Transcription:
I want to do a video comparing growing in soil versus growing in hydroponics. Now, I have here the Bubble Boy this is a deep water culture hydroponic system and what you can see is these plants are starting the same time growing in the same area. The hydroponic plant is a little bit taller and has better branching and it’s already begun to flower here. So it is a week or two ahead of the soil-grown plant. Now soil is a great medium; I always recommend, if you’re going to start growing, start with soil. It’s the easiest and most forgiving but once you can grow in soil, you will get a little more out of your plants and more out of your grow area if you grow hydroponically. Now you don’t have to take my word for it, but let’s look at how these two plants have grown over the last few weeks.
So what I want to do here is do a little side-by-side comparison with the Bubble Boy deep water culture and growing in soil. I always recommend starting out in soil if you’ve never grown indoors. It’s what plants naturally grow in and it’s the easiest way to get started. But what I’m hoping we do a side-by-side comparison is we’ll see the benefits of growing hydroponically. Once you can handle growing in soil, a lot of growers then switch to hydroponics. It’s a little cleaner, you don’t have the dirt, but also you’re going to get faster growth. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to grow what’s called Anise. It’s a plant in the mint family, and you can see here we do have some roots started here. So I’m going to put that into the deep water culture here. Of course I’ve pH’d the water, it’s at 6.2. And then I’m going to put the exact same plant – again you can see this one also has roots formed – and I’ll put this into the soil here. Same sized containers and we’ll be checking in here every few weeks and see a comparison of growing Anise in hydroponics versus growing in soil.
Week 1
So here’s our first check in and I’m thinking about changing the reservoir. It’s been about 10 days and I will have a video about when to change the reservoir of your hydroponic system. But already we can see that there’s a faster growth rate with the hydroponic plant. If we look in here you can see there’s one, two, three, four, and then five, six leaves. the soil grown plant has one, two, three, four, and then the fifth and six are just starting down here. So in ten days we already see a faster growth rate with the hydroponic system. We’ll check back in a little bit and see where we’re at. But in less than a week you can already see a growth in comparing hydroponics with soil grown plants.
Week 2
So entering our second week here in our Bubble Boy deep water culture comparison to growing in soil. Not a big difference, again I grow in soil – it’s a fantastic way to grow plants – but if you look here the leaves on the hydroponic are a little bit bigger. And you might not be able to see it here but the hydroponic plant is getting some little growth here on the node. It’s going to get some branching, whereas the soil plant here is not really getting these nodes yet. So, again, soil is a fantastic way to grow plants. It’s the best way to start out because it’s the most forgiving, but when you grow hydroponically you can get a little bit more out of your plants than when they grow in soil.
Week 4
So it’s been about a month now, I’m going to wrap this video up. I’m going to keep growing these and shooting other videos, but in the comparison of soil versus hydroponics you can see with your own eyes that the hydroponic plant is a little bit taller. And it actually has one, two, three, four, five, six fully developed sets of leaves. Coming out with number seven here. The soil plant has one, two, three, four, five. The sixth set of leaves aren’t out. When you look at the secondary branching here, you can see that the hydroponic plant has better secondary branching. So there’s nothing wrong with growing in soil, I always recommend people that are just starting out grow in soil. It’s the easiest thing to grow in But once you’ve been growing for a while, if you want to get a little more out of your plants, you want to get a little more out of your gross space, you might want to try growing hydroponically. The Bubble Boy, this deep water culture, is one of the best ways to get started in hydroponics. So hydroponics is a way to get more out of your plants compared to soil.
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Thanks for watching. Good Growing!