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.

This week we’re discussing something often overlooked by new growers - container sizes. This is a key factor in your successful grow, but many newbies stumble along the way when learning about getting your plants into the right pots. In this edition of Hydro 101, I'll tell you how to pick out the correct container size for optimal results, and also what to expect from the container size you choose.

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.

Hey hydro-heads, we’re back with another edition of Hydro 101. This time around,  I'm going to teach you how to prevent molds and mildew on your indoor crop. Disease can happen to the best of us, but if you follow these three easy steps, you'll stand a fighting chance against these common little nasties.

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:

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.

Jennifer Nelkin and Viraj Puri began their careers in horticulture when they created a floating garden atop New York's Hudson River. From there, they joined fellow green-thumb Eric Haley to create Gotham Greens, a company dedicated to growing produce locally, with a massive hydroponic greenhouse complex atop a warehouse in Brooklyn. That's what we call moving up, literally.

Black Friday is upon us, along with the start of the holiday retail shopping season. For many, this means rolling out of our tryptophan-induced comas early Friday morning and heading to the mall to spend the day elbowing soccer moms aside for amazing deals on a 3-D flatscreen or iPad 2. In the US, the day after Thanksgiving is by far the busiest shopping day of the year but has also become more synonymous with images of panicked mobs and massive injurious stampedes than with the excitement and joy that should accompany the holidays. This Thanksgiving I’m thankful for the freedom that being an indoor grower gives me, which means I have the choice to join the madness or enjoy the serenity of my hydroponic garden far from the maddening crowd. On that note, there’s an incredible offer available for growers this Black Friday. I’ll get to that in a minute.

In our previous aeroponics article, we noted that aeroponics provides maximized mists containing hydroponics nutrients, water and oxygen to spur incredibly fast growth and superb yields. But aeroponics has its drawbacks. One of the biggest is that you can’t just plug plants in to an aeroponics system, make sure you’ve got adequate water and nutrients in a reservoir, and go away for a few days.

Q:

Where I live power outages are a common nuisance for me and my grow. They rarely last a few hours, although occasionally longer. This has been creating several problems for me including the fact that the lighting cycle gets all messed up in flowering, and it’s even caused some hermaphrodites as a result. I am a smaller scale grower and coupled with the fact that I live in an apartment doesn’t make a generator seem like a good solution for me.

Any ideas, especially where it comes to keeping the lighting cycle? Sick of picking out the seeds here :P