Aeroponics: Guest Post from @Foxxotron

Foxxotron's Instagram feed features an array of beautiful gardening photos - countless plants at all stages of life! - and so much information that it quite nearly makes my thumbs turn green. Here's a great post that I wanted to share about Aeroponics, a method of growing plants in the air! Strays from the norm are important for the future of farming - agriculture - even our food, so I hope you enjoy this information regarding a pretty neat water-saving way to garden.

"...Today I will be writing about Aeroponics, which is a method of growing plants using air as the medium that the plant grows in. Aeroponics does not use soil like normal farm work or potted culture, but instead of soil you grow the plant in air and the roots are suspended in air and constantly misted to provive the plant with all of its water and nutrition requirements. Also, because the plant is grown in air as its medium, the amount of oxygen that is available to the plants via the root zone is generally very high. Aeroponics is usually conducted in a closed loop system, meaning the environment around the plant can be largely controlled and that the water can be reclaimed easily and reused easily. this is an important factor and in a properly maintained system, leads to a drastically reduced water consumption. The ability to control the environment in which your plants roots are growing provides some unique opportunities to speed up the growth of your crop and reach harvest time quicker than identical crops that are grown in soil. Don't get me wrong, I am loyal to the soil. Healthy soil can do many things that aeroponics can not. That being said, aeroponics (and hydroponics in a more general sense) offer some distinct advantages for crops with shorter lifespans like vegetables or to grow plants that would normally take a very long time to grow to fruition in soil in a shorter amount of time. You can remove sucker stems off of tomato plants with desired traits and clone them by sticking the cuttings in a aeroponic cloner, and then once roots apear, the clone can be grown in an aeroponic fashion throughout the entirety of it's life until it provides as abundantly as the mother plant from which it came. This is just one of thousands of uses for aeroponics. This picture is of the roots of a Monstera deliciosa that i am growing in this method. This species of plants makes aerial roots in nature to climb up trees, for this reason, it was easy for me to grow this monstera clone in air using simple aeroponic methods. Other plants that make aerial roots like dragonfruit or vanilla orchids also seem to grow very well using aeroponics."

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