Hydroponic Gardening - Strawberries

Strawberries are a fairly easy plant to start with if you are just beginning to explore the world of hydroponics. Indoor gardening is perfect for these plants and they will grow equally well inside your living quarters or in a greenhouse or enclosed porch. Your choice of place will depend on how large a crop you want to cultivate. Strawberries do well in a planting mixture of perlite and bark. It is easy to pollinate smaller crops by hand, but adding specially bred bumblebees to your growing area can easily pollinate larger crops.

Start your strawberry crop by clipping “runners” from a grown plant or purchasing some from a garden center. Rooting can easily be done by placing the cuttings in perlite and covering with plastic to keep moisture and humidity in. Once rooted, you will need to place your clippings in a cold area for approximately three months. This will simulate the winter that strawberries need in order to begin growing. This done, your plants can be moved to a permanent container. The container will need to provide a way to allow the hydroponic nutrients to flow freely past the roots as well as provide needed air for the roots.

Strawberries need five to six hours of full spectrum light daily and this can be accomplished with the use of grow-lights. This lighting schedule will need changed to twelve hours on/twelve hours off when it is time to fruit. Temperatures should be within the range of 67 to 74 degrees Fahrenheit at all times for optimum growth. Strawberries do well if allowed to hang down. For this reason, you can “layer” your containers to make better use of space.

Your hydroponic strawberry garden will need to be pollinated in order to flower and produce fruit. For one or two plants, manual pollinating will work. This is a matter of simply brushing the centers of the strawberry flowers and using a fan. Most hydroponic gardeners, however, produce crops much larger and it can take a lot of time to manually pollinate. Adding specially bred bumblebees to the area helps to pollinate greenhouse crops. It is not advisable to use any commercial insecticides on your hydroponic garden. Strawberries, however, are not likely to be plagued by many pests. If necessary, a specially formulated product like Barricade, sold at Advanced Nutrients, will help take care of the problem.

There, in a nutshell, is all you need to successfully produce strawberries the hydroponics way. As you can see, the process is much simpler than many hydroponically grown plants. Strawberries are a wonderful way to start your exploration of hydroponics. Little space needed, no soil, room temperature and pre-formulated nutrition. What more could you ask for? Finally, if you want to harvest robust, abundant fruits and vegetables you should check out the seven best-kept secrets of hydroponics at http://www.advancednutrients.com/freereport/ Advanced Nutrients is the world's foremost supplier of hydroponic nutrients to discriminating growers everywhere