Hydroponics Vs Soil

With hydroponics currently at new heights in the gardening world, the question facing gardeners today is Hydroponics or Soil? This question is also becoming an age old debate of battling sides fighting to prove the other wrong. I won’t be taking a stance on the issue. Instead I’ll explain the key differences among hydroponic and soil gardening as well as advantages and disadvantages for both techniques.

The fundamental difference between hydroponic and soil gardening is the growing medium. In a soil-based garden, that medium is the soil itself. In hydroponics, the medium is a nutrient-enriched liquid solution. Each method has advantages and disadvantages. For either to produce healthy plants, the basic nutrients must be made available to the plant roots.

Hydroponics commercially efficient and time-saving, is not practical for the amateur. There are too many risky factors involved- most importantly, it is easy to have an unbalanced nutrient solution, which will stunt the growth of the plants. Our nutrient solution lacked enough of the important nutrients nitrogen and potassium, as we could tell by the appearance of our plants. The nitrogen deficiency caused the plants to have abnormally light-colored leaves and stunted growth. The fact that our hydroponics plants did not grow very much is explained here. 

The potassium deficiency caused our plants to have stunted growth and slightly withered leaves. Although the hydroponics clearly fared worse than the soil plants, the soil plants still were not productive in this experiment. This was probably caused by the fact that the fluorescent gro-light was not as close to the plants as to simulate sunlight, and therefore the plants did not grow as fast as we had hoped. However, the soil plants did grow steadily if slowly, and were more healthy than the hydroponics plants in the end.

Advantage of Hydroponics

An advantage hydroponics gardening compared to soil gardening is the control the gardener has over the quantity and content of the nutrients. The solutions may be tailored to specific plant needs and plants needn't compete with other plants or weeds for nutrients as happens in soil gardening. The risk of damage or disease from soil-borne pests is greatly reduced, due to the lessened exposure to these pests.

Advantage of Soil

Soil has the advantage of the organic factor. Although all nutrients need to be in an inert form for roots to access and process, the nutrients may be in organic form when added to soil. In hydroponics, the nutrients must already be inert and immediately soluble, and so are synthetic. The organic nature of soil gardening encourages the development of ecosystems that include bacteria, fungi, worms, insects and birds, all of which contribute to the natural renewal of nutrients in soil. The soil gardener need only assist in nutrient renewal, rather than control it. No such sustaining ecosystem exists within hydroponic gardening methods.

Reference: http://www.ehow.com/
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