Print

[BubbleCat]

This is in progress still modifying it.
In fact this is on hold until I got another better attempt, the last one was a success but not really nice, the plants where severely damaged when a hose in the system came loose and the sun burned down on the plants, while I was absent.

ph

Water

Water is necessary in any of the growing methods displayed im the following and the future. Therefore you should consider different sources of water for your hydro grow (and your general growing) and inform yourself about them. For me it comes handy that the tap water supplier publishes data about the water, all sorts or. What really matters for us is hardness. Waters hardness results from dissolved minerals in the water and theese minerals can be used by plants or comfuse plants if present in abundance. So keep in mind hydroponic nutrients have been developed with that in mind. This is the reason why General Hydroponics for example sells nutrients for either hard or soft water, so certain nutrients that already are present in your tap water wont fall put of balance. My water is very inbetweenish to the ranges specified by General Hydroponics and so I decided to go with nutrients for soft water and adjust my waters hardness by mixing plain tap water with distilled water.

Nutrients

I feed them GHE (General Hydroponics) flora series which comes in three handy bottles, allowing for different nutrient balance in the hydro juice contributing to different stages of growth. Also GHE includes a ph test kit and acid in the set. Telling from the concentrations needet I can tell the 3 x 500ml bottles will last for a lot of growing. So, with that set (nutrients, pH test and acid) you can get growing hydroponically, nothing more is needet, but optional.

Nutrient concentration

http://www.lenntech.com/calculators/conductivity/tds-engels.htm

Getting into hydroponics was rather difficult for me, or at least I felt insecure about what I am doing until I was doing it sucessfully. So I hope I can share my experiences here and not inform about pH, ec, ppm and nutrient availlability, because all that information is ubiquitous on the net. Much more I want to share what I have been doing and learning so far that anyone could just immitate and be sucessfull, once one does grow hydro, many questions answer themselves.

Also I want to ask for advice in the same process, this is my first year im growing anything hydrponically and therefore things appear to not be ideal sometimes.

So far I grow two species that I am already experienced with hydroponically, so I can tell the difference: Papaver Setigerum and Capsicum.

My Capsicum sit in rockwool cubes and skyrocket conpared to their soil borne siblings. The Papaver sits in a roughly 1:1:1 mix from perlite, coco coir and Spaghnum.



I got myself a very few $ chinese ec meter too, because in the beginning I was irritated, because I understood nutrient concentration will affect ec and most manuals specify a nutrients dosage and a ideal ec. I didnt get my mind around this, either I adjust to a certain ec or to a certain nutrient concentration. I found two answers that satisfy:

On one side ec comes as a handy way of universally measuring nutrient concentration, not only in the hydro juice you are just mixing up, but also after it has for example been pumped around a few times and you wonder: "Did my plants evaporate more water lately, or use more nutrients. A quick test can tell you your nutrient concentration, and wether all is fine, or water or nutrients must be added. Also the ec becomes a way of understanding your plants, after a bit of experimentation you'll know at what ec your plant likes to sit in certain stages of growth. So if you for example changed your nutrients brand, knowing "they like 7ml of this for every 10L" wont help you. But knowing they like to sit at 1.640 S does.

Secondly: It is in the water. When you mix your hydro sauce, youll obviously use water and as long as its not pure distilled water (that would be stupid) your water will already come at certain ec. Having harder, say higher ec, water will of course result in higher ec after adding a certain amount of nutrients according to your experience or the suppliers instructions. I do as follows: I will mix tap water (that is chlorine and iodine and basically everything free here) with distilled water to get my desired ec, then I'll put in my nutrients and I dont have to measure ec again, a certain amount will raise it a certain amount, but if I'm not lazy I'll do so again to be sure, and for my notes. Yes notes help understanding the plant, how much of what did I feed them at what time ? All the ec questions, are optional questions, you can grow your hydro plants without ever knowing your solutions ec.

Just in case all the ec gets confusing, or youre confused about ec, ppm, ppb... ec means electrical conductivity, in contrast to popular belief water is poorly conductive, more isolating. But, if salts go into solution in water, like the salts that are nutrients, the ec will rise. But its individual to everything, how much it makes the ec rise. Now thats where ppm & ppb come in, they mean "parts per million" or "parts per billion". If we had plain distilled water and dissolved NaCl in it, we could determine ppm or ppb by simply measuring ec and multiplying ec by a factor that has been found in experimentation, also we cpuld just weight our water and NaCl, and we knew how many parts NaCl we have put in one million parts of water. Now if we dissolve several things, like our nutrients, then the thing gets trickybecause they will all have a unique factor that has to be applied to ec to calculate ppm. So in the end: if you read ec from a ec meter, or ppm from a ppm meter (which is a ec meter that does the multiplication) doesnt change anything, neither is more precise or a more valuable information, they much more serve you as a point for comparison. Many growers in europe go by ec, so do I, many growers overseas seem to go by ppm, which is fine too.

So what you want to do is, decide on a hydroponics setup for your plants, dozens of varieties are described online, ans wether you want to set it up yourself or buy one. Also consider manual irrigation, which really isnt covered online much.
Decide on a nutrients product, it doesnt matter which you get as long as it comes with all nutrients your plant needs.
Then you'll have to germinate your seeds, which works fine in plain water, better in water with its pH adjusted, or in a very "poor" so low ec/ ppm/ ppb hydroponics juice. Simply put the seeds in place, like in their rockwool cubes or on their vermiculite and water them until they germinate. They wont starve as long they can feed from their cotyledons.
Next you will have to start feeding them, so you need to cook up your hydro juice, which is straight forward. Just measure the water that is required to be put into your growing setup or into your waterin can for hand irrigation. Then consult your nutrients suppliers manual that will recommend a fairly low concentration for seedling. Measure and stir your nutrients in. Then start adjusting the pH of your water by adding small amounts of acid, stirring them in and measuring after each time you add acid. The pH your plant preffers perhaps can be found online, if not anything around 6 will do. When your hydro solution is mixed and got its pH adjusted youre ready to go, if you want you can now measure ec or ppm but dont make changes according to the reading, just remember it, or better: write it down, as the initial concentration you fed your plants when they were seedlings. My plants have diaries for this.

You are ready to go, irrigate your plant with that solution or fill it into your self irrigating hydro setup. Yes its that easy and that straight forwards, what you really have to pay attention to: how many nutrients did you add and is your pH correct, dont worry too much about ec or ppm.

Finally, at this stage my Capsicum habe been growing strong, sadly, some tild over I had this on soil borne peppers too, but not in that extend. Can someone tell, does it need more rooting space already ? Or did it grow too fast and heavy ? Might it even be infected ?

Also the rockwool cube set algea, which im not concerned about, but amongst the green I can spot white spots on some cubes, is it mold or crystalisation ?

Thanks all I will keep this posted with the hydro Capsicum, the hydro Papaver will be featured next time and I'll share my findings