Wick Hydroponic Systems
What is a wick hydroponic system?
A wick hydroponic system is one of the simplest hydroponic systems to set up because all it consists of is your plant, some wick like substance such as yarn, cotton ropes, or nylon, and your water reservoir.
This setup requires no electricity or pumps, just the properties of water.
To set this up all you have to do is place the wick in the reservoir and bring the other end to the plant. Simple enough right?
Now you may be thinking if it’s that simple why wouldn’t everyone grow this way?
Though wick systems are very easy to set up they are notoriously difficult to do right. To start you have to regulate the speed in which the plant receives water.
Based on what wick you choose, what growing medium you use, and what strain you are growing are all factors in how much water you need to use. To increase the flow rate of water to your plants there are a few things you can do.
The first one is to increase the number of wicks that are going to the plant from the nutrient reservoir. This creates another lane essentially for the water to travel. The next thing you could do is raise the reservoir above the plant.
This is just using gravity to your advantage since the water is traveling down it and will travel faster. The steeper the drop the faster it will travel so be careful.
If that still isn’t fast enough then the last experiment I would recommend would be closing the gap between the reservoir and plant. Makes sense right, the shorter the distance the water has to travel the faster it will get there.
Sometimes you will have to slow the flow of water and to do this you can do the reverse and increase the distance between the reservoir and plant. You can also try thinner wicks.
Thinner wicks means that it can’t hold as much liquid and in turn the flow rate decreases. One last trick to try would be to keep the reservoir lower than the plant.
The water now has to travel against gravity which as we all know is difficult. Now after all that I have told you one could see that the work isn’t that bad but the problem doesn’t really begin until you plants get larger.
Once your plants are large they will require much more resources than before which in turn makes fine tuning a wick system a nightmare.
Imagine doing this with just one plant and the amount of time it takes to get that one plant just right. Then you have to do it again and again until each individual plant is receiving the right amount of resources.
On top of that this system has a difficult time bringing air to the roots. As I’ve said in other articles, air is very important in making sure that your roots grow healthily.
Most growers do not use this method but it wouldn’t be impossible to grow using this method. However, I do not really see any reason why you would choose this method unless you just didn’t have electricity and really didn’t feel like watering the plants yourself.