The Hydroponic Garden Secret

Topping out today, which is Thursday, at 106 degrees in my next-door neighbor's side yard. This. Well, this is Asa GartenBake. Hi everybody.

I'm Michael Croes and it is Stig and Hot, Laura. It really is. I got this really cool book. I won't talk about this book.

By the way, you can't buy this book. I get a lot of books. This book is... You can't buy it.

They have to sell it to you. And the way I found this book is that I was on Facebook. And I'm looking... You know, they have ads running in there, and I had been doing some research on hydroponic gardening.

For a friend of mine, my daughter. And because I had done that, or maybe I was talking about it in the car, I don't know. But mystically on Facebook, this ad, this video pops up about hydroponic gardening. So I clicked on it.

It was a cute little video. It talks about all about hydroponic gardening. And you can get the book for free. And I said, oh, and it's a solid book.

I have it right here. It is. Alright, you can get the book for free. Just pay shipping and handling profit.

And the free book was $9.95 when I went in there. So I said, well, it looks interesting. I think I will buy it. I actually bought the book.

I don't buy books. People send me books, but I bought this book. And I said, you know, I'm gonna look it over. And I will just have all of this information.

Well, let me tell you something. When people publish books, they do it in different ways. And this book was published for one reason and one reason only. And that was to sell you other stuff.

And it was put out by the alternative daily out of Jupiter, Florida. Thealternativedaily.com is their website. So if you want this book, you might try going to thealternativedaily.com. And maybe you can figure out a way to get it.

Because it's not on Amazon. I look down Amazon. Then the author is a lady by the name of Susan Patterson. So I went on, you know, and she's written other books that seem strange.

One was a gardening book from a few years ago that you can't get new. They only have used and they want 45 bucks for it. And I gotta tell ya, she writes good books. And another one was about arthritis.

And another one seemed to be a kid's book. But this book, the hydroponic garden secret, how to grow more food faster all year long by this really nice lady, Susan Patterson. Let me read about her first. Because this is kind of cool.

Even though you can't get the book. Unless you go, I guess you can go to that website. I haven't gone to the website yet. I probably should have done that before the show.

But let me read you about her. Susan Patterson is a master gardener. Certified health coach, which explains why she wrote books about arthritis and stuff. And published author.

She has been gardening and growing food for her family for over 30 years. She doesn't look that old. She looks young. I gotta tell ya.

And has an extensive knowledge of horticulture, homesteading, natural health, and organic living. She has written 23 books, including her best-selling garden book, The Secret Garden, that has sold more than 80,000 copies. Now that one's on Amazon, but again, you can't get a new copy of it. You only get an old copy of it for 45 bucks.

I said, okay, that's weird. Oh, let's see. What does it say? I wonder if she lives down in...

Okay. All right. I need my readers. I've determined I need my readers.

Okay. Anyway, it sold all these in a year. Susan lives in the mountains of Arizona with her family and numerous animals. And when she's not in the garden, you can find her hiking, biking, kayaking, and creating recycled art with her husband.

Well, isn't that nice? Why don't you make your book available to everybody easily? I don't know. It's a cool book.

Let's talk about hydroponic gardening. Now, I usually don't do things on hydroponic gardening. Well, I don't. Although I like hydroponic gardening.

For years, I didn't do things on hydroponic gardening because people primarily used hydroponic gardening to grow marijuana. And I was like the anti-meriwani guy. I guess I still am. I don't smoke marijuana.

I think smoking marijuana makes you stupid. And it is stupid. That's just me. You're probably going to disagree with you.

Most of you are, as it turns out, going to disagree with me on that. But I stayed away from hydroponic gardening because that's what people were using it for. And but now, you know, I, if you want to use it for pot, go ahead. I used to grow the most wonderful tomatoes and other things.

And my daughter wants to do hydroponic gardening and she wants to grow tomatoes and she wants to grow cucumbers. I think she wants to grow pot. Now, she's living over at her mother's house with my three grandkids. I think she wants to grow pot.

I could be wrong. I don't think her mother would be happy with her doing that. But I know she will grow tomatoes. So I got this book and I started going through it.

Now, what plants need? This is one of the thing that says, growing plants without soil, the benefits of growing hydroponically. Hydroponic pioneers tells you about that, blah, blah, blah. Here's a good thing.

They talk about building a foundation of things in motion. When you're growing hydroponically, you're either growing in pure water or you're growing in some medium that is not soil. I, my hydroponic gardening has, in my own personal experience, has been growing in rock wall. I kind of like that.

Or growing in coconut, the coconut fiber. I've done that. And let's see, the key elements of the hydroponic system, if you're growing inside, you need grow lights. You need growing mediums.

Then you need, here's the most important thing. And she does a pretty good job in this book about talking about this. And that is the nutrition solution. And you see, that's the secret to good hydroponic growing.

And you talk about water, the water reservoir, the grow tray, the pump, the air stone, the tights of hydroponic systems, all of these things you can talk about. And it's quite interesting. Now, one of the things I want to talk about now, if I can, is I'm using a different microphone. I have to get used to it.

All right. I'll be going back to the old microphone next week. Let's talk a little bit about systems. Okay.

The WIC system, the WIC system is a passive hydroponic system that has no moving parts. And it's pretty easy. You've got little pots sitting on top of water. And you've got a wick that goes down there that pulls up the water in the nutrients.

Pretty easy. Okay. There's instructions in the book on how to do it too, by the way. So I like that.

There's deep water culture. I do that over at, at, uh, at Disney World at Epcot in there, where it's just going into water. You've got to have a pump. You've got to keep the water moving and all that type of stuff.

There's the drip system, which I like also where you've got a water source, which is usually a big, you know, tub and then a pump that shoots the water over the plants and the nutrients over the plants that are growing in some type of system. More in just a moment. Ah, yes. And as Billy Mays used to say so brilliantly, but wait, there's more continuing now are either very exciting or very boring discussion on nitropons and we're talking about systems.

And right now I want to talk about the evin flow system. All by the way, all of this is in this book, the hydroponic garden secret, how to grow more food faster all year long. And as far as I can tell, the only place you can buy it is at the alternative daily.com outfit out of, uh, Jupiter, Florida, which is down by Palm Beach. And when I saw it and I was telling for when I found this on Facebook, I bought it like I got it for free.

I just paid pussy, chance, laying in profit, $9.95. But they wanted to sell me a ton of more stuff. They wanted to sell me all of these supercharged systems and blah, blah, blah. They wanted me to spend gads of money by the time I kept saying, no, no, no, no, no, every stream you'd go to, it took me 10 minutes to get to the end screen where I just paid the 9.95 and then off again in a game, relatively quickly.

Now, evin flow system at first glance, the evin flow system looks complicated, but it's really is actually quite simple. The once it's set up, the evin flow system is a pretty easy way to manage and can be adapted for any size space. So they talk about that. They go into great detail, what parts you need, some of the other systems that they talk about, uh, the nutrient film in FT, uh, and that is where you have an elevated growing thing and you have water going in the top of it and going down and going through the roots and then draining down to a bottom tank where it's then, you know, redone into that.

Then there's something called aeroponics. I've never seen that successfully done, but, uh, you know, aeroponics system is, uh, most high check type of hydroponic gardening, uh, you can read it in a book. It's, it's real interesting. And the cray, the cray-cra-ky, cracky method, uh, which is also water based in, in, in it looks good.

And, you know, all of these things, um, and they have simple jars that you can make to grow herbs. Now, a friend of mine that I went to high school with a million years ago, I just saw this in this book where they take mason jars and they set it up as little hydroponic plant things. She used to grow herbs. She was a chef.

I mean, she, you know, she fancied herself as a chef. Um, I'm not mentioning her name because I got to tell you her cooking was anyway, she fancied herself as a chef and she grew the herbs this way and I thought it was cute. She had them, uh, you know, in the kitchen on the window and you need a wide mouth mason jar, uh, black spray paint. She had it.

She did all of this the same way. Uh, you need, uh, grow pots, baskets and all of this. It's real simple. They tell you how to make it in the book and, uh, it was quite good.

Now I have, I know a guy. It's actually the lovely X, Mrs. Croce number two favorite X, Mrs. Croce's ex boyfriend who's got a hydroponic system going down at his home in Largo that I visited that he set up out of five gallon buckets and totes and it is a water based system and he is growing.

I mean, he gave me some broccoli and it tasted so good because he got the nutrient system down really good, which is, you know, what's good. And here's, they tell you the five gallon bucket deep system for water culture. Uh, is in here. That's how I used to grow tomatoes hydroponically and did all of that.

So it's, it's quite good. The PVC, uh, film, or nutrient film technique system, which is a little bit higher. He's got something like that set up. I haven't looked at it that much.

I just glanced at it. Uh, and then they talk about in the book, the growing process, starting seeds, I start seeds. Um, I don't know how the book tells you how to start seeds, but I start seeds in straight pure vermiculite and I use super thrive. I get really water, you know, I water it down to where it's really wet and then I put the seeds down and then I sprinkle vermiculite on top of the seeds and then I gently water it again with super thrive.

One, uh, cap of super thrive in a gallon of water after you get them developed roots, then you transplant them into your hydroponic system. That is how I do it. Uh, tips for success. That's in the book, you know, because there's a lot of ways to fail in hydroponics, a lot of ways.

I saw a guy who was growing bean sprouts hydroponically down in Largo, many, many years ago, he was selling them to restaurants. He had quite a business going. He had some of the best restaurants in our area that were buying these, he was delivering, they would grow overnight. He would deliver on the next day because he did not follow the cleanliness rules of hydroponic growing.

He got, uh, you know, he got a virus in there and it just wiped him out and he could not, you know, it took him, I don't know, two weeks to get it all cleaned out and by then he lost most of his customers. So cleanliness is good. The nutrient solution. That's the big one.

Okay. That is the big one. What do they say for best results, change out your nutrient system weekly, or at the minimum top off your system with clean water. And they're not talking about what nutrients to use.

They, they don't do that in great detail. I need to write a book about nutrition in plants, both hydroponic and in the ground. I need to do that because I've got some expertise in that simply because I hung out with the people at Dr. Shadliers, who developed hydroponic growing systems and the nutrients that went with them.

So I've learned about that reservoir temperature. You can't let it get too cold. Uh, you know, all of those that has to have good airflow. You've got to watch your plants daily inspection of plants.

Okay. And only change one thing at a time. And by the way, it's very important to start with healthy plants. If you start with plants that are not healthy and you think you're going to have a problem with it.

Um, and you're going to try and, you know, you're going to try and cure it hydroponically. You're not, trust me, you're not, they're going to die. Okay. In conventional gardening, fungus and bacteria thrive in the soil, hydroponic growing.

Uh, the most common causes of disease are environmental in nature. Disease can be spread rapidly in close growing conditions. So it's important that you have, uh, each plant has an enough individual growing space. And if you get that, if you get a disease, you can't treat it.

You just have to pull the plants out, clean the system totally with bleach. And then you're done. They talk about the different diseases that you can get in the book, pest, pest our problem. Uh, and they talk about that.

Here's how I handle pest hydroponically. Uh, well, this is how I have any years passed when I did hydroponics. I haven't done it in years. I used to use safer insecticidal soap and then safer had another version of it that was safer insecticidal soap with pyrethums.

I cannot find the safer insectal, insecticidal soap with pyrethums. What a friend of mine who is doing a lot of commercial growing hydroponically is using is a organic product called a centria. And you've got to look for it. I found it on Amazon.

It's made up of many botanicals. And I got to tell you, the stuff works. It works wonderfully except I can't stand the smell. But as it turns out, I'm the only person in the universe who can't stand the smell.

Everybody else loves the smell except me. I am the only one who does not like the smell, but everyone else loves it. I have some of the century here. You know where I keep it?

I keep it in a plastic toolbox in my backyard in the corner of my backyard. So I kept it in the garage once and the smell just permeated the concrete in my garage. It was awful. You know, but everybody else smells wonderful in your garage.

No, it didn't. I hated it. So I keep it out there. I use a centria on my exterior plants, 100% organic.

Every ingredient in it is classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as generally regarded as safe. So it's good stuff. You can use it right up to where you harvest. And it's not going to hurt you.

As a matter of fact, it's all botanicals. It's basically food grade. So it's good. Whereas with the safer insecticidal soap with the pyrethum, even though the pyrethum was natural, I don't think I'd want to eat pyrethium because when you breathe pyrethums, it gets funky.

I'm not a big lover of pyrethums, simply because they make me sneeze. I mean, they do. They work quite well, but it makes me sneeze and it gets my eyes watery. So I don't like that.

But that is what I suggest is the the acentria. They talk about using beneficial predators, which I agree with. Horticulture, oils, and herbal extracts. I like the acentria.

And then they talk about nutrient deficiencies. Anyway, the name of the book, once again, The Hydroponic Garden Secret. And it is by Susan Patterson. You can only get it.

Go to this website, thealternativedaily.com. You can't buy it in a store, but it's a good book. I highly, highly recommend it.