Hydroponic Houseplants: How to Grow Plants in Water

As a field of horticulture, Hydroponics can sometimes feel like the gardening of the future. But in reality, it’s a time-tested art dating back thousands of years, with a plethora of immediate benefits for you and your plants. 

Hydroponics refers simply to the growing of plants without soil. 

Now it may come as a surprise, as it did to Professor William Gericke’s contemporaries almost a hundred years ago, but plants don’t actually need soil to grow. And in many cases, they can actually grow faster, stronger, and more fruitfully without it. 

Gericke, a professor at the University of California Berkeley, coined the term ‘Hydroponics’ as we use it today and modernized the practice of growing plants, specifically crops, without the need of soil. Today, we can use this simple method in our own homes to bolster our houseplants or grow fresh herbs without the need of a garden.

How it Works

All a plant needs to survive and grow are sunlight, water, oxygen, access to nutrients, and a structural support to keep it upright. As it turns out, you don’t need soil for any of those. Instead, plants can be grown directly in nutrient-enriched water, where they have access to all of the oxygen they need. 

By removing soil from the equation, you’re removing one of the biggest variables to your plant’s health. Soil can carry diseases, shelter pests, and conceal fungus. It can restrict your plant’s water access or compact and starve your roots of oxygen. Root-rot, the bane of houseplant-lovers everywhere, isn’t actually the result of over-watering, but the result of harmful fungus and bacteria that live in the moist environments of over-watered, non-draining containers. Removing soil reduces all of these threats to your plant’s health, while providing it with everything it needs to thrive. 

Another benefit to growing your plants in water? You use significantly less water! Most of the water that we give our plants goes unused, either evaporating or being absorbed by the soil. Switching to hydroponics means that you don’t have to lug around a heavy watering can, and you can feel that much better about the amount of water that you actually use. Plus, there’s no way you can under-water, either. Goodbye guesswork.

Transferring Plants to Hydroponics 

Transferring your plants to water is very straightforward, and if you’ve ever experimented with water propagation, you probably have completed most of the steps below. 

1. Choose the plant you’d like to grow, and water it the day before you take your cutting. 
2. Take the cutting where the leaf meets the stem of your plant, including the leaf node which contains the necessary growing hormone. You’ll want to leave a good-sized stem so that your leaves don’t have any contact with the water, which can cause decay. 
3. Transfer the cutting directly to your water container. 
4. Within just two weeks, you should start to see roots forming on the plant. 
5. Add water whenever the level starts to drop, and add only a few drops of nutrients every so often. Your plant can only absorb these so fast, so you don’t want to waste any of your plant food. 

Unlike Propagation, which uses water to activate the roots of your plant before transferring it to soil or another medium, you don’t remove the plant cutting from water in the case of hydroponics. Instead, you let your plant continue to grow, and shockingly, it will do so with gusto.

What Plants You Can Use 

There are lots of different houseplant varieties that can be grown this way, including some that you may already be familiar with. 

• Pothos 
• Coleus 
• English Ivy 
• Fiddle Leaf Fig 
• Chinese Evergreen 
• Money Tree 
• Spider Plants 
• Philodendron 
• Tradescantia 
• Lucky Bamboo
• Peace Lily

Conclusion

Hydroponics is an amazing method that can be used to grow all kinds of plants, reducing the risks and variables that come with soil, while enabling you to observe and control the growth of your own little green friends. For more information on alternate growing methods, check out our article LECA: Going Semi-Hydro. As always, tag us in your photos @houseofplantlovers so that we can join your plant journey. Happy growing!