Beginning Hydroponics – Soilless Gardening by Richard E. Nicholls

An updated edition of the classic guide to hydroponics, providing a thorough introduction to soilless gardening.  Hydroponics, a method of gardening without soil, has developed over the past fifty years.  While it has been proven both reliable and effective, and has received much attention in some quarters, it is still an unfamiliar practice to many gardeners.  This book is designed to introduce you to the principles and methods of hydroponic gardening.

Rodale’s All-New Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening – The Indispensable Resource for Every Gardener by Fern Marshall Bradley and Barbara W. Ellis

Over 400 entries of the most practical, up-to-date gardening information ever, collected from garden experts and writers nationwide!

“Gardens are places to renew yourself in mind and body, to reawaken to the truth and beauty of the natural world, and to feel the life force inside and around you. And the organic way to garden is safer, cheaper, and more satisfying. Organic gardeners have shown that it’s possible to have pleasant and productive gardens in every part of this country without using toxic chemicals. They make their home grounds an island of purity.” – Robert Rodale

Secrets of High Yield Plant Growth by Graham Reinders

An advanced guide that focuses on useful, practical techniques for producing high yields in both soil and any hydroponics growing media. With comprehensive features on how nutrient, light and PH levels will affect the yield of a plant. More advanced than most of the other books we offer, but not too technical to understand.

The Rodale Book of Composting – Easy Methods for Every Gardener by Grace Gershuny and Deborah L. Martin

The essential guide to composting for all gardeners and enviromentally conscious people. Composting is fast becoming a household word. Gardeners know it is the best way to feed the soil, while others look to composting as a way to dispose of grass clippings, autumn leaves, and tree trimmings.

The Rodale Book of Composting offers easy-to-follow instructions for making and using compost, helpful tips for apartment dwellers, suburbanites, farmers and community leaders and ecologically sound solutions to growing waste disposal problems.

Gardening Indoors with CO2 by George F. Van Patten

Plants can use up to five times more CO2 than naturally occurs in the air. CO2, essential to photosynthesis, is often the most overlooked element limiting plant growth. This book demonstrates how fertilizing the air with CO2 can shorten growing time and double your harvest.

Includes technical information on how to set up a CO2 emitter system or generator system and how to grow cuttings and seedlings with CO2. Packed with the most up-to-date facts and figures on CO2, Gardening Indoors With CO2 shows you how to put CO2 to work in your garden room or greenhouse for super results!

These are just some of the many book offered in igrowhydro.com. Please check out the site for even more reading for the beginning to the most advanced grower.

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July 16, 2009

Plant roots provide the crops we eat with water, nutrients and anchorage. Understanding how roots grow and how hormones control that growth is crucial to improving crop yields, which will be necessary to address food security and produce better biofuels.

Now an international group of scientists has shed light on how a plant hormone is crucial in controlling the growth of plant roots. Plant growth is driven by an increase in two factors: the number of cells, and their size.

Scientists already know that the plant hormone gibberellin controls how root cells elongate as the root grows in the model plant. Now a paper appearing in Current Biology describes for first time how this hormone also regulates the number of cells in the root in order to control root growth.

Gibberellin normally acts by signaling the removal of proteins which repress growth, and so promotes root cell production. This  research shows that mutant plants that do not produce the hormone are unable to increase their cell production rate and the size of the root meristem, the zone of cell proliferation.

Plants in which the cells in the meristem were made to express a mutant version of the growth-repressing protein GAI not degraded by gibberellin showed disrupted cell proliferation. Expressing this mutant form, gai, in only one tissue, the endodermis (the innermost layer of the root cortex of a plant), was sufficient to stop the meristem enlarging. In effect, the rate of expansion of dividing endodermal cells dictates the equivalent rate in other tissues.

This research was headed by Dr Susana Ubeda-Tomás and Professor Malcolm Bennett of the Centre for Plant Integrative Biology, in collaboration with scientists in Nottingham, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Spain, Belgium and Sweden.

Professor Malcolm Bennett, Biology Director for the Centre for Plant Integrative Biology and Professor of Plant Sciences in the Division of Plant and Crop Sciences, said: “We have shown that gibberellin plays a crucial role in controlling the size of the root meristem, and that it is the endodermis which sets the pace for expansion rates in the other tissues.

“Understanding precisely how hormones regulate plant growth is one of the key areas of fundamental plant biology which will underpin crop improvements in the future.”

Adapted from materials provided by University of Nottingham.

University of Nottingham (2009, July 16). Hormone Clue To Root Growth.

As scientists understand how the root system builds, I’m sure we’ll see products come to market that will add these hormones to nutrient solutions.

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igrowhydro.com has put together an amazing collection of frequently asked questions, articles and downloads all related to how to grow hydroponics.  We’ve broken how to grow hydro down in to the same categories most people shop for hydroponics. Starting with the two most important elements – your grow lights and your hydroponic system and from there we have articles in the ten other major hydroponic topics. We even have a whole section for you soil growers.

Here is the catch – our grow section only contains a fraction of our knowledge when it comes to how to grow hydro. We’ve been helping people grow indoors for a long time, but we haven’t gotten it all down on paper yet. You know how that goes. So, we invite you at any time to comment on any article and one of our grow experts will get back to you as soon as possible with the best solution to your indoor growing issue.

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