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Comment by GhettoComputers | Hacker News Reader

Great post! This reminds me a lot of making dog food for people (aka Soylent) with the best profile, requirements, and because plants don’t complain about taste, you’ll have no problem with ratios!

The only issue is about the effects of these elements and what they can do to the water or your home. Would they need a special environment to prevent fungi, algae, bacteria or mold that would also feast upon these nutrients? You said bacteria didn’t always appear but what if some will grow on hydro? What optimizations would you do for preventing infections?

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Some growers keep their reservoir and root zone as sterile as possible, using additives like hydrogen peroxide or calcium hypochlorite. Others dose beneficial bacteria intended to outcompete bad stuff, like Bacillus amyloliquefaciens (Hydroguard, Southern Ag Garden Friendly Fungicide).

Algae can use the same nutrients as the plants, but can often be controlled by excluding light. Other bad microbes are generally heterotrophs, so they're feeding on something else (like dead algae or dead roots).

Is it possible to make an ecosystem that is beneficial, like kombucha in a way? Will they be using indoor lighting like from weed grow LEDs (red and blue) or you planning all/mostly natural lighting? This is a really cool project, do you have any plans with plant hormones? I only know I used rooting powder, this article is interesting! I used ethylene as well to ripen foods with bananas but I didn’t actually use them on my plants. https://untamedscience.com/biology/plants/plant-growth-hormo...

I grow mostly by sunlight on my balcony. I've also got some white LM301B lights, which seem very popular among those growing by artificial light only. Greenhouse growers supplementing sunlight still seem to prefer red-blue. You could tell a story like "some intermediate wavelengths will improve yield, and you can get them either from white LEDs or from the sun", though I'm not sure how rigorous the evidence is for that.

I don't think there's much about plant hormone use that's specific to hydroponics. People use rooting hormone and foliar sprays of plant growth regulators and such, but they do that in soil too.

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