Hydroponics (Soilless Culture of Plants)

Hydroponics refers to methods of growing plants in a water and nutrient solution, without soil. This technique allows gardner to grow plants in a more efficient and productive manner with less labour and time required. In the hydroponics system of plants growing, the nutrients are directly fed at the root base, never stressing the plant due to lack of nutrients or water. This technique is ideal for growing wide range of plant species especially fruit bearing crops, such as tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers, leafy crops like lettuces, cabbage, herbs and flowering plants. Hydroponics offers an opportunity to provide optimal conditions for plant growth with higher yields as compared to open field agriculture. This technique can be used any where in all agro-climatic zones and hydroponic produce are higher in nutritional value and tastes better than field growing crops. The cost of production in hydroponics is also less over conventional methods. If optimum growing conditions and nutritional requirements are applied, combined with sound horticultural management, this system of growing plants can offer an alternative means of food production.

Due to various advantages over open field agriculture, hydroponics is more popular in some countries like Canada, especially in commercial production of vegetables. But in India, this technique could not get popularity among gardners till the date. The main bottleneck behind this is lack of its standard knowledge and our weak extension system. All thought, more literature on hydroponics is available but standard, precise and authentic in formations are  lacking.

For popularization of hydroponics in our country, it is very important to provide scientific proven technology of hydroponics to gardner and create mass awareness in potential areas at national level. This manuscript is based on author's past years experience and work done on the hydroponics and intended to provide practical and standard information on various aspects in précised and digestible form. Various key issues have been discussed in different chapters to make it very useful to every gardner, farmer, student, scientist, planner and policy maker – gain enough knowledge of hydroponics to be able to grow plants successfully.