The Hello and welcome to on the ledge episode 35 I'm your host Jane Perone and this week we're all about hydroponics.

And this episode is dedicated to Chloe,

J.P. Lewis, June, Pablo, Mariel, and Yolo's dad,

who all bought me a coffee via co-dash-fry.com.

Thanks guys, your legends. I have to admit that before I started

work on this episode my knowledge of hydroponics could probably be fitted on a postage stamp or indeed one of On The Ledge's brand new fridge

magnets. Whoo-hoo! Yes, we have merchandise. Keep listening till after the interview to find out how you can order yours.

Also coming up, a Q&A about a Boston Fern that's gone horribly brown and crispy in the center.

We'll find out why and what you can do about it.

But for now, back to hydroponics. So I decided to talk to an expert,

Kevin Espiritu of epic Gardening.com, a California-based blogger,

Garden Expert, podcaster, and I picked his brain for everything the beginner would need to know about hydroponics.

Kevin's first task was some jargon busting

because I don't know about you but I'm rather confused about the differences

between hydroponics, aquaponics, and water culture.

This is actually how I got into gardening in the first place, so the first garden I really ever had was a hydroponic

garden just because I'm a bit younger than the average gardener and that was my entry point that was something interesting enough to get me into gardening in the first place and I was just like you there's a lot of there is a lot of confusing terminology and it I don't know why it is that way but basically here's here's what here's going on so

hydroponics if you just break the word down you've got hydro which means water and

PONOS means work so what you're saying there is that the water is going to do the work

instead of the soil so hydroponics defined is growing plants without soil and what you're using instead of soil is water, some sort of nutrient solution that could be organic or synthetic, and then you're using some kind of growing media that is usually

inert meaning it doesn't have any nutrients in it and a lot of people will use something like

coconut quar which is just ground up coconut husks, or they'll use

...