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Aeroponics · Hydroponics Daily

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  Hi welcome back to hydroponics daily today we're talking about another funky
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  way to grow your plants and that's aeroponics so this system is very advanced
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  it's not for beginners and it's but it is probably the most highly well it's
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  it's known as the most productive and mostly,
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  fastest way of growing plants if you can get it right so
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  what it involves is you have a holding tank just like any of
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  your system you have a pump and that pumps it into a
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  closed area where the plant roots are but instead
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  of being a film of water or a
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  tank of water that the roots are in like in DWC or
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  NFT it's a mist of fertigation solution
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  so they mist the roots rather than and then
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  rather than the actual water enveloping them
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  and then the plants themselves the green tissue
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  that sits on the outside so the foliage the stems are
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  on the outside and they don't get exposed to
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  this mist and because it's a mist rather than just a mass of water the aeration
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  level is super high those roots are getting loads of oxygen and they can grow
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  really rapidly and so that's why it's such a highly productive system if it's
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  growing well and the system i've.
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  Illustrated there is like a tp tent system and
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  they're popular in asia and so you'd have a long
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  running it's like tent a frame and the
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  roots would go into that and then you might have a recirculatory system
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  back in there or it might evaporate off and
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  things like that depends depends on the parameters of your
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  actual grow it's great for lettuce and herbs basil
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  things like this you want to grow super fast and will
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  be conducive to this obviously if you've got a very tall plant they're
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  going to fall off the edges because this is not horizontal these are nearly
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  vertical so you can pack a lot of plants in you've got supplementary lighting
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  it's great for areas where you haven't got much space and it's a very light
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  system as well so if you're going on a rooftop system then you don't,
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  like DWC an Olympic sized swimming pool that's a lot of weight whereas here
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  there's not a lot of weight it's only the tank which can be positioned elsewhere
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  it doesn't have to be in the actual grow room.
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  There are some major disadvantages with aeroponics. Two major disadvantages that I'm aware of.
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  One is that the roots, because there's no medium for them to root into, often clump together.
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  And when they clump together, you get biofilms enveloping them and they start
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  to rot and they just don't absorb oxygen. It's covered in biofilms and algae.
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  Algae is growing this system and they're very difficult to control.
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  You know, normally in like NFT or DWC, you would apply hydrogen peroxide or
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  some other sterolent to kill off the algae, but you're going to kill the roots in this system.
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  And also you might expose workers to that peroxide as well, which is,
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  you know, hydrogen peroxide is horrible stuff.
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  Instant pain with hydrogen peroxide if it's strong enough. And then the other
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  disadvantage is, you know, you're spraying mists in a warm environment all the
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  time and that just screams Legionellas to me.
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  So you need to be really careful you don't get a Legionnaires outbreak.
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  And worst case scenario, you know, you get contamination of the crop,
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  the leafy veg with with some sort of contaminant microbial contaminant
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  so if you're really good at controlling algal
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  growth in nft and dwc and you think you know
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  you've got it locked down then aeroponics might be the system for
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  you in hydroponics sort of
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  amateur or side hustle hydroponics aeroponics
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  is used very often for routing of
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  cuttings lots of people see success with
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  very small aeroponic systems so you
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  know desktop size had aeroponic systems
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  for rooting cuttings and they're you they're only
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  in there for a short period of time so you don't get those build-up of biofilms
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  and lots of oxygen get into the newly developing adventitious roots so if you
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  most people start off with aeroponics and then they they move into some other
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  system once their cuttings have rooted so for propagation aeroponics is often
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  a good option so that's been the Hydroponics Daily for today. Thank you.