Well, we’ve got a little teaser for you for this season! We’re building yet another garden, the 11th in our entire line up!
As we’ve pushed this Frosty Garden thing forward, we’ve realized that it gives us an opportunity to demonstrate different techniques and methods one can use to build gardens and grow in the subarctic. We’ve had one glaring omission from our lineup, hydroponics! Also, since this is our 10th year anniversary, we wanted to do something unique and special!
Hydroponics is a radically different growing technique from the soil based gardens we’re typically using. In case hydroponics is new to you, it’s a growing technique that entirely relies on growing plants in nutrition filled water and using non-bioactive (organic or inorganic) as the media.
If you’ve studied some of the container gardening info, you know that we “sort of” dabble in hydroponics all ready. At least with how we treat our sub irrigated containers. Alas, this isn’t “true” hydroponics because we’re still relying on soil and organics as our growing medium.
I’ve dabbled with small scale hydroponic gardens over the years, just to build some familiarity. But, this will definitely be our first foray into taking hydroponics into the outdoors at scale. We’re also diving straight into the deep end, trying to grow some of the most challenging outdoor subarctic plants!
Technically, we’re building two different hydroponic systems, both a “set and forget” type system and also a fully automated hydroponic garden. We can’t give away too much this early in the season, but, you can expect us to start discussing this topic in more depth this year. If successful, it’ll become part of our typical rotation of topics in future years.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been this excited about a new garden, this is something I’ve been planning for years now. I think it’ll do decently well, but the only way to find out is to do it!
