Hydroponic Herb Garden Guide

What's going on Epic Gardeners? This is Kevin from Epic Gardening. Going to do a rundown of a guide that previously you can only download if you subscribe to my mailing list, but I decided to release it for free today. And it's my Epic Gardening Herb Garden Guide. It teaches you how to grow a hydroponic herb garden. It's absolutely perfect for someone who's just starting out in hydroponics. So let's go ahead and run through the guide. It's really, really easy to do, even though this table of contents looks a little intense. I just wanted to be thorough. So the whole point behind this is to design a system that helps you grow herbs, which are traditionally the most expensive plant in the grocery store on a per weight basis. Really cheap, really easy. And you know, with total control, you get to know exactly what you're growing. You get to choose exactly what you're growing. You can grow some interesting varieties of basil or whatever you might want to grow. And you know, it's just a fun way to get into hydroponics. So some of the benefits, very cheap. Shopping list. What do we need to get this done? I've provided a bunch of links for you guys. You can source everything locally. If you want some of the stuff, you might want to grab on Amazon. So I've provided some links there as well. At the most basic, what you need is a plastic tote, some spray paint, if it's a clear plastic tote, just because you don't want any algae to form inside of the reservoir. Then you're going to need some sort of air supply. So the simplest setup is an air stone, an air pump, some tubing, and then some suction cup tubing holders to pull that down. Then you're going to need some nutrients and some way to test your water. So I've set up a pH testing kit and then Flora Grow, which is all you really need to grow herbs because most herbs aren't going to flower. So you can just grow them through the vegetative phase. You'll need some net pots, which is what's going to hold your growing media and your hydroponic plants. Then you're going to need some seeds or some seedlings. I personally prefer seeds, but you can go ahead and grab some already sprouted plants if you want to and transplant them into the system. You'll need some sort of media. I've got an extensive guide both on the seedlings, how to start them and hydroponic media on my website, as well as my YouTube channel. So check those out. But you can also get this from a pet store. And then if you want to make your life a lot easier, go ahead and pick up a two inch hole saw with a pilot bit. It lets you drill into the top really easily and smoothly. So you won't really have to worry about any sort of jagged edges or just sort of looking ugly. And then here's just a breakdown of some of the reasoning behind why you need this. I'm going to skip through this part. This is more for the people who read it on the blog. All right, so here's how you get it going. The first thing that I want you guys to do is wash the reservoir and the tape it. Because instead of, because we're painting the whole thing, we're going to want to make sure that we know what our water level is at all times. The last thing you want to do is have your plants run out of water, die, or, you know, you just want to know. And the easiest way to know is to actually make a mark right at the bottom of where the net pot would sit and then put some electric tape on it and make sure that you cover it up. So when we spray paint it, that's actually still going to be translucent. So you'll be able to look at a quick glance and see what the water level is. Just a really quick tip, not necessary, but it's really helpful. Then you're going to want to spray paint the tote. A couple of coats is probably solid. I like to make sure that I get it as opaque as possible. And I give it a good amount of time to dry, about 45 minutes or so. Then you got to get into the drilling and cutting section. First thing I like to do is drill the airstone hole. I like to do it on one of the thinner sides close to the handle, just because you don't want to drill your airline hole below the water level because then you're going to get some leakage. You want to drill it above and then use the suction cups to kind of guide the airline to the airstone. So I do about a one eighth inch hole there, and then you can stuff the airline tubing through. Then you've got the installation of the airstone. And as you can see, it's pretty straightforward. You just thread the airline through, put a couple of suction cups on and then put your airstone on. And the reason you use the suction cups is because without it, you're actually going to have this thing float up and it's just a little bit annoying and it doesn't circulate as much air as possible because of, you know, the deeper it is, the more air, the more water is going to be exposed to those bubbles. This is just a picture of what it should look like, the kind of dispersion you should get. Then we've got pHing and adding the nutrients. I've got an entire video on this on my channel that you can check out if you want to, but at a most basic level, it's your water probably going to look a little bit green like this when you use the pH testing kit. And that's because most water is in the seven to eight pH range. You're going to want to get it down to an orangey yellow, which is the six to 6.5 range. Most herbs do really well in that range. And again, on the blog, there's a post on pH and nutrient availability. All right, the next step is to go ahead and add your nutrients. And at the beginning, especially if you're going from seed, you really don't need nutrients. They just need water to sprout. But as they become seedlings, you're going to want a light nutrient solution just because the food that they get from their cotyledons or their seed leaves is going to be depleted. So they're going to start needing nutrients from the water and the nutrients reservoir. All right, add your growing media and add your plants. And you know what, this blog post, there's actually a missing step that I need to go back and add, but it was the drilling the net pot holes. So the easiest way to do that is to flip these net pots over and kind of line them up, draw a circle around them and then use your drill bit to drill an even amount of net pots, you know, evenly spaced all throughout. I think that for a 15 quart tote, about eight net pots is probably the most that you want to hit. And if you want more, you can actually check out this post. It'll be updated with that step on the blog so you can check it out and make sure that you fully understand that step. We're going to move on to step six, which is add the growing media and the plants. In this particular example, I used a mixture of hydroton, which are the tan circle looking things and grow stone, which is the lava rock looking stuff. And then I used a starter plug, which is a coconut bar starter plug. And you can check that out on my hydroponic media guide. I went from seed, but I also have an example of what you should do if you're going from soil or a transplant. And the best way to do it is to wash as much of the soil off as possible. It's okay if you break a couple of roots or you tear a couple of roots off, but you just don't want to introduce soil to the system. It's going to get the water a little bit dirty. You might be introducing some, you know, some nasty bacteria potentially. But this is an example of what a cleaned off basal plant would look like before it goes into the system. And once you do that, you plug the whole thing in, you're pretty much done. And here's an example of what my herb garden looked like after about two to three weeks or so out of seed. I've also included for you guys, some details on plants. If you want to try to plan out what to grow, these are some of the most popular herbs and their germination time, the time to get through the seedling phase and then the time to harvest. And then I've got a little bit of a guide on taking care of the garden. It's very simple. You can actually just run this off natural sunlight if you have a good windowsill because herbs aren't super light intensive. They don't need a ton of light. Watering is very, very simple. What I like to do is I keep about a gallon or so of pre-prepared nutrient solution. That means I pH my water and added the correct amount of nutrients. And then I just top off my system as I see the water level get lower on my water level indicator. Then finally the harvesting phase, which is the most fun phase is the whole reason that we did this. Just clip off things as you need them. For things like basil, it's, or really any other plant, it's important to clip off the more mature leaves rather than the younger leaves because you're going to have a more perpetual system there. You know, if you start clipping off stuff at the top, you're going to sort of stunt the growth of the plant and make it grow a little bit bushier as opposed to more vertical. And by doing that, you're going to crowd out the other things in your system. So be careful on how you harvest, but you know, harvest at will. This is the whole reason we do it. If you do this well, you can actually pull off the same plants for quite a while and have super cheap herbs, super fresh right in the house, you know, right in your kitchen. So this is Kevin from Epic Gardening. If you have any questions, leave them on the blog or leave them in the comments and I'll get you back. If you want to check this out, I really encourage you guys to check out some of the stuff on the blog because this is the biggest sort of project that I've posted and it requires a lot of different knowledge. You know, how to pH, how to add the proper amount of nutrients, when to harvest, all that kind of stuff. And there's a lot of posts on the blog that cover all of that. So go ahead and check it out. And until then, keep gardening guys.