Hi Everyone! In this video, we'll be looking at how we can grow bigger and healthier hydroponic
peppers! We'll be experimenting with different nutrient additives and feeding programs to see
the results they have on our young pepper plants. Starting from the beginning, I've got seeds here
for orange bell peppers. I'm using rockwool as my growing medium and setting up each seed on
a small piece of the rockwool. I've got this in an ice cube tray with holes in it, that will be
suspended above water. We've got full videos detailing how to start seeds hydroponically,
so check out the channel if you're looking for more details. As time went by our seeds would
germinate and eventually sprout their first leaves. Here we are on day 10 and we've got
a bunch of mini plants growing. Some of them need a bit of rearranging, so I'm cutting open
the rockwool and inserting the root structures of the plants. I want to ensure that each plant
can get its roots down into the reservoir below. I continued to monitor these plants
and would adjust them as necessary to ensure they weren't drying out. Joining the plants on day 21,
they are looking great and it's time to start providing nutrition to them. I'm getting each
plant set up in a net cup and reservoir, using these plastic inserts to support the plants and
block light. This is where our nutrient experiment really begins! Most hydroponic nutrients are sold
as a base series or an additive. Base nutrient products contain everything a plant needs to grow
and the additive products are meant to stack on top of those base nutrients, to supply specific
nutrients or features. In theory, these additives should help produce bigger better plants. With our
peppers, every plant and reservoir we have here will be receiving a mix of micro, grow and bloom
nutrients, which are a base series. This will be the foundation of our feeding program. Half of our
plants will also receive two additive products and the other half will remain as our controls.
I'll be mixing in a cal mag additive, an incredibly popular product. Aalcium and magnesium
play important roles in photosynthesis and maintaining plant structure. I'll also be mixing
in a root boosting additive. Plants obviously need roots and a healthy root system should help the
rest of the plant to flourish. After mixing these reservoirs, I checked the ph of everything and
both our base and additive groups looked good. Now that these plants have access to some nutrition,
their growth should really take off. And this is exactly what would happen in the coming days.
This brings us to day 33. We've got base only plants on the left and additive plants on the
right. For the most part these plants look great. I'm pleased with the vertical growth and each
plant has multiple nodes of leaves developing. As we inspect our base plants a bit closer,
there's a bit of discoloration on a leaf or two here and there. I'm not too concerned about it,
honestly. The air is super dry in my growing space right now, with the humidity hanging around 20%.
This is probably stressing the leaves a bit and the transpiration process may be
happening quicker than is ideal. Looking at our additive plants, we've got a similar story with
slight discoloration. These leaves do look to be a bit worse off though- the edges are rougher and
the discoloration is more prominent. This leaf here looks worse than all of the control plants.
You can see that it's developing some small holes in it. This plant here seems to have some tip burn
developing. Generally speaking though, it looks like our additive plants are in worse shape so
far. I lined up all of our plants in order of their size and it looks like our three smallest
plants had additives in their reservoirs. This is definitely not what i was expecting to see at this
point. I checked in on the ph levels of all of our plants and there's no significant differences
between the base and additive reservoirs. If anything, the additive reservoirs were closer
to optimal than the base ones. We'll also take a peek at our root systems. They're growing nicely
and in line with what I would have expected. It looks like my jars need another coat of paint,
as we've got a bit of algae developing. This isn't really a big deal, but I know a lot of people go
wild in the comments and get upset about algae. Checking in again on day 45, these plants are
really taking off and still look pretty great. Sorting the plants into groups here, we can get
a view of how our feeding programs compare. Things look similar for the most part, with the exception
of two small plants on the additive side, which seem to be falling behind pace. If we look at
the three biggest plants that we have in total, two of them had additives in their reservoirs.
This is a sign that the added nutrition is helping these plants to thrive. Our base only plant here,
and the rest in general, aren't far behind though. We can absolutely get by with just base nutrients
and these plants are proof of that. If we look at the three smallest plants we have,
two of these again had additives in their reservoir. This is at odds with the finding of
our top three biggest plants.. It seems like while the additives can provide benefits, any complexity
we add to our system will increase the variability of our results and can at times be detrimental.
I also want to specifically look at and compare the root structures of these groups,
as we did use a root specific additive. We're just going to eyeball things here and see if
anything stands out. In our first comparison plants, things look pretty equal, with similar
size root structures. Again we've got some algae growing, but this isn't anything we can't fix.
In our second comparison we do have a material difference, with the additive plant having the
smallest root system we've seen yet. This is one of the smallest plants too,
so it sort of makes sense. Comparison three- things look pretty equal on both sides.
Our fourth plants again have the additive plant falling behind, with quite a small root structure.
And looking at our fifth set of plants, this looks to be a slight edge to the base series only plant.
The additive plant root structure isn't doing terrible here but does look to be smaller. Overall
that's two ties and three wins for the base only plants as we evaluate the root structures.
So there you have it! We've got a bunch of great looking plants, here growing with and without
nutrient additives. I'm not seeing anything in my results that says additives are a must buy or must
use in order to get thriving young pepper plants. If anything, these results have me appreciating
the simplicity and saved costs of only using base nutrients. We might miss out on the biggest
possible gains, but it's much harder to mess something up when we just stick to the basics.
We had a decent sample here of five plants in each cohort- probably not enough to say anything too
definitive, but i do like the results that we saw. I'd love to hear what you think about the findings
presented, as well as any of your own experiences using different nutrients and additives! I'm
going to get this algae cleaned up with hydrogen peroxide and keep these plants moving forward. As
these plants grow into the flowering and fruiting stages, I'll be looking to compare the effects
of flowering specific additives. I want to see how things compare in those later stages of
plant growth. So keep it locked on the channel by subscribing below and we'll have part two in
this pepper nutrition series coming soon. Thanks a lot for watching and as always Happy Harvesting!