Tag: indoor hydroponic gardening

The Importance of a Reliable Ballast

Recently when I was away from my house and garden for almost two weeks, I learned a valuable lesson about the importance of a good ballast.  The ballast is the box that cord set comes out of for HID lighting.  Ballasts usually come with metal halide and high pressure sodium lighting systems so if you are using a high powered lighting system in your hydroponics garden, you most likely have a ballast.  As a novice I didn’t realize the importance of a good ballast.  I learned my lesson when a large crop of berries was wiped out because of a ballast failure.

I was using a cheap ballast that came with the kit and did not even have casing to cool the outside temperature of the device.  It was an old fashioned magnetic ballast.  The ballast died while I was gone on vacation and when I came back the berries had been sitting under darkness for days, like a three or four day solar eclipse.  To make matters worse the berries weren’t using any energy because there was no sunlight, but the water pump for the nutrient reservoir was still running on schedule.  The berries were being pumped with nutrients every day during their bloom phase while they were receiving no light!  There was no way for the berries to use the nutrients being fed to them.  They were just starting to bloom so they mostly died and there was no fruit for all the work I had put into them.

The lesson here is no matter if you get a magnetic or electronic digital ballast, make sure its GOOD QUALITY.  Your crop may depend on the reliability of your ballasts.  Hopefully indoor gardeners all over can read this tragic story of loss before they make the same mistake I made.

Product Review: AzaMax – Controlling Spider Mites


Lately I’ve had a pretty bad infestation of spider mites and aphids and I have been looking for the best solution for my plants without getting into nasty chemicals that will affect the taste of my food at harvest.  Gnats are another common indoor gardening pest I have had trouble with.  A simple solution for gnats is the yellow sticky paper that you can put along the walls and on posts in the containers of your plants.  Spider mites however don’t really fly around or get attracted to the bright yellow colors.   They seem to just be attracted to the pretty green leaves of my plants!  Flattering… except spider mites are gross and I would not like to eat them, regardless of how much they want to eat the leaves of my plants.

I tried spraying some solution of Neem PY onto my plants and it takes a few days to kick in but it slows down the infestation for sure.  Neem makes the bugs slow and frankly just plain stupid.  The bugs aren’t killed instantly, so don’t feel like you’ve been cheated because all your bug problems are still there.  The neem makes the bugs not hungry and unable to reproduce.  The bugs will eventually starve to death and the babies will hatch damaged or will eat the neem on the leaves right away and become affected.   The Neem PY wouldn’t stop the infestation completely but it certainly crippled them.  No matter how much neem I used the spider mites kept coming back.  One time I used too much neem too close to harvest and I could taste its tangy flavor on my food.  It wasn’t as horrible as a I thought and was better than eating mites, but I would rather have the best food possible not just “okay” food.  Thats why I grow my own!

To get the infestation in check I picked up some of General Hydroponics’ AzaMax because two other indoor gardeners recommended it to me.  I figured it would work like Neem PY but it was actually amazing how much stronger it was.  I foliar fed the AzaMax to my plants and than poured some solution into my hydro reservoirs to ensure the plants would be bug proof.  After about two days it seems like almost all the spider mites have died or stopped moving.  It definitely helped control the gnat problem too.  I have not harvested the food the AzaMax has been applied to since it is new but I will be sure to write about how it has affected the food flavor and aroma if at all.    If you decide to go and try AzaMax I would try foliar applications at first to see if you can rid the problem that way.  This is especially good if you are still in the grow phase and the fruits you will be eating or picking have not started to form yet.  AzaMax is a little pricey for how much it recommends to use but I promise it does work well.  I will most likely continue to use Neem PY and AzaMax as a preventative and reactionary pest control solution.

Another good feature of AzaMax is that it is OMRI (Organic Materials Review Institute) approved.  Sometimes labels can be questionable since any company can label their products “organic.”  Look for the OMRI or other official organic labels.  Make sure to look up and research any product you think is suspicious or may be claiming to be organic.  You can take a look at the OMRI web site here.  Even though some forms of hydroponic systems use inorganic parts, I still think it is best to get the closest thing you can to organic every time.  I believe this can yield a more natural and usually sweeter tasting fruit or vegetable.

Get General Hydroponics AzaMax at Amazon today to protect your indoor garden investment. You can also read customer reviews here.