When you’re growing high value hydroponics crops you’ve invested a lot of time and money in, you rely on your plants and gardening skills…but you also rely on trusting the folks who make hydroponics nutrients and supplies.

For many indoor gardeners, everything starts with cuttings (aka clones). If you can’t get rooted plants, you will never have a functioning garden. So how do we get stem cuttings that will root quickly and thoroughly? And how does a plant stem generate roots in the first place?

Check out this piece covering one of the hottest growing topics in the hydroponics industry – Networked Growing Systems. This is the talk of the town and is ripped straight from the pages of the latest edition of Rosebud Magazine. And best of all, this one is courtesy of the inimitable expertise of grower guru Erik Biksa. Enjoy!

Since their introduction as a practical electronic component in 1962, LEDs (light-emitting diodes) have found their way into millions of devices. And to say that LEDs have made their mark on the indoor growing industry is an understatement. Because LEDs differ so greatly from our current HID/MH horticultural lighting technologies, many growers don’t know exactly how to make LEDs work for them.

Answers for April's Quiz:

1. C

2. A
3. B
4. A

Hey Folks, c’mon down and join us here in Hydro Lingo Bingo-the game where you get to show your level of hip-talk in hydroponics. Check with us online at rosebudmag.com/lb for the correct answers.

Q: How safe is most of the growing gear that is for sale at the local hydroponics shop? I haven’t had any problems, but I’ve heard of fellow growers getting inspected by local by-law enforcement for electrical codes in their rented buildings. My one friend had no problems, the other place got temporarily halted until they made some changes and got re-inspected. I want to avoid this potential production pitfall-what can I do to protect myself and my grow?

On a crisp morning, Tapan Adhikari, Ph.D., carefully measures clear fluid from a large container, then drips it slowly into a beaker at a lab at the University of Massachusetts. The soil scientist is roughly 8,000 miles from his office at the India Institute of Soil Science in Bhopal, India, and today he is working in a temporary laboratory in a basement in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he has partnered on a collaborative program with the university.

If you choose to grow from clones, an accelerated rate of growth and therefore an increased number of harvests per years occurs because you eliminate the extra time that seedlings require. Cloning also eliminates the lost time and space that comes from growing unfeminized seeds, some of which will produce males that you likely won’t keep.

In the previous issue of Rosebud, we talked about powerful methods to make this your best year ever for getting the heaviest and most valuable harvests from your garden. Let’s take a moment to summarize those harvest-boosting techniques before we go on to this month’s set of powerful strategies that will give you more rewards from your grow room:

It’s time to pack up your automated sealed grow room and take it on the road! If that sounds like an impossible dream, think again. Thanks to California technical wizard and hydropreneur Tom Patton, sophisticated, automated, plug-and-play sealed grow rooms are road-ready so you can grow wherever you have electricity.

Plants and people aren’t as different as you might think. While on a cellular level we have some big differences (they have cell walls, we don’t), there are some remarkable similarities in how we function. Some of the ingredients in your premium crop nutrient feeding program are even good for your body as well.

Every commercial grower needs to evaluate the growing style that will work best for him or her based on a range of criteria. Of course, everyone is interested in the quantity of their yield, but it’s also important to consider things like the quality of your harvest, the growth period, the relative ease or difficulty in managing your growing style, and the overall cost-to-profit ratio in the growing system you choose. That might sound overwhelming at first, but I’ve always found that being meticulous pays off in the end.

Ed and Betty Osmun had planned for a power outage. They had installed a backup generator in their indoor Aquaponic farm for just such an event, but when Hurricane Irene hit their small town of West Barnstable, Massachusetts early this year, knocking out power, the alarm failed to notify the couple of the crippling outage that threatened their fish and flora. As a result, the Osmun's lost all of their fish to oxygen deprivation, a tragic and costly malfunction. In the few short months that followed, the Osmun's replaced their finned friends and are back to the usual routine, a testament to the tenacity of hydroponic gardeners.

Yes it’s true. This is the final edition of Rosebud Magazine. It is with a heavy heart and great sadness that I have to say this. First, the entire Rosebud & Advanced Nutrients team would like to thank every one of you who have and continue to support us.

Straight to the point . . . the cold hard reality is Rosebud Magazine has operated at a significant loss since the first issue, and it has put a HUGE financial strain on Advanced Nutrients, the parent company which funds Rosebud. I don’t have to tell you, high-level quality costs a lot of money, and the magazine was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s financial back.