For my fellow gardeners who have been following my attempts to extend and add on to my vegetable garden, I almost threw in the proverbial towel today. You see, I have no tolerance for fortune tellers - especially if they are always wrong.

Meteorologists are just that, fortune-tellers who are seemingly always wrong. Today, Monday April 13, marked the fourth consecutive Monday that I have been unable to get outside and do anything in my garden. It also marked the fourth consecutive Monday the weather forecasters, a.k.a. fortune tellers, were wrong about their prognostication. I looked back over the weather forecast from Friday and even Sunday. Nowhere did any forecaster in my neck of the woods say anything about blustery breezes in Monday's forecast. In fact they were dead wrong about Saturday's forecast as well. The forecast called for clearing skies and highs around 58. The skies at 5 pm were overcast and the high for the day was 43. Sunday was supposed to be in the upper 50s. It got to 45 but the wind made it feel like 25. This was the one time when a real wind chill was in effect and no one called it.

Well the weather today did hit the upper 50s like they said, but not until 6 pm when the day was done. But the wind again howled all day at 20-25 MPH. No way was I working outside even though the sun was out.

I was working on Plan C all the while when I could not work in the garden. You might say - what happened to Plan B? Plan B was a diabolical scheme to have every meteorologist suffer through every miscalled forecast of their career on some cold wet deserted island in the Hudson. It was too expensive and not worth giving any weatherman a vacation on any island, even one in the Hudson in the middle of winter.

Plan C uses the survivalist side of my brain. Plan C calls for growing my garden indoors under lights in water. This process is called hydroponics. After studying several wholesale hydro catalogs on the last four weather-challenged Mondays, I decided to try and build my own hydroponics system. Commercial systems are durable and long lasting. So is their affect on your pocket book. Using off-the-shelf components, I managed to build a simple ebb-and-flow system for around $70. A similar sized commercial system would run three times that amount.

Still considered by some as esoteric, and by others an illegal form of gardening, hydroponic gardening is an amazingly simple and timely system for indoor gardening. While huge production systems can take up a lot of space, an indoor hydroponic system is self contained and fully automatic.

Small-scale hydroponic systems can actually take up less space than conventional gardening methods. This is because huge plants can be grown in smaller "pots' since the root system is always getting a steady supply of nutrients, therefore the plant does not need transplanting into bigger heavier containers as it grows.

The simplest indoor hydroponic system uses nylon rope to wick water and nutrients from

a reservoir tray up into containers sitting directly above the reservoir. This bottom tray usually contains an air stone like those used in aquariums. The air stone connected to an air pump keeps the nutrient mixture highly aerated. The resovoir tray can be as simple as a 20-gallon storage container.

Holes cut into the lid accommodate planters. Instead of soil, a 50/50 mixture of perlite and vermiculite, rock wool, coco-fiber or expanded clay pellets hold the plants in place. Roots will grow through the bottom of the planter into the constantly aerated nutrient solution. The air stone keeps the water fully oxygenated, so the roots do not drown n the water.

Another easy system to construct uses two storage containers again stacked on top of each other. This time instead of nylon rope providing the plants with nutrient solution a pump does. This system called ebb and flow or flood and drain does not pump water continuously to the growing media. Instead the pump is placed on a timer and, depending on the growing medium, floods the upper storage container for a predetermined period of time. Afterward, the solution drains back into the bottom reservoir. This constant flood and drain pattern keeps the plants roots moist and the growing medium is of high porosity and stays just moist enough to keep the roots healthy. This is the system I chose to go with.

Two other more intense systems are available to make at home. A drip system consists again of a bottom or external reservoir and pump system. Drippers at the top of each planter slowly drip nutrient solution into the container. At the bottom of the container is a return tube. The solution passing through the bottom of the container returns to the reservoir to be re-circulated back through the container. Again there is a timer connected to run the system automatically.

The last and most sophisticated DIY system is called NFT or nutrient film technique.

This involves a closed loop system in which nutrients are constantly pumped through the roots instead of at timed intervals. The closed system is usually made from PVC pipe with holes drilled where pots are placed. Nutrients are pumped from a holding tank reservoir and re-circulated through the loop on a continuous basis. The roots are never out of the mixture. The mixture is highly oxygenated by an air stone and air pump. Plant growth in this set up is tremendous considering the small size of the containers. Home growers can use six ounce plastic cups with several holes drilled in the side and bottoms for this system.

Of course plants will not grow in a soil set-up or hydro set-up without proper light. That is the subject of an entire article in itself. How to set up and use a nutrient program properly can also consume an entire page in the paper.

A hydroponic system will perform perfectly well with the same light systems used indoors with plants grown in soil. Fluorescent tubes specifically made for indoor gardening work well on small systems. Large hydro systems, like large soil set-ups, benefit from HID (High Intensity Discharge) lighting. Both fluorescent and HID systems have bulbs for vegetative and flowering stages of plant growth.

So in case spring forgets to show up or the fortune-tellers continue to guess wrong on the weather, I can still have my garden. Only this time, I control the amount of "sun" and "rain" my hydroponic garden receives. I do not need a crystal ball or fancy Doppler radar to have the good fortune of a healthy harvest.