Dr. Nate Storey: We've been getting some questions about nutrient solutions for hydroponic systems.
We do a lot of aquaponics here, but we also have a commercial hydroponics facility and
do a lot of hobby hydro as well.
Today I'm going to talk a little bit about the different nutrient solutions, what you
should be looking for, and the best ones to use in your particular system.
There's basically two types of nutrient solutions out there.
Now there's a lot of different formulations but there's two basic types.
You can get your fertilizer as a liquid, or you can get your fertilizer as a powder or
a solid.
For most hobbyists, you're buying mixed fertilizer solutions, so you're buying a liquid mix.
A good example of it would be something like this stuff.
We both sell this Foliage Pro and we use it in all of our home and hobby systems.
This kind of fertilizer solution is really, really nice because it is very simple, is
very easy to put in your system, is very easy to run, and with this Dyna-Gro stuff, we actually
really like it.
This is our preferred nutrient mix for smaller systems.
Now if you're going to scale up though and you're going to do a larger system you probably
want to look into powdered nutrient solutions.
These are commonly called two-part mixes.
What they are is they're a combination of calcium, nitrate, and then a main nutrient
mix.
You're going to mix those together into water separately, then you're going to mix them
together, and that's what you're going to be using as your nutrient solution.
The pros and cons are that this stuff is very easy to use, very simple to use.
But if you're shipping it or if you're using it a lot of the time you're paying for a lot
more water.
Now if you're a home grower then this is still very cost-effective and it's a great solution.
It will work really well for you.
But if you're commercial grower you don't want to pay for all that extra water to be
shipped and you basically just want a concentrated form for storage, for mixing, just to make
your life a lot easier.
For instance our farm down in Colorado uses a two-part mix that they buy from a place
down there called Hydro-Gardens.
Hydro-Gardens sells a bunch of different two-part mixes and different formulations for different
crops.
So depending on the crop that you're going to be growing you want to find a formulation
that is close or specific to that crop.
Most home and hobby solutions are not typically that crop specific.
A lot of them have been developed for alternative industry, I'll put it that way, so the home
and hobby grower, the ones who say grow strawberries or wants to grow lettuce or something like
that oftentimes has difficulty finding a solution that's tailored specifically to that particular
crop.
But for two-part solutions the nice thing is that all of the formulation has been done
for us.
We can actually buy a strawberry mix to grow strawberries.
We can grow an herb mix to grow herbs.
We can buy a lettuce mix to grow lettuce.
That's the differences between the two.
On a small level of course we recommend a Iiquid fertilizer.
This Dyna-Gro stuff is really great.
If you haven't tried it, definitely, definitely give it a shot.
It's what we use, again, on all of our spring systems and all of our small hydro systems.
One other thing that you should be thinking about is if you're going to be getting into
hydroponics there are a few things you need to understand.
One is pH and one is EC.
These are your two major measurements that you need to be taking in any hydroponic system.
The exception to this is if you're using like one of our springs and you're using our Dyna-Gro
solution you don't really have to check EC or pH that much.
We give directions on how to do it without checking pH and EC.
But for all other systems you need to be checking your pH and adjusting your pH because the
systems will get more basic or more acidic overtime.
Similarly with EC, you need to be checking your EC and making sure it's in the right
range.
What EC is is electrical conductivity.
We'll do more videos on this down the road because it's a complicated topic.
But you need to be measuring your EC and making sure you're within a certain range, to make
sure that your nutrients are within a certain range.
EC is basically measuring the soluble salts or the nutrients in your solution.
If you don't know what those are I'd encourage you to go do a little more research before
you jump into hydro.
But once you understand these principles, once you understand these things, hydroponics
can be a really fun and very, very profitable, and very ... It's just a great way to grow
food.
There's a lot of payback both in education and quality of product, and if you're doing
it commercially of course and money.
So definitely do a little bit more research and keep checking back.
We're going to do videos on pH and EC.
We've talked about these in the past for aquaponics but going forward we're going to talk about
them in a more detail for hydroponic growers because this is a really growing area of interest
out there.
Hopefully this information is useful to you.
If it is, make sure you check out some of our other videos.
We go into more detail on other topics in our other YouTube videos.
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