Many people who enjoy working with their hands, making things, gain tremendous satisfaction from what they create and deplore spending money on a manufactured product. There are at least as many others, however, who would rather concentrate on the actual growing of hydroponics plants and who would prefer to buy a system that they know will work.

One of the wonderful aspects of hydroponics is that there are no limits to the inventiveness of the builder or even the buyer of a system. Try anything that you think will work. If it doesn’t, you can always alter your procedure, and you will have gained valuable information in the process. Even the most knowledgeable user is constantly trying new methods, different nutrients, many varieties of plant life and wide ranging applications of all the necessary components of hydroponics. If there is a single word that sums up the best approach to hydroponics, it is experimentation.

If you decide to build your own system, remember that hydroponics is more a science than an art. To get satisfactory results from a homemade system, much more is required than a box to hold plant life.

There are four approaches to hydroponics gardening:
1. Growing outdoors as farmers do but using a hydroponics system rather than soil
2. Growing hydroponically indoors
3. A combination of these two, the year-round garden
4. Growing hydroponically in a greenhouse.

The more you substitute for nature, the more complicated these methods become. When plants are removed from their natural environment, as in indoor gardening, then all aspects of that environment have to be duplicated by artificial or technical means. The important thing to recognize in any of these methods is what is taken away and what needs to be replaced. There is no substitute for natural sunlight, for instance, although there are adequate replacements. This is why I recommend that your year-round garden be portable so that it can be moved outside in summer.

Should you decide to confine your growing only to the outdoors, then you needn’t know a great deal about light¬ing, temperature and humidity controls, pollination, or any other sci¬entific matters other than nutrients. However, the remaining three approaches do require a working knowledge of all these things. Simply-put, pay attention to the environment around your crop, or you won’t have a crop.

There is no reason to be intimidated by pollination and other rather scientific terms; the procedures are simple. The point is that you do have to know how. Hydro¬ponics is a science and there is a considerable amount of knowledge that must be acquired. For these reasons, a manufac¬tured system would be better, to the novice who chooses to grow a year-round garden or indoors exclusively. The reason is simple: if you start growing hydro¬ponically with a system that is only partially effective, when you start having problems it is more difficult to ascertain whether the trouble is with the system, the quality of nutrient or the environment. You know a manufactured system works, and any problems you encounter will be environmental. You can therefore concentrate your learning in the area of the plants’ requirements.

The person who spends thirty dollars making a simple hydroponic system may discover that seven days a week, three times a day, he or she must be available to pour nutrient over the aggregate. For the busy city-dweller, this could be a hassle. He or she could have purchased a work¬able system, experimented a little, gained biological knowledge, got the “feel” of hydroponics and been ready to branch out to build a system suited to the individual’s needs.