Easy Seed Starting for Hydroponics

What's up guys? This is Kevin from Epic Gardening here. I'm going to teach you how to start seeds in a hydroponic environment. Now, there's a couple of different reasons you'd want to do this. Number one, it's just pretty fun. I enjoy it. Number two, you get a little bit of a benefit because we're going to be using one of these, which is an air pump, some tubing, and some air stones, and what that's going to do is it's going to keep the seeds, and what we put the seeds in, moist the entire time that they're sprouting. And then once the roots start to push downwards, searching for water and searching for nutrients, we're going to have these little bubbles that are forming at the surface of our reservoir, and what's going to happen there is it's going to keep it moisturized and really stimulate that root growth. So here's what we need to get started. You're going to need, obviously, some kind of container. I've got a guide on my website on how to build something like this. This one in particular is from my friend Parker at h2ogrowing.com. Now, the next thing you're going to need is some kind of media to put the seed in. Now, I like to use starter plugs. This is a Rapid Rooter starter plug. It's just kind of a peat moss with a little bit of an organic adhesive that keeps it all together. You can just kind of plop it in there, throw your seeds in, and you're good to go. No mess, nothing like that. Next thing you're going to need, obviously, some seeds. I've got some romaine, spinach, some different kinds of lettuce, and some kale here. You might be wondering, why are these so huge? Because I also grow microgreens for restaurants, and I need bulk seeds when I do that. All right, and the last thing you're going to need is an air pump. This one, obviously, you can see is from Petco. Pretty damn cheap, like $10. Comes with all this stuff. You get two of these little air stones, and you get some tubing. So, that's all we need. Let's go ahead and move on to the next step. All right, we're back. Our next step is very simple. Just fill up your reservoir with water. And the idea is you want to have the net pots, which are these little guys right here, you want to have them just barely above the surface of the water. So, if we plop this in right here, and I pull up one of these net pots and get a little bit closer, we can see that the surface of the water, which is right in there, is just below. And what that's going to allow us to do is have the air stones bubbling and hitting the rapid rooters, which are right here, hitting the bottom of those with water and pulling that moisture up into the root system and stimulating growth a little bit further. So, the next step is going to be connecting the air stone together and setting that up in the system. Okay, we're back. Now, I kind of skipped the steps here, but it's really not that complicated. All you have to do is connect the tubing to the air pump and connect, on the other side, an air stone to that air pump. Now, this is a really small air stone. There are disc-shaped ones that are probably going to be better suited, and there's also bar-shaped ones. I've found that the disc-shaped ones last a decent amount of time. The bar-shaped ones kind of float around and they're hard to deal with. So, get a disc-shaped one. They're about the size of a coaster. Now, this doesn't look like a lot of bubbles, but that's because I haven't turned up the pressure here. So, if I turn that up, you'll see that the bubbles start to go a little bit crazier. And I'm probably going to switch this out with a disc-shaped one in the future, but for right now, this is all that I had, so we're going to stick with it. Now, the next step is very, very, very simple. You want to take your cover, plop it on top, and start filling it with Rapid Rooters. So, I'm going to go ahead and do that, and I'll see you in a couple seconds. Alright, as you can see, that went pretty quickly. All we've got to do now is make sure that we moisten these up a little bit. These are a little bit dry. I've left them out a little bit long. And then one thing I didn't mention in the last step was, if you want, you can pH your water. It's not 100% necessary, but I would go ahead and do it. I do have another video showing you how to properly pH and add nutrient solution to your water, so I would check that one out if you don't know how to do that, but it's fairly simple. So now, I'm going to go ahead and soak these, and then we're going to go ahead and get to the planting, which is the very final step. Alright, made a little bit of a mess on the reservoir, but that's no big deal. Got these fully soaked and ready for planting. So, I'm going to do some spinach seeds here. These are Vero Flay spinach seeds, just because they're big enough to see on the camera. As you can see, they've got a good size to them. That's what they look like right there. Alright, so when we plant these, we want to make sure that we're not just planting one per pod, and the reason being is because not every seed has 100% germination rate. So, if we plant two or three, we can always thin it out later, but we're going to pretty much guarantee that we have something sprout from every single one of these. So, the step's pretty simple. Just go ahead and drop them in. Give them a little shake, make sure that they're in there nice and good. If you want, you can plop a little bit of soil on top, but as you can see, they're hiding down in there right now. Making sure that they're moist is going to be a key thing as well, but that's pretty much it. Alright, so fill up every single one of these with some seeds, and then just kind of let this thing sit. For the most part, you don't have to worry about anything. The only thing you really have to take care of is that the water level doesn't go down, so keep an eye on that, but it really shouldn't because this is probably going to be indoors. And then, you know, watch for your seeds. Watch for them to come out. When you see them start to come out, and they have their seed leaves, which is called a cotillion, make sure that you thin them out. So pick the best looking one in each one of these little pods, and cut the rest of them away. Then you can take a look under the system and see if the roots are starting to pop out. That's when you know that they're going to be really thriving and pretty much ready to be transplanted into maybe a bigger hydroponic system, out into your garden, or into really whatever setup that you want to do. So this has been Kevin from Epic Gardening. If you guys have questions about this, go ahead and leave it in the comments. I'm going to write an article on this on the blog as well. And if you want to hear more about this and urban gardening experiments, go ahead and check out the channel. Subscribe, like the video, send me a message, do whatever you want. Hit me on Twitter, hit me on Facebook. Alright, keep growing guys. Kevin from Epic Gardening, out.