To those that have grown using different methods, which is your favorite and why?

Hydroponics

Aeroponics: I absolutely love aeroponic grown herb! It's frosty, smelly, and looks out of this world! Here's the negatives. It's difficult to maintain. Major PH fluctuation. You can't get your plants very huge because of the root space capacity. And it's VERY difficult to keep your system clean.

Ebb & Flow: Out of all of the systems that I've grown out I feel this is definitely easy to maintain. You make a reservor up and you balance your PH before flooding once to twice a day. You can grow large plants in tables like this or many small plants. Your herb will come out green and frosty if you feed it right. As for ANY hydroponic method of growing overfeeding is very easy and almost always crucial! So you'll need reliable ppm meters and PH meters these are absolutely two vital tools to a hydroponic grower!

Drip Irrigation: Drip feeding is awesome if you get the right size pump and actual sprayers rather than slow drippers. Be careful of sprayers clogging if you can't obtain the proper sprayers/drippers from your hydro store I like the ones that have nice deep slots in them and they're plastic spikes. I did an awesome grow with drip irrigation that came out SUPER frosty. The negatives of drip feeding is you have to constantly check drippers to make sure they're not clogged! A clogged dripper or down sprayer means no water to your plants roots! I felt that for overall weight a drip system will provide the grower with more final product and about the same amount of resin production as an Ebb & Flow setup. However, once again this is so easy to overfeed your plants I would feed for 3-4 days and then run straight water for 3 days and repeat the cycle. This will ensure that you wont get a salt buildup.

Drain to Waste: If you have the time, patience, and money this is a superior way of growing. It is what the name says 'drain to waste' each day you make up a new nutrient batch and feed your plants by either hand watering them in a soilless mix or run a drip system that drains to a waste res.

Bubble Bucket: These are very cool but can become a nuisance to maintain since you're constantly dealing with opening and closing a lid to feed and clean your bubble buckets. Also if your air pumps decide to take a shit then your roots will sit in stagnant water and eventually get root rot. Personally, I didn't care for this method of growing since I like to do larger grows and this type of setup becomes a pain in the ass.

Soil Growing:

Emily Garden Containers w/ coco: I really like these containers if you're going to use a ebb & flow table to keep your plants on and water them. These planters have slits on the sides which make excellent drainage. I also enjoyed using cana coco but you have to be careful with the type of nutrients you feed coco plants. Coco is completely naked of anything other than trichoderma and sometimes calcium depending upon how it was washed. Personally, I've found that I enjoy a homemade soil mixture a lot better than any store bought bag of coco.

White Grow Bags w/ Happy Frog Soil: I absolutely love grow bags. They're cheap and reusable! You can pick up a 7gal bag for like 25 cents! Also you can put these bags close together and they drain awesome! You can grow HUGE plants out of these bags because they sale 30 gal even 50 gal grow bags! The benefit of using a grow bag is the mobility and the size of plant that you can produce. My favorite soil for a longtime like 10yrs has been Happy Frog made by Foxfarm. I love this soil because it comes loaded with enough food that you don't need to feed your plants for the first month! Also this soil is loaded with beneficial bacteria and trichoderma two different forms of root organisms you should familiarize yourself with if you plan on doing soil gardening.

Smart Pots w/ Organic Homemade Soil Mix: Well I love organic gardening and I've been sold on it for many years. So I'm going to say this if you want the absolute best medical quality bud that you'll be growing for yourself and maybe one other person than choose smart pots and make your own soil mix and add your own amendments. You won't get the hugest yield but the pot you'll get will be out of this world and taste so smooth and sweet which it will blow any PH balanced hydroponic style of gardening away! The thing about organic growing is you don't need to use PH adjusters, bloom boosters, or RO water! You simply make a good soil mix and water your plants with tap water perferably well water! Well water has ALL of your micro nutrients that your plants need and your soil mix is and should be PH balanced by adding the necessary amendments such as: lime, peat moss, guanos, bone meal, etc.

So it's like this. Do you want the absolute best, most heady weed that you can grow and you're totally not worried about harvest weight? Then choose organic gardening in smart pots. If you want heavy hitting plants that are easy to grow then choose a soil like Happy Frog and use grow bags or smart pots but smart pots are really expensive like $5-7 per 3gal pot! If you use Happy Frog add in extra Trichoderma and Beneficial bacteria personally, I like Piranha and Tarantula. Then just water your plants with plain old well water for the first 3-4wks and then start feeding them whenever you start flowering with the Foxfarm line of nutes which are Tiger Bloom, Open Sesame, Beastie Bloomz, and Cha Ching.

If you want to try hydro go with an ebb & flow setup and get yourself on a solid nutrient regime and don't overfeed! Keep your PH around 5.9-6-5 and check out House of Gardens it's a popular hydroponic nutrient regime that Californians are crazy about now these days.

Either way good luck and I hope this little bit of information helps!

 

Wouldn't Recirculating bubbler buckets be just as easy as ebb and flow? I could see a stand alone bucket being a huge pain in the ass but surely when you got a res life is easy.