The Kratky method is a passive hydroponic technique for growing plants suspended above a reservoir of nutrient-rich water. Because it is a non-circulating technique, no additional inputs of water or nutrients are needed after the original application…
