A coworker is raving about hydroponics and how her veggies grow 4x faster. I googled up a few videos to see how it is done. All of them seem to use a store bought fertilizer. I don't know how I feel about that, because I want to grow things I am going to eat. I don't want any unknown chemicals or mining waste in my food. Is there no way to do hydroponics without store bought fertilizer? I really like composting and the control it gives me over what goes in and what comes out of my garden.

The problem is that you'd need to provide the plants with all the nutrients that are essential to them and in the right balance, and this would be difficult to do without store-bought. This article explains some of the difficulties.

https://www.maximumyield.com/t...