Hydroponic gardening is exploding in popularity, with more and more people choosing to convert their spare room and basements into a source of vegetables, flowers, and other plants. Part of the reason is that hydroponics can allow anyone, in any geographic locale, experience the joy of gardening. But there are several other ways that hydroponic gardening benefits the gardeners personally. Here are just a few of the reasons why people choose hydroponic gardening as a hobby.
- Reduces Stress – The satisfaction that comes from running a successful hydroponic garden can make it easier to deal with everything else you do in life. Learning a new skill has long been known been known to reduce stress, because it raises your confidence and allows you to take your focus off of whatever it is that gives you stress. Seeing a project to completion, such as turning seedlings into healthy plants, also gives you a sense of accomplishment, which can reduce your stress levels.
- Fantastic Tasting Vegetables – If the only vegetables that you have tasted are the kind at the supermarket, you don’t know how good vegetables can be. They are often picked long before they are ripe halfway around the world, crated, and then shipped to your hometown. Because they ripen off of the plant, they lose out on a lot of the sugar that give vegetables their flavor. And since large-scale farmers are paid by weight, not the flavor of their produce, their vegetable plants are often bred for maximum yield rather than optimum taste. They are also often refrigerated to slow ripening, which kills some of the taste. When you grow your own vegetables in your closet or basement, you can pick them right before you are ready to eat them, thus eliminating the early picking, rough handling, and refrigeration that renders store bought vegetables relatively tasteless.
- Creative Outlet – Growing your own flowers or vegetables through hydroponic gardening is a very personal thing. You choose which plants to grow, you choose how to grow them, and even choose which plants are worthy of cloning. Every hydroponic garden is as much a reflection of its creator as a painting or song is. As you become a more skilled gardener, you can further change and alter your garden to suit your personality.
- Exercise – Growing in your own garden doesn’t really sound like exercise, because we typically associate exercise with unpleasant work. But with hydroponics, you get in a lot of physical activity just the same. Hauling your medium to your buckets or grow trays, filling your reservoir, and squatting and stretching to connect your fittings and lights all involve some amount of physical activity, which burns calories and gives you a healthier heart and lungs. Some studies even suggest that doing forty-five minutes of gardening is the equivalent of doing half an hour of moderate aerobics. What’s even more, is that since gardening is a pursuit you will probably actually enjoy, you are much more likely to head off into you grow room than drive down to your local gym.
