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Aeroponics vs. Hydroponics

Here’s what you might not know about plants they don’t need dirt. Now, that’s not to say that you should run out and dig up your begonias and hope for the best. You do need to do a little work to make agriculture without soil work for you. But if you put in the work, you might be amazed at how efficient these methods for growing plants.

There are two main methods of growing plants without soil; hydroponics and aeroponics. Actually, aeroponics is actually a subset of hydroponics, but they’re as different from each other as they are from standard agriculture, so for the purposes of this article we’ll consider them two separate things. So basically, it’s going to aeroponics vs. hydroponics here.

In hydroponics, you’re replacing the soil with another sort of material for the plants to grow in. Generally, this is going to be some sort of foam like material that can easily hold and move water. The plants that are being grown hydroponically will then get their nutrients through water that the foam is soaking up.

Aeroponics is actually fairly similar, except that it does away with the foam aspect of it and just gets straight to giving the plants the nutrients they need to grow and thrive by misting them with nutrient rich water. This allows you to do a number of things that you couldn’t even with hydroponics, such as arranging the plants you’re growing vertically.

So which is the winner in the aeroponics vs hydroponics competition? Well, we need to look at the question a little more, because they both have a lot of benefits. Both of them are much more efficient than soil-based agriculture, and both of them allow you to have a lot of control and flexibility with what plants you can grow.

A point against the hydroponics systems in the aeroponics vs. hydroponics debate is that they require a lot of space and are still pretty heavy. While this may not be a concern for the professional farmer or gardener who has more or less unlimited space to play with, this is going to be an issue for a lot of people.

An aeroponics system is also a lot easier to set up than a hydroponic system. You can set up an aeroponic system with stuff you can find at any hardware or home improvement store, but you’re going to need to make some specialized orders to get what you need to set up an equivalent hydroponic system.

There are a few other advantages aeroponics has when compared to hydroponics. One of these is that the plants can more easily be transplanted, since they don’t suffer from transplant shock. This gives you a lot more options than you might otherwise have.

Aeroponics also allow you to observe the plants directly without disturbing them, which allows you to adjust the nutrient mix that you’re using and cut off any problems that you might be having before they actually have a chance to become a problem.

Aeroponics vs hydroponics, who wins?  They’re both good, but the edge has to go to aeroponics for the precision and flexibility and cultivation that you can’t get with any other method.  To get involved in aeroponics you have two options: commercial aeroponics kit shown here or the DIY version of aeroponics here.  Either way you go, you can get the best mix of supplies at Amazon, you can see them with the button below:

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