Hydroponics: Pros and Cons of Growing Without Soil

As an avid gardener I have grown various indoor plants and herbs both in soil and in hydroponics, or soil less/water setups. I found numerous pros and cons for each type of setup and had to weight them all in order to figure out what to use in my limited indoor growing space. Since your conclusion based on these various observations will undoubtedly vary from own I will simply law them out and leave it up to you to decide.

The first thing is ease; this factor has a couple of different elements to it when we are speaking of hydroponics vs. soil. Hydroponics takes some serious work and tweaking, making it not that easy, when you first begin as you have to find the ideal pH and nutrient levels for your system. In addition to this assembling your system with reservoir tanks, pumps or passive wicks, etc. is quite a bit more difficult than potting a plant. This does, however, swing around after you get the hang of things. Instead of having to repot and get new soil, as well as dealing with nutrient levels which are more difficult to adjust in soil hydroponics systems are mostly autopilot after you have your levels correct. Just add the water and nutrients to the water and forget about it!

The largest pro that I have ever found for soil is when it comes to growing plants for human consumption. It is simply not possible and organically grow plants in hydroponics setups and you can taste the difference. There is just something about natural nutrients and soil that leave a better taste in your mouth. That being said the perfect pH and nutrient levels in your hydro reservoir make for much higher yielding fruits which may be the way to go for you.

The final area to analyze is the indoor space that you have. Hydroponics systems allow you to closely bunch plants together and, in my experience, is a far more space efficient way to grow plants indoors. That being said soil allows you to more easily have each plant on an independent nutrient regimen which is important if you want to feed different levels of nutrients to your plant based on what plant you are growing or whether it is flowering or young. This can be done with hydroponics as well but you would have to divide your table and create multiple reservoirs which again becomes a bit of a chore.

Hopefully you have now learned the many pros and cons of growing without soil in a hydroponics setup. This article should assist you in making an educated system about what type of medium you will choose to grow your plants in.