In traditional agriculture, fertilizer works alongside the soil environment in creating ideal growing conditions for plant development. While you can grow crops without fertilizer, they may take longer to grow.
However, in a hydroponic system, your plants are wholly dependent on the fertilizer you give them. If it’s not customized for their needs, you won’t be able to maximize their potential. If you don’t have nutrients in your hydroponic solution, your plants will not grow to maturity. However, if you provide them with the right mixture, they’ll reward you with bountiful harvests and rapid development.
In this blog, we’ll discuss the things you need to know about selecting hydroponic fertilizer, how to add it to your system, monitor its composition and make changes and adjustments when needed.
What is Hydroponic Fertilizer?
Hydroponic fertilizer is a part of the nutrient solution mixture that provides nutrients to your plants. This is crucial to hydroponic farming. Outside of carbon dioxide absorption through the air, plants growing hydroponically have no other way to access nutrients.
Types of Hydroponic Fertilizer
There’s an assortment of hydroponic fertilizer for almost every need. Companies like General Hydroponics provide nutrients for every need, from fertilizers intended for use during growth and bloom cycles to mixtures that encourage root development during the vegetative stage, and everything in between.
It can be hard to know what’s right for your plants. Because of this, it might help to explain the most important nutrients that form the foundation for all these fertilizers.
Three Part Fertilizer
NPK nutrient mix – comprised of Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium, is an essential component that aids plant development.
The percentage of each can change, but a typical concentration is 10/5/5, with the three nutrients totaling 20% of the dry nutrient mixture. This information should be available on the side of any nutrient mix you buy.
Identifying Nitrogen Deficiency
A nitrogen deficiency can be identified by yellowing leaves (first observable in the tips of older bottom leaves) and declining growth rates.
Old leaves experience the effects of nitrogen deficiency first, but if the deficiency isn’t resolved, your plant can die due to its inability to produce enough chlorophyll for photosynthesis.
Identifying Phosphorus Deficiency
Phosphorus deficiency often presents symptoms of darkened green or purple leaves, poor root development and stunted growth.
Phosphorus is perhaps the most important nutrient for plant development outside of Nitrogen. A phosphorus deficiency often leads to purple or reddish hues on the underside of leaves and stems due to anthocyanin buildup. Later stages cause dark green, stiff leaves that eventually die off.
Identifying Potassium Deficiency
Plants with a potassium deficiency grow slowly and can first appear with the sign of yellow coloration appearing on the outside of leaves. Then, the leaves can brown and curl up at the sides, reducing fruit development and shrinking harvest volume.
Additionally, potassium deficiencies can make plants more susceptible to frost damage, making identifying and rectifying these issues especially important.
On the other hand, too much potassium can compete with calcium and magnesium for uptake, causing deficiencies before nutrient toxicity becomes an issue.
Challenges with Hydroponic Fertilizer
One of the biggest challenges with hydroponic fertilizer is getting the formula right. While you can find grow guides that suggest ideal compositions, nothing beats the knowledge you can gain from trying different combinations to find what works for your specific plants.
However, hydroponic fertilizer is a tricky beast. It’s not as easy as adding a specific nutrient that’s deficient. Issues like nutrient lockout require growers to completely flush the system before rectifying any hydroponic fertilizer deficiencies, which is annoying and costly.
Nutrient Luxury Consumption
Luxury consumption is a level of nutrient intake that exceeds the optimal level of nutrients required for plant development. For instance, a plant is supplied with an excess of Potassium might uptake those nutrients but is not able to use them to further its development.
In most situations, this isn’t a problem. However, if the level of nutrients crosses the next threshold, nutrients can become toxic, working against the plant and resulting in smaller harvests.
Nutrient Lockout
A related concept is the phenomenon of nutrient lockout. This occurs when the grow media becomes saturated with salt and nutrients, to the point that it stops absorbing new nutrients, even if they’re present and accessible. This is a serious problem and often results in plant death.
Nutrient lockout can occur when nutrients aren’t mixed properly, or when too many nutrients are added to the solution.
In a nutrient lockout, the first step to solving the problem is to stop feeding your plants additional nutrients. Then, you should flush your system of existing nutrient solution, and replace it with reverse osmosis water to reset your nutrient solution mix. Then, reintroduce nutrients to your system a day or two after your plant recovers.
Monitoring pH Changes in Your Hydroponic Fertilizer
Another important component of your hydroponic fertilizer is the pH, or level of acidity or basicity in the nutrient solution.
You can monitor pH balance through test kits, or with higher accuracy through an electric pH monitor. As an important note, never touch the electrodes on the monitor, as the oils on your skin can disrupt the sensor’s accuracy.
In most cases, a pH range of 5.5 to 7.0 is preferred, although some crops have unique needs, like blueberries that grow better in more acidic pH environments, between 4.5 and 5.5.
In a Pure Greens Container Farm, monitoring pH is easy. You can check the pH of your container farm at any time through the PLC system or the connected mobile app.
Additionally, if you notice that an adjustment is in order, it’s easy to add pH up or pH down to quickly rectify the issue. pH up shifts the pH up with small amounts of a base substance, while pH down shifts the total pH down with small amounts of an acidic substance.
Summary
In conclusion, hydroponic farming offers a unique and efficient way to grow plants, but it requires careful attention to the nutrients provided.
By understanding the types of hydroponic fertilizers and how to manage them, you can ensure your plants receive the optimal conditions for growth. Regular monitoring and adjustments are key to preventing issues like nutrient deficiencies and lockout.
With the right approach, hydroponic systems can yield impressive results, providing a sustainable and productive method for cultivating a wide variety of crops.
Want more information about how Pure Greens container farms make it easy to monitor and adjust your nutrient solution? Contact us today for a free consultation, where you can speak with our growers to see if a container farm is right for your operations.
