Grow plants in your own ‘home made’ hydroponics system!

To build your own hydroponic pot you need:

• An empty plastic bottle with lid. Please don’t buy one for this aim. You can reuse any type of plastic bottle that is sufficiently clean to grow plants in
• A 15 cm long piece of cotton cord
• Scissors
• Aluminium foil or non-translucent colour paint
• Substrate for your plants, like potting soil
• Plant nutrients (from your flower shop or supermarket)
• Seeds

 

Preparing the bottle.

Clean the bottle with water. Flushing it with tap water will often be good enough to get rid of organic and inorganic compounds that may harm the plant’s growth.

Now mark the bottle with a horizontal line, a few centimetres above the middle of the bottle and cut the bottle along the line.

After that, you can make a small hole in the cap. Big enough to get the cotton cord through the hole. Take the piece of cord and make a knot in one end. Take the other end and put it through the hole you made in the lid, starting from the side with the threaded side of the cap. Screw the cap on to the upper half of the bottle, making sure to leave the free cord in the outer part of the bottle.

The last step in preparing the bottle is needed to block the light from getting to the water, thus avoiding algae growth. You can do this by covering the lower half of the bottle with aluminium foil. You can also choose to make your own design by painting the lower half of the bottle with non-translucent paint.

 

Filling the system

Now you’re set to fill the system with the substrate, water, nutrients and seeds. Put water in the lower part of the bottle and, on top of it, place the upper part of the bottle upside down on the lower half, exactly as you can see in the picture. You can now add some nutrients to the water. Please read the instructions on the nutrient package and keep the concentration of the nutrients a bit lower than indicated on the package.

Place some substrate for your plants in the upper part of the bottle. For a real hydroponic pot you would use some inert substrate (coconut fiber, clay balls, etc.) so you are sure about the amount of nutrients that you supply your plant with, but you can also make a nice pot with a water container.

Put some seeds into the substrate, spreading the seeds on the surface and gently pushing the seeds into the substrate, say covering the seeds with some 1-2 cm of substrate.

 

Grow your plants!

Place your pot close to the window so the plants will get sufficient light. Soon you will have some nice plants growing. You won’t need to water them every day, since the cotton cord will suck up the water into the substrate by capillary force. You will only need to check the water level in the bottle. When you add nutrients to the water you add, the plants will get plenty of nutrients for their growth.

 

This page and instructions are made to have fun growing plants in your own hydroponic pot. Use of the content of this page is entirely at your own responsibility. KeyGene shall not be liable for any damages arising out of or in connection with the use of the content of this page.