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Hydroponic Gardening Info
Hydroponics
The method of growing plants without soil is referred to as hydroponics. The name implies that the plants are grown in water containing dissolved nutrients. All of the other methods might be grouped as soilless culture, which would include gravel culture, and culture utilizing other soil substitutes such as Rockwell cubes and Hydrocorn.
At Higrocorp our products are beneficial to the gardener enthusiast who wishes to try hydroponics as a hobby. The commercial production of vegetables using hydroponics techniques is complicated and should be used by only the competent and experienced grower.
Importance of Water Solutions
In water culture, plants are grown with roots submerged in a nutrient solution, with the stem and upper parts of the plant held above the solution. With this system, the main considerations are: provisions of a suitable container, suspension of the plants above the water, provisions of a suitable nutrient solution, and proper aeration of the water solution.
Nutrient Solution for Water Culture
There is no one ideal nutrient solution. Any good solution will contain all of the essential elemental nutrients need for plant growth. The sources and amounts of these nutrients will vary from on suggested solution to another, but are commonly available as commercial fertilizer and chemically pure salts. Higrocorp offers state of the art solutions that have the highest buffer capacity plus the largest number chelates available on the market.
Hydroponics is a method of growing plants without soil in nutrient solutions. Dozens of different nutrient solution compositions have been suggested over the years, but most resemble each other very closely. The guidelines for nutrient solutions are that they contain nutrients in amounts that are proportional to plant tissue composition and in a total solution concentration that does not damage the plant (nutrient solution does not resemble soil solutions).
Early hydroponic solutions were composed of several salts to provide the essential elements that were currently known (an example is Knops’ solution).
In many respects, the greatest advances in hydroponics since the time of Knop have been -the use of iron in chelated form, that is to say, iron that is supplied with compounds such as EDTA, DTPA, and EDDHA that form stable complexes with the iron in solution and keep it from precipitating. The intentional addition of the micronutrients, instead of relying on reagent impurities.
Nutrient Preparations
Because of tendency of some nutrients to combine with others and precipitate when concentrated the standard procedure is to prepare two solutions where precipitating components are kept separate. When a prepared solution is added to the nutrient water the concentrations are so low that precipitation does not cause any problems. Calcium phosphate and calcium sulphate are the main concerns. Calcium is therefore kept away from phosphate and sulphate in the formulations. Never add both nutrient solutions together and then add onto the water feed- valuable nutrients will precipitate and become unavailable.
pH affects nutrient availability:
- pH values above 7.5 cause iron, manganese, copper, zinc & boron ions to be less available to plants.
- pH values below 6 cause the solubility of phosphoric acid, calcium and magnesium to drop.
- pH values between 3 - 5 and temperatures above 26ºC encourage the development of fungal diseases.
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