Effort vs. Patience:

You will find that sometime during the vegetative cycle or bloom cycle that you will be tempted to “try something else” or add the newest “booster” or bottle with a “snazzy name and pretty picture” on the front and “amazing growth” guarantees on the back that you saw at your local hydroponics store. The thing is, when first starting out, K.I.S.S. is your best friend. Keep It Simple Stupid. 

Don’t be fooled into thinking that adding more ingredients to the stew when you don’t have the basics down yet will fix a burned ham.  After you have the basics confidently covered, then you will be able to see the benefits of the additives. Our choice for nutrients is by Canna.   

A simple and complete A and B nutrient for Vegetative state, and an A and B for Flowering is where you should start. We have had terrific results slowly adding the whole Canna line up of additives as well as their handy custom nutrient calculator to aid in the perfect regimen for your plants.  (We are in no way associated with Canna, we just have learned over the years that less can be more in the nutrient world, and you do not need 12 different bottles to create amazing flowers and fruits.)

You will want to complete a full and successful grow before making things harder on yourself. Then, on your second or third round of growing go ahead and take what you learned.  Adapted that working knowledge to your environment or nutrient schedule to better fit your goals and plants needs. The biggest mistake we have seen with new growers is adding more nutrients when seeing “deficiencies” and not understanding the actual issue is “PH lockout” from nutrient salt buildup in the substrate.  This is caused from too much nutrients being used, but the plant shows signs of too little, and the unadvised keeps adding more while simply compounding the problem!!  

Ideally for problem solving, you will only want to make one change at a time to correct a problem while growing. That way you can tell what works, and what does not work next time. Make sure you know what is actually wrong before you try to make more corrections.  Over fertilization or PH lockout are only one of the two most common issues that show many different signs similar to deficiencies. The other being pest attacks or fungal infections. All of which take very different precautions to mitigate, but will be covered in a future Blog Post.

Sleep well knowing you won’t have to worry about your environment thanks to your My Smart Grow environmental system.  We can handle the night shift for you.  A perfect growing environment will thwart most pest attacks and fungal infections by allowing the plants to be in the healthiest environment, providing the healthiest cell growth possible. Pests are more likely to attack sickly plants which are heat stressed, water logged, with damaged cell walls. This will allow for easy fungal growth to be promoted by improper humidity and or temperatures. Rest assured, all of these can be monitored and then controlled with the My Smart Grow system to get you the best crop possible, and is repeatable every time.