What is Hydroponics?

Hydroponics is a method of growing plants without soil. The name comes from the Greek 'hydro' meaning water and 'ponos' meaning work or toil: the water does the work of transporting all the plants' nutrient requirements to the roots.

Although you may think that hydroponics is a new method of growing, this is not the case: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon used hydroponics and the US Army used the technique to feed soldiers during WW2 on the Pacific Islands. Today, hydroponic installations can be found in all corners of the globe: Australia, USA, NZ, Spain, Holland, Israel, Thailand and UK.

Hydroponics allows the grower a lot more control over what the plant is fed and the plant can be provided with everything it needs to grow. We provide the plant with its nutrients in a form that makes them very easy to take up: they are added to the water which is taken up by the plants. By adding the correct mixture of plant nutrients to the water, we can grow any kind of plant without using soil.

At The Achiltibuie Garden we use our own inert growing medium, Gold, and nutrients to the water.