Horticulture Lighting Solution for Hydroponic Vertical Towers

What do you do when you don't have enough ground surface for all your planting needs? This is a problem that drove humans to develop the concept of vertical farming.

Think multistorey buildings or skyscrapers, and you have the same working principle behind the concept. Vertical farming is all about cultivating more by stacking multiple layers of planting surfaces.

It is easy to see why the concept becomes highly desirable for hydroponics. Since indoor hydroponics enthusiasts often suffer from lack of floor space, vertical hydroponics is often the only choice.

What Is Vertical Hydroponics?

Vertical farming is the growing of crops in vertically stacked layers. Vertical hydroponics, as the name suggests, is the combination of hydroponics and vertical farming.

So in a vertical hydroponics grow system, you will have several stacked levels, with plants being grown on each level. It is closely associated with gardening and farming in urban areas like cities.

The practice is also known by several other names. Tower hydroponics, tower gardens, vertical grow systems are the most popular names.

Incidentally, the practice of vertical gardening is certainly not new. It has its roots in Ancient history.

The Babylonians had a similar idea when they built the Hanging Gardens in around 600-500 BC. This Ancient Wonder had flowers, shrubs and even trees growing in massive tiered gardens.

In modern times, hydroponics and vertical gardening seem made for each other. Using soil as growing medium increases the weight of a vertical growing system.

Hydroponics, on the other hand, can reduce the overall weight of the upper layers by at least 30%, if not more. This means that you can stack more layers.

The main challenge then is in delivering adequate water+nutrients and light to plants at all the levels.

The Babylonians had to use water flowing from the mountains, along with manual water screws to irrigate the higher levels. Water pumps make this task much easier in the 21st century.

Providing light for vertical hydroponics can be a challenge, especially indoors. If your hydroponics system is outdoors, then the ancient idea of using staggered layers is perfectly viable.

But staggering levels come at the cost of additional. Indoor vertical hydroponic tower systems can use vertically suspended led grow lights to create an ultra-compact, and high yield grow system.