It’s 95°F outside and I’m inside with a cold. This seems like a good time to take cuttings, since I’m too tired to work in my garden outside. As children, we all looked forward to carefree summer vacations and sunny days at the pool—now, as I try to keep my post-nasal drip from hitting the keyboard, I think of the hard work involved with a summertime indoor garden. Every summer I hear about over-heated grow rooms and cuttings that lack roots. While I can’t turn down the heat outside, I can offer a few tips for your cloning woes.

Cloning machines are all the rage for hydro enthusiasts and in the long run they pay for themselves, since you no longer need propagation trays, domes or a growing medium. In the summer, however, I always hear complaints about slow performance—or even no performance—from formerly successful cloners.

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Ebb and flow systems are some of the most common, reliable and easy ways to garden with hydroponics, although some gardeners find greater yields can be obtained growing with drip systems. Others prefer drip systems over ebb and flow because of the reduction in nutrient costs made possible by using smaller reservoirs or the ability to water larger containers from the top down.

If you currently use an ebb and flow system and are considering changing your methods, let me show you how to easily convert your hydro set-up to a drip system.

Most ebb and flow (aka fill and drain) systems involve a reservoir underneath a tray. At least once a day a pump in the reservoir kicks on (via a timer) and fills the tray with nutrient solution. The upper tray is full with container plants or blocks of an inert growing medium, which are soaked by the flooding process. If you are using airy media like grow rocks or perlite the tray should flood several times each day. If you are using a medium that holds more water, you will water less often.

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Gardening is a hobby that produces waste. There is no way to get around it. Every gardener—whether they deal with hydroponics or soil—knows the hassle of throwing away all of those root balls. In a post-harvest situation, root balls and growing media are usually wet and heavy. Filling plastic garbage bags and sending them off to the landfill is cumbersome to the grower and harmful to the environment.

In my experience, most of the waste matter from an indoor garden is organic: soil, leaves, roots and so on. So why not make valuable compost from this stuff instead of throwing it into a landfill? Considering the work involved with trashing your scraps, gathering and turning compost should be easy.

Wait, don’t stop reading! I know some of you are thinking “Composting?! I’ve heard this before…” Well, this compost plan is specifically for indoor gardeners. I’ve got an easy-to-build and easy-to-use compost system that will be the perfect addition to your garden process, and you will be thrilled with the effective waste removal.

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Great root systems give us great plants. Large yields just aren’t possible without large root systems, and most indoor gardeners can tell you their favorite method for achieving thick mats of healthy white roots—although their advice will vary widely. Some growers will even combine multiple techniques to reap the benefits of different styles of gardening.

Top-feed drip systems and deep water culture are two common hydroponics methods known for creating amazing root systems. Some of the most popular growing media are soilless mixes and grow rocks (usually expanded clay), both of which are known for generating luscious root growth.

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Have you ever noticed how plants grow in nature, versus the way we grow plants in gardens? You won’t find any plastic buckets in a field or a forest. Plants certainly don’t require the containers and pots we grow them in—we only place plants into individual containers for moving and sorting reasons. People are always asking me what is the best size of container for flowering. The answer is almost always, “Bigger than what you are using!”

So let’s talk about the ‘perfect container’. It depends on how you grow your plants. For ebb and flow gardens and for those who prefer aeroponic or deep water culture, the ideas discussed here will not apply.

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