I live in Florida. North Central Florida to be a little more precise. We have sand. Lots.of.sand. Whenever one decides to plant a garden, you almost need to act as if this is a desert region rather than subtropical at times.
When you cultivate the "sand" here, you end up dumping more time, energy, and nutrients into the ground just to find out that the sun bakes the earth and the rains wash it all away most often before your plants have any sort of chance at retaining them to grow. This was a serious point of frustration in our gardening endeavors that spurred me to visit my good friend the internet.
Can you grow plants without soil?
Well the answers were startling.. yes.. yes you can grow plants without any bit of soil whatsoever..
You have a couple options actually:
After weighing those options I found that Aero and Hydro both had similar drawbacks to the soil that you had to pump a bunch of money into buying the nutrients to add. While with aqua-ponics you buy or grow fish food and they provide nutrients to the bacteria, then to other bacteria, and then to the plant. By maintaining "balance" in a state of equilibrium, our planned zen garden will exemplify the harmony of natural systems living in balance.
Now, there are a ton of blogs and other resources out there that will get into far greater details about the topic, not to mention all the you tube videos that you may find on the subject. I don't intend to go into too many more details writing something that is already written elsewhere and can be linked to. My intentions are to catalog our particular build, and the system as an example to add to those resources for others to maybe learn from.
This should be a fun project so lets get to it..
