How do you top off your nutrients?

[stella]

Hi,
No, you do NOT have to change the solution every two weeks, what a waste that would be.

Try the 50% top-off method described here:

nutrients.html" target="_blank">MAINTAINING HYDROPONICS NUTRIENTS : THE RESERVOIR

Has worked well for us with flood and drain as well as top drip.
Good luck!

[joe.jr317]

I disagree. You may not HAVE to change it out, but I feel you should. You have no way of knowing exactly what the solution content is. Is there more nitrogen? More calcium? Enough of either? Enough magnesium? It doesn't matter if your EC is 1.8 if you don't know what content is making it 1.8. Not all elements have the same level of conductivity. EC is only a guide that is useful when you do regular changes. nutrients need to be somewhat balanced in order for optimum uptake. That isn't to say they won't uptake at all. Thing is, most people that think their plants are doing great probably don't realize how much greater they could be doing if they only fed the plants better. I've learned this from trial and error. My error being greatest when I let others convince me that regular changes are unnecessary. I've run side by side experiments using GH Flora series nutes. Regular changes definitely produce much greater yields and require a lot less daily maintenance of pH.

I think some people get it in their minds that if their hydro plants look like garden plants, then they are doing great. Well, they are doing okay. Hydro plants should look better and produce more than the soil garden.

Keep in mind it isn't just about what nutes aren't in there. Toxic salt build up can occur. It might not kill the plant, but it can reduce yield by reducing uptake of nutes and water. It's easy to see when your plants start looking a little crappy and we get questions on other forums "Why am I getting BER" or "Why do my leaves have yellow between the veins" and such. And the results of the problem are usually not seen immediately, as is rarely the case with toxicity or deficiency. People misunderstand that just because they made a change this week and the problem arose this week then it must be due to the change. Not so. The problem could just now be evident from the previous reservoir imbalance. Another problem that can occur from toxicity and deficiency is greater susceptibility to disease. Plants can fight off a lot when fed well. Just like us, if they aren't they can get sick easier.

One last point: there is a reason the formulas are fairly precise. There is a reason that when people make their own nutrients it is important to make sure you maintain some precision. This haphazard way of things completely contradicts this. I don't do hydro so my plants can do okay. I do it for several reasons, but the main is for the challenge of growing the best my plants can possibly offer. Just as our bodies do best when fed right, so do my plants. How much money are you wasting feeding plants that could be producing better? Is it more of a waste to change the solution regularly or to risk deficiency or toxicity and get less yield?

[watercatwn6535nd]

If you disagree what is it you disagree with? my award winning plants? I don't think many people on this forum have growing issues, but holey smokes we all grow differently.

Also with out knowing everything about some ones grow as well as there initial water quality. Its hard to judge and when they tell you they are having excellent quality grows its hard to convince them there not?

But just take my system for instance (if you wish to save any money growing) The initial water is RO clean, i mean perfect! Then my system holds about 50 gallons of hydro. in one bucket i have a drip feed pump (fairly big?), drain to waist or flush pump, as well as a cheapo wall mart dual air stone air pump.

Also you need to know if they use dehumidifiers and room temperatures plus is the air being exchanged or is aco2 being used by burner or tank

Aeration is a huge key to high quality hydro. must extend the life of a tank of nutrients by 50% maybe? or more. then when you factor in that i dump 1 gallon of hydro ( which is pumped into my storage bucket for my out side plants) every day. this gives me in a 30 day period a 30 gallon flush on a 50 gallon system.

Now i top off my nutes at what ever rate they require. a daily testing in PPM with my pen meter indicates about 250 PPM using GH at its blooming formula on its bottle. running about 1500 to 1800ppm hydro base load.

So here is the deal. The plants will uptake what they need for the most part. If you are washing some hydro daily out and always adding the exact amount back in they have eaten there is a great chance that since they look perfect and taste terrific (cuke in hand as we speak eating, 18" long 1 3/4" around perfect flavor) that they are.

So its not that the tank is not being flushed its simply not being dumped all at one time. I have done the once a week dump and the two week dumps before with virtually no difference. when your computer is doing it is not tough to try and then verify.

Now we that said i have a second system of about the same size that has auto filler for water level and i drain it every few weeks i top it off randomly at best. these plants always look perfect some times I'll see a leaf color change and remember to run a ppm or flush.

Now how about this i have another system that i run almost all water in with almost no food and the plants plants produce miniature fruits with decent flavor. but every system has to have mixing or blending pumps and aeration and be sealed from light. Let light in and algae will grow and you will lose your control unless you have large tanks with lots of aeration.

Or i like this i just moved 9 vf 100 cherry tomatoes to my front yard from my main green room. with just garden hose water and some cheap terrible top soil i brought home in the dump truck there doing just fine. so to say a system wont work is odd at best. I'm always more interested in what didn't work. I mean what did you finally do to kill the pant off completely. Because that is the real tricky part. its easy to grow a plant but to kill it takes some one special.

By the way i am putting in a aquaponics system as we speak. just dug the hole for a 2000 gallon tank. hoping to go with lettuces and such with rainbow trout as they are native hear. Its just a few feet from the BBQ to keep it all really fresh. If any one is interested in bio filters used in hydro i have been looking into a system called the Skippy filter. just Google it. The new yard lake is 14' by 13' and about 3.5' deep. not to big but a lot of work i did by hand. with a 20 ft long stream that feeds into it. I'll post picts soon of it.

[joe.jr317]

Ummm, no. Didn't say anything about your plants. I was actually replying to the statement that you don't have to change every two weeks. I guess I should have quoted Stella. Oh well, doesn't change anything. Some of your plants DO exhibit signs of deficiency in your videos. The cukes and melons, for example. Take a look at the yellowing around the edges of the cuke leaves and on the new melon leaves you gave us a birds eye view of. They obviously had a deficiency in the video. Will the plants survive? Sure. Will they produce food? Obviously, there are cukes and melons. Will they produce as well when stressed? No. Will they taste their best or be as nutritious when stressed or missing certain elements? No.

I'm not saying your plants are crap or anything of the sort. They look fine. I'm not saying your system doesn't work. I'm saying it could work better. I'm also not saying I run perfect systems. However, I do know if I have a problem, what it is. And I know not only how to fix it, but how I caused it. Most often, it's from laziness.

Why the heck do you use software if you don't feel precision is important for optimum production? That doesn't make sense to me at all.

If you are washing some hydro daily out and always adding the exact amount back in they have eaten there is a great chance that since they look perfect and taste terrific (cuke in hand as we speak eating, 18" long 1 3/4" around perfect flavor) that they are.

Like I said, it's not just what is missing, but what is left behind in the res. The imbalance left behind can affect the new nutrients added and a snowball effect can occur that will probably not show up until fruiting. Most people mistake such long term issues for something more immediate like root problems, disease, etc. They usually make a reservoir change and the problem corrects. However, the damage to the plant is done and the yield already suffered.

I've had tomatoes off of very stressed plants that look and taste terrific. I just wish I would have had the amount that I could have if I weren't being lazy. Last year, my ground garden cukes got quite stressed and suffered from deficiencies due to a new bed and the fact that I don't use synthetic nutrients on that garden. It was horribly obvious in the leaves. They produced some cukes, but not near what they should have. Most of those that it did produce looked just fine, though. Pretty much any gardener out there can verify this as most of us have had deficient plants at one time or another and gotten food from them, just not the amount we expected. So, your cuke doesn't indicate a super healthy plant. It indicates one that was simply healthy enough to produce a cuke. Not trying to get you riled up. Just stating the facts.