What Is A Hydroponic Garden Tower And How Does It Work?
With a hydroponic garden tower, you can grow nutrient-rich vegetables and fruits. A hydroponic garden tower system is one of the many easy solutions to sustainable gardening. It can be incorporated both outdoors and indoors. Enjoy quality food produced from your plants at home with less commitment to your garden. A typical tower garden is somewhat automated to supply water and nutrients to your plants, saving you loads of work. Say goodbye to weeds with a hydroponic garden tower as it uses no soil, just water and a supply mechanism to ensure your plants get what they need to grow successfully.
What Is A Hydroponic Garden Tower?
A tower garden is also called a vertical hydroponic garden. Vertical hydroponics is a method of growing plants without soil vertically. A garden tower is bought as a kit with a tray, pots, seeds, pump, pH test kit, timer, draining tube, pH adjusters, among other vital components depending on the size of your system.The tower is made using pipes with holes drilled into it. The holes are fitted with bottles, trays, or cup holders that host your plants in the system. A stable tower can host up to 20 plants per unit. A tower takes up very little space as plants are grown in less than 4 square feet. Depending on your intended cultivation plan, you can increase the number of towers in your plan to achieve much more yields.
How Does A Hydroponic Tower Work?
Most garden towers have a similar design. A tower garden has two important parts; a water reservoir base and a plant growing section. The reservoir is filled with water mixed with a nutrient solution that has minerals that plants require to grow successfully. If the reservoir is the system’s base, how do nutrients get to the plants? Inside the reservoir is a submersible pump that supplies the nutrient solution to the growing plants from the base to the top of the tower. A funnel at the top of the tower drizzles down the solution pumped, allowing the plant’s root in the pots to absorb the solution gently. This drizzling helps the nutrient solution mix with oxygen and enhance absorption. Most common solutions used in a garden tower work well with many plants, including cabbages, kales, and strawberries. The pump makes the hydroponic system quite automatic by utilizing a special timer. The timer can be adjusted to suit your need but a 15 to 20 minutes on setting and 40 to 45 minutes offsetting all day all night is good for home purposes. Commercial hydroponics may use a different timer setting. You have to do some small work of manually adding water and nutrients to your system.
Pros Of A Hydroponic Garden Tower
Pest Control
Hydroponics uses no soil to grow plants, preventing infections such as mold. In vertical hydroponics, water is often recycled hence reducing external pest outbreaks.
Space To Breathe
In a garden tower, the plant’s roots are suspended in air and not soil or water. They are drizzled with nutrient-rich water pumped up the tower. The drizzling mechanism ensures plants are not overwatered and waterlogging the roots thus helping the plant’s roots grow healthy.
Precision
A vertical hydroponic garden uses a timer-controlled pump to supply the right amounts of nutrient solution to the plants. This precise control ensures your plants mature more consistently and produce consistent produce.
Eco-friendly
Despite vertical hydroponics being environmentally friendly, it saves your resources such as energy and nutrients.
Space Saver
A vertical hydroponics garden is sleek and can be placed anywhere indoors or outside. However, you can increase the number of garden towers, which will take more space, just like a traditional garden. A garden tower may be used indoors to enhance the interior décor while taking up less space in your indoor setup.
Creativity
You can be creative with your garden tower and develop different plant species and designs to it your aesthetics. With a bit of research, you can quickly build a garden tower for your special plants or even mix them up and see the beauty of your vertical hydroponic garden.
A Garden Tower Is Mobile
You can move your vertical hydroponic garden from place to place relatively easily without affecting the plant’s growth. Additionally, you can organize a garden tower to fit your desired space.
Cons of a Garden Tower
Constant Monitoring
A garden tower requires regular maintenance, which can be tiresome. You need to check the nutrient solution’s pH values and fertilizer level.
Plants Are Limited To Size
Plants in vertical hydroponics flourish well, but a challenge arises when they grow very large. When plants grow rapidly and become too large, they become unfit for a garden tower. Large plants may inconvenience your plan for your garden tower as they may require additional costs for fertilizers and frequent water.
High Initial Cost
Vertical hydroponics can be expensive initially, whether indoors or outside. Indoor garden towers hike up energy as some require additional lighting mechanisms.
Power Outages
Vertical hydroponics require electricity to pump water and nutrient solution up the tower. A power outage may halt the entire system, and your plant’s roots may dry.
Prior Technical Knowledge
A beginner getting started with a vertical hydroponic garden tower may find it a bit hard to learn how the system works. Technical devices require complete information on how they work for you to operate them successfully. As the cultivator, you are left with monitoring moisture levels and using pH adjusters to track the pH of the solution.
Can You Use A Hydroponic Garden Tower Outside?
Vertical hydroponics is more efficient outside than indoors, where you have to use humidifiers and grow lights which make the process rather expensive. Having your garden tower outside can help you save on energy costs. Say goodbye to growing lights as you have the free sunlight outside for your hydroponic plants to use and grow faster. Take advantage of the sunlight in the summer season and watch how amazingly your plants will grow healthier with these conditions. If you decide to have your system outside, get a spot with enough sunlight and shelter. It is important to prevent the reservoir from direct sunlight as the solution will evaporate. A disadvantage that you may encounter with your garden tower outside is that you cannot control nature as you would with an indoor system. Your outdoor hydroponic equipment should be UV tolerant of remaining undamaged by strong sunlight. Additionally, your plants don’t require very high temperatures for their growth; hence you need to monitor outside conditions for optimal results. You might want to keep your vertical hydroponic garden indoors during the winter, as very low temperatures may drastically affect the nutrient solution.
Can You Use A Hydroponic Garden Tower Inside?
A garden tower can be used for indoor purposes since it can fit in any location: the kitchen, balcony, terrace, rooftop, lounge, or in porches. A vertical hydroponic garden may not survive very cold conditions in the winter season; hence you may want to have your indoor garden indoors. Having your garden tower inside will help you get fresh produce even in the cold months of water.
Growing your plants inside means you may not have access to natural sunlight. Your vertical hydroponic garden needs to be equipped with grow lights or LED lights. Your grow lights need to be running for 14 hours every day for optimal indoor results. An indoor system may be expensive, but you can build it for less than the right knowledge of hydroponics. Indoor vertical hydroponics are less productive with fruit crops.
Conclusion
A ready-made hydroponic tower comes with a kit that contains tools to help you successfully run the system. A base reservoir is the main component of a garden tower system as it hosts water with nutrient solution and the system’s pump. With a garden tower, you can grow plants vertically by using a pump in the system that pumps nutrients up the tower for plants to absorb them. You can place your garden tower anywhere in your home, even in your garage, if you have reasonable space to host it. A garden tower can be moved from place to place, inside or outside.
Additionally, vertical hydroponics relieve you of the hustle of having to remove weed from your crops since you don’t need soil for hydroponics. You also need to constantly monitor your garden tower for changes in pH values of nutrient solution. Having your garden tower outside is convenient for all plants as they get the natural sunlight that helps them grow healthier. Vertical hydroponics may be hindered during the winter season as there is no sufficient sunlight. You may incur additional energy charges if you have your garden tower inside, as your plants require to grow lights to give them sunlight. A hydroponic garden tower is easy to maintain and helps you harvest healthier crops faster than most traditional methods.
