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Old 03-04-2010, 04:22 PM
Sabrina Sabrina is offline
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Default Hi! Newbie member

Hi guys, Im Sabrina, and I am new here and to hydroponics growing in general. I am on a joint venture with my dad and we are growing in soil at the moment and I am wanting to get into growing through hydroponics.

He is interested as well and he is wanting to create an outdoor system by making a pond and covering it. I have searched through a lot of sites on hydroponics and it seems that is not the best way to go about this. Most places I have been always talk about hydroponics indoors, and using grow lights to control day length, proper watering and mixture techniques and other stuff.

Can anyone tell me about making a pond and trying to grow vegetables in it?

It seems that it is going to be incredibly difficult to keep foreign material out of the water and any number of other items are coming to mind, but I dont know enough about all this to figure out if these points are valid, so if anyone has information which would help me figure this out, links, websites, etc, I would very much appreciate it. Meanwhile, I will just look around the site here and see what I can find. Thanks!

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Old 03-04-2010, 10:45 PM
GpsFrontier GpsFrontier is offline
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Location: Lake Havasu AZ.
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Quote:
he is wanting to create an outdoor system by making a pond and covering it.
Well there is basically two ways I can think of going about doing it this way, although a in ground pond would not be my choice for a few reasons. One would be a Aquaponics type system. With this type of system there is usually fish in the water and the plants feed on the fish waste. Although this is usually a recirculating system also, where the fish are cultivated in tanks and the nutrient rich (from fish waste) water is then pumped to the hydroponics system where the plants are. So they are not usually in the same tank, although they can be.

The other way would be in a Water Culture System, a true water culture system is not recirculating, the plants are placed in a floating raft (usually Styrofoam) that is cut to be the same shape as the container it is using for the reservoir. The reservoir (or in your case it would be the pond) is filled with the nutrient solution and the plants float on top of the solution. At the bottom of this reservoir are air stones (like in fish tanks). These air stones get a steady stream of air from a air pump, and create a bunch of tiny bubbles. As the bubbles rise they keep the nutrient solution from stagnating, they also provide the plants root system with the needed air/oxygen, or they would suffocate. Either design would be easier to maintain above ground, as well as harvesting the plants.
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Most places I have been always talk about hydroponics indoors, and using grow lights to control day length, proper watering and mixture techniques and other stuff.
Well both yes, and no. It is true that it's very common to grow indoors with artificial lighting, although the definition of Hydroponics means "growing plants without soil," that has nothing to do with being indoors or even using artificial lighting. All my plants are grown outside in natural light, and most commercial hydroponic farming operations use natural light. Though they usually grow in greenhouses that allow the natural light inside the greenhouse. When growing without soil the water needs to contain all the nutrients the plants need to be healthy. They are also much more susceptible to a lack of water, although there are many variables that would affect how fast they will have a problem with the lack of water.
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It seems that it is going to be incredibly difficult to keep foreign material out of the water and any number of other items are coming to mind,
There are a lot of things you can do in your design to keep material out of the water, although in the long run using a in ground pond as a growing container would probably be more work than its worth if you were purely wanting to grow plants with it. But if you still wanted to give it a try, I would be happy to help you design it. Or if you wanted help with designing any type of system, I would be happy to help you with that also. I would need to know a lot more about the location you were planing to use as well as what plants you were going to grow before I go into a lot of detail for any system.

1. Is it on the side of a hill?
2. Is it on flat land?
3. How far from the house is it?
4. What state are you in?
5. Min and max temperatures you get there (both summer and winter)?
6. Amount of sunlight it will get?
7. How many plants you wanted to grow, as well as how much space you have to work with?
8. Type of budget you have to work with?

etc... Also pictures of the location would help too.
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  #3  
Old 03-05-2010, 04:46 PM
smurf smurf is offline
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I dont really have a lot of time,
but I wanted to stop in and say Hi, and welcome!

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