Starting Plants from Seed in 'Kratky' Passive Hydroponic Jars

 

 Many people in the personal hydroponic and AeroGarden community refer to these passive hydroponic jars as "Kratky jars".  They are loosely based on the Kratky method of passive hydroponics, but technically they aren't.  The actual Kratky method is a 'fill and forget it' method – that is, once you set everything up, you shouldn't fill the water reservoir again.  This is a key component in the method, while these jars are much too small to actually do this.  That said, this vaguely Kratky-esque method is very popular and effective.

In the AeroGarden community, they are generally used to move plants grown in the AeroGarden out into the jars, generally the last stragglers of a crop, to enable you to replant the garden with a new crop, while taking advantage of the AeroGarden's "spillover" light. However, sometimes you want to start plants in addition to the ones in your garden, and so you need to start them direct from seed.  Here, I will lay out the process I used to start some herbs I wanted to grow.

Pruning Basil

 This will be a post-in-progress for a little bit.  I am currently sprouting two basil plants for a pruning comparison, just to show what a difference proper pruning can make.  However, in the meantime, I can show the basil trimming basics.

Before we begin, an important Don't.  Don't pick individual leaves from a basil plant! Your plant requires leaves to produce the sugars and energy it needs from photosynthesis, and since you will be taking the tips, it needs the older leaves left in place.  The exception to this, is if the older leaves are sufficiently large that they are overshading the rest of the foliage; you can remove them in that case, but make sure there is other foliage.  You should never take it down to nothing but stem or only stems and immature buds.  If you are wanting periodic small harvests, just let the tips grow larger than buds before removing them; you can take up to ⅓ of the plant at any one time without trouble, but that doesn't mean it has to be for each branch; so, once you have two branches, you can let them get to 5 or 6 nodes long and then cut down to 2 on one branch if you leave the other intact for a while longer, and so on.