You buy an attractive selection of pretty little plants at the garden store. They're thriving and happy until they enter the valley of death and despair: YOUR HOME!

Every spring there are long lines at the garden centers. Gardening is one of America's favorite leisure activities because it is an excellent way to relax while you grow healthy foods and fresh flowers for your family and friends.

However, not all of us are fortunate enough to be able to participate as much as we'd like. For starters, we often don't have the luxury of a large yard any more, or perhaps we live in harsh climates that severely limit our growing season. Even worse, though, many of us just don't seem to have a green thumb.

I was one of them. I can't tell you how many times I tried to grow everything from tomatoes to petunias with no successes to my credit. This is my story.

Confessions of a gardener with a brown thumb!

First of all, I don't know where or how the urge to garden came from within me. I'm not one of those people who grew up in a small Midwest town with a nice family garden. I grew up in a gritty Eastern urban suburb where the only outdoor plants you saw were spindly grayish weeds that bravely tried to outlive the regular railroad spraying teams. And besides, I was interested in engineering. Building things with math. So I graduated from college with a degree in engineering.

From this unlikely background, something about gardening fascinated me. Perhaps it was the mystery of growth. Here was something quite magical and beautiful, even mystical! I couldn't explain why I was drawn to it, and that made it all the more interesting to me.

There was only one little persistent problem. I seemed to have been born with a "brown thumb."

When I first tried to garden, my school of thought was the darker and richer looking the soil, the better your plants would grow! Well I never took into consideration that the rich-looking "dark soil" near my old neighborhood was that way because of the leaking oil tank in my neighbor's yard. But even outside that shortcoming, I didn't find much success with potted plants either. They'd either die from lack of water, too much water, too little fertilizer, or too much fertilizer. What was the secret of success for someone like me?

How could I ever grow a garden of green when clearly my thumb was brown???

And even if I could somehow learn the secrets of gardening, I found I had to give up what little soil I could use in my family's backyard in favor of an apartment in the city to avoid a long, exhausting commute. And to top things off, there was no garden center where I might learn something about gardening in the city anywhere near me anyhow! I did see how people were trying to garden anyway, but usually with little success due to the lack of space and harsh environment.

But one day I just happened to pick up on a story about how the ancient Romans and Aztecs used to grow crops in water because their geography made regular farming nearly impossible. This piqued my interest and further research led me to an article on En Gedi Israel where they grow greenhouses full of lush crops in the middle of the desert by using hydroponics, which is the "Latin" name for hydroculture which means "water working."

I remember immediately thinking, what a neat concept these ancient people had come up with. By adding the proper nutritional elements to the water in which crops are grown, plants grown this way could receive a perfectly balanced diet and use all the energy they normally reserve for growing roots to growing more fruits and veggies.

I really got excited when I learned that hydroponic cultivation is so efficient, you can grow nearly twice the amount per square foot than you can in a soil garden. This is because the roots are all fed directly with the nutrient infused water. Soil borne roots have to expend a lot of energy to search out food and water, and compete with the other plants close by. For my small urban apartment, a small hydroponic garden seemed to be an idea worth pursuing.

What really sold me was the fact that by feeding your plants this way, they grow faster and more healthy since their diet isn't compromised by poorly constituted soil and the diseases and pests harbored within. Maybe just maybe, there was hope for a gardener with a brown thumb.

I decided to give this soilfree approach to gardening a shot since at this point anything better than a wilted petunia would've made me smile. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life being a gardening-challenged person anymore. This sounded like something even I could do!

I began by picking up a few books on the subject and constructing a simple hydroponic planter from some spare parts, a very nice looking window planter a friend brought me from her indoor garden, and a fish tank pump. I plugged the hole in the planter bottom and filled the planter with ceramic gravel. I used the fish tank pump to "aerate" the water and nutrient solution which helps the plants even more - same way as earthworms create tunnels in the soil allow the roots to breathe.

I started off growing basil, as I take a particular liking to its scent and flavorful taste when added to my favorite pasta dishes. The fresh fragrance was intoxicating. The flavors it added to my family receipts were delicate and complex beyond any tastes I had previously experienced. All I could think of was how, for all our progress, the ancient peoples may have at times lived better than we do!

I bought some nutrients that were specially formulated for hydroponics. I found out that the main difference between these nutrients and a general purpose nutrient like "Miracle Grow" is that they are complete and balanced, containing all the elements necessary for plant growth whereas a conventional fertilizer contains only those that would supplement what is already found in soil.

Unfortunately, as exhilarating as my first successes were, they would prove to be as brief as the summer sun streaming through my kitchen window.

Next: Winter comes and changes everything!

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