Replace your aging grow lamp Something that growers learn about pretty quickly when they start out is the direct correlation between usable light and potential yield. Everybody loves to experiment with new lighting fixtures and reflectors, but it’s easy to forget about the grow lamps themselves. As time goes by, high intensity discharge lamps produce decreasing levels of light for every watt of power they consume, which slowly eats into your yields. We recommend replacing standard 230V HPS lamps after each full grow, and 400V HPS and CDM lamps at least once a year. This will help to maintain t ..read more

Steve Welsh is the manager of Incredible AquaGarden, a working indoor garden and learning centre set up in 2013 at Todmorden High School. You can read about Incredible Aquagarden here. Hydromag sat down with Steve to explore the challenge of setting up and running such a facility and leading the march towards reintroducing horticulture into the national curriculum in the UK. What problems did you come up against in design and how did you resolve them? Light is our main issue. We can control heat, nutrients, pH etc and we’re experimenting with artificial light for germination and growing on. We ..read more

Ultraviolet (UV) light isn’t visible to the naked eye, but despite making up only about 10% of sunlight, it has significant chemical and biological effects; sunburn is the effect most people will be familiar with. Just as sunburn can lead to cancer in humans, so Ultraviolet light can damage the DNA of seeds. Unlike humans, plants can’t simply step into the shade to avoid UV. Instead, they produce biological versions of sunblock. It seems logical then to protect plants from Ultraviolet light – traditionally that’s exactly what indoor growers have done; greenhouse glass largely blocks out UV lig ..read more

When music-video director Tim Pope teamed up with The Cure to sing “I Want to be a Tree” in 1985, he possibly wasn’t being literal. But this worthy, if unusual, sentiment seems to have served as an inspiration for Barcelona-based designers Martín Azúa and Gerard Moline, who bring us the Bios Urn – part of a recent surge in eco-friendly funeral products on the market. Now you too can aspire to be a tree. For those of us for whom ‘green-living’ is important, it might also be prudent to consider ‘green-dying’. It’s a morbid thought, but alongside taxes, death is one of the few certainties in life ..read more

When growing from seed, there are a number of different growing mediums that we can use; Soil, Stonewool (Rockwool), Clay pellets & Vermiculite are all suitable growth mediums. Before we plant our seed we need to decide which medium best suits our purposes. By and large, selecting the right growing medium is a matter of personal preference. When seeding, you should select the medium that best suits your needs, with foresight into what you expect to use later on in the process – i.e. if you plan to use stone wool for transplanting later on, then you should start with stone wool. The size of ..read more

Pig farmers, violin makers and cannabis cultivators make for unlikely bed-fellows; Solacure binds them all together, producing ultraviolet lighting across these industries and many more besides. Their client list includes universities throughout the US and the US Department of Energy. Their lights have been used to show, in laboratory conditions, that UV light bridges the gap in quality between garden grown tomatoes and those grown indoors, out of season. Solacure’s UV light, The Flower Power arrives in the UK imminently. We’ll be taking an in-depth look at how this works in later articles (li ..read more

Behind a Todmorden school, there is a place for students to learn as they grow, and they even get to eat the results. On the menu are salads, fruits and vegetables and, in the near future, fish and tropical fruit. The Incredible AquaGarden, a partnership between Incredible Edible Todmorden and Todmorden High School, is an ambitious project without a forerunner. A centre for hydroponics, aquaponics, alongside traditional growing techniques, it produces food for the school and beyond, with the focus firmly on learning. After several years in planning, fundraising and construction, the centre ope ..read more

Dutch lighting Innovations (DLI) develops and manufactures supplemental lighting systems for the global greenhouse industry. They’ve recently made the decision to step into the home and hobby markets, too. Focusing on reliable, low-maintenance products built from high quality components and to exacting standards, a cursory glance at their lighting fixtures is enough to see how 25 years of industry experience translates  into an exceptional high level of design. A Philips OEM, DLI is working with The Growers Wholesales to distribute their products in the UK. We sat down with Pepijn Looijaard to ..read more

As of next week, four new Quest dehumidifiers will be hitting the UK market for the first time, fresh from the US. Offering industry leading efficiency and a patented, optimised air-to-air heat exchanger, it’s little wonder that Quest are the first choice for commercial and hobby growers alike. But it isn’t just the horticultural world that they dominate. Quest dominates dehumidification in general on a simply eye-watering scale; from the government sector to micro-breweries by way of gyms, cold storage, water treatment and everything in between, the scope of their business is comprehensive to ..read more

Last December the Soyuz TMA-07M launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan; destined for the International Space Station. On board were Dr. Thomas Marshburn, Chris Hadfield and Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko. If they passed Earth coordinates 51.3689° N, 1.4189° E, and had happened to gaze out of their spacecraft window, they would have been privy to a curious sight: a 55 hectare greenhouse complex. They would have seen the UK’s largest hydroponics farm; Thanet Earth. For many, the Thanet Earth project is a glimpse of the future – a beacon of sustainability in a world increasingly d ..read more