Today, Jesse walks us through how to properly mix our classic three-part Flora Series™ advanced nutrient system™. It’s the backbone of all hydroponic growing and serves as the starting place for just about any project. Flora Series™ is the most widely used hydroponic fertilizer for several reasons! It offers complete nutrition to all types of plants and enhances growth, flavor and yield! It’s pure and perfectly balanced, when used correctly. The series contains three parts: FloraBloom®, FloraMicro® and FloraGro®. Watch and learn as Jesse takes you through the process of mixing all three properly.

If you are just beginning to learn about hydroponics, this video will be very useful. If you are old hat at this, it couldn’t hurt to brush up on your skills and get a reminder of what it’s like to do it by the book. You never know; you might find a mixing tip that will increase your success rate! Watch and enjoy!

Coco fiber is a truly great growing medium, effective, and environmentally friendly. It can be used on its own or mixed with clay pellets, perlite or topsoil to grow amazing plants! It’s nicer to the earth than sphagnum moss and has better water and oxygen retention than most other media. Coco coir works well for hydroponics and also is a wonderful addition to most soil mixtures, especially for propagation!

However, it does come from the sea and the sea is salty! High salt content is dangerous for plants. It causes nutrient imbalance, dehydration and can lead to plant death. Most coco fiber contains at least a small amount of salt but some can contain a high, fatal quantity. Our compressed CocoTek® bricks and blocks are generally low-sodium. However, we still recommend rinsing it before use, just to be safe.

There are a few methods for rinsing coco fiber. When in a brick form, it is quite compact but when it’s soaked in water, will expand up to three to four times larger than the brick size. So, think big when you prepare for this project (or just do small amounts at a time).

Place the fiber in a bucket, plastic tub or other large container (bathtub? wheelbarrow?). Break it into chunks with your hands (some people prefer to wear gloves for this process). Cover it with water and let it sit. You can continue to stir it and break it apart or you can let it sit for a while and the water will absorb into the entire pieces, eventually making them easy to pull apart. We recommend adding a small amount of CALiMAGic to the soaking water to ensure proper calcium ratios when you put that coco to use. It tends to hold onto positively-charged nutrients, like calcium, so adding extra helps guarantee proper balance.

Once it is fully soaked, you can take out handfuls, squeezing out the water and placing them in another bucket or tub for later use. However, to really ensure that the salt is removed, we recommend running water actually through the fiber a couple of times. You can place it in a bucket with holes in the bottom or over a mesh screen or sieve and just let the water run over it for a while, occasionally turning and moving the fibers around. Keep breaking apart any remaining chunks, making sure that the water can penetrate every part.

Some people prefer to use hot water only. Others use distilled or pH balanced water. You can experiment and see what you prefer but the most important thing is to make sure it is well-rinsed before using it as a growing medium of any kind. Your plants will thank you with their bountiful growth.

Click here to see our line of CocoTek® growing media! 

The best nutrients for each system: 

When you are new to hydroponics, it’s best to keep it simple. Use the Flora Series™ (including FloraGrow®, FloraBloom® and FloraMicro®). Together, they offer complete nutrition and superior growth for just about any plant and work well with all of our systems. You can use the supplements (like the ones you find here) to get larger foliage, greater fruit production and better flavors and aromas to satisfy your individual growing goals. We call it the fine-tuning, while the Flora™ series is your basic motor that runs the whole operation. Almost all of our GH-made nutrient solutions are perfect for any of our hydroponic systems so explore them all and choose your favorite! However, I would like to mention one note about our General Organics™ line: they are ideal for growing media such as cocofiber or soil. However, they are not compatible with any of our hydroponic/recirculating systems because, when it comes to the flowing systems, cleanliness is paramount! The GO line promotes the growth of microbes; having that in the lines will gum things up fairly quickly. So, stay with the Flora™ series and you’ll be all set!

How to blend your nutrients (measuring and mixing):

The Flora™ Series is easy to mix whether you are comfortable with milliliter or teaspoon increments. Each of our recommendations are added at a per gallon ratio. When using the FloraSeries™, it is very important to first add the FloraMicro® to your water/reservoir. You can then add the FloraGrow® & then the FloraBloom®. This will ensure that the nutrients are properly mixed and will prevent lockout from taking place. The Flora™ Series is the industry standard to which all other hydroponic nutrients are compared.

How to check PPM (parts per million):

Once you get your system set up and get the right nutrients to go with it, you have to make sure you maintain the correct nutrient level for your plant. You can follow a feeding schedule and hope for the best but some plants take up nutrients at different speeds and plants need different levels at various stages in their life cycles.* The best way to calculate your system’s nutrient concentration level is with a PPM (parts per million) meter, a common scale for measuring nutrient strength. It tells you the mineral concentration of the water in your system.

There are a few different scales for measuring PPM but here at GH we use a .5 PPM scale (the second column in the chart to the left). It is the standard we use for all our measurements and recommendations. If you use a different meter, you can compare your reading to the chart to see its equivalent in other scales.

* Ideal PPM readings (on a .5 scale) for various stages in plant life:

• Seedling: 200-250 PPM
• Increasing growth: 800-1000 PPM
• Full bloom: 1200 PPM

How much to feed and when:

 Using our nutrients is really quite easy and the nutrient calculator makes it even easier! Just input the specifics of your set-up into the calculator and let our program customize your feeding schedule, including the use of supplements like FloraBlend and Floralicious Plus. It doesn’t matter if you use Flora Series or FloraNova. It doesn’t matter if you recirculate or run to waste. Just enter all the variables and get personalized data pertaining just to your garden.

EUROGROWER

Just about anyone can grow beautiful, healthy plants using hydroponic methods! We are here to help you get started and to guide you through every step along the way. This is the second in a series of blogs, focusing on helping beginners get started. Keep checking back for the latest installments and leave a comment if there is a topic you’d like to see us cover.

What kind of system is right for you? The way to begin answering this question is to ascertain what your needs are.  What do you want to grow? How much yield are you looking for? Where will you be growing? For example, if you want just a few tomato plants for your household, a smaller system like our best-selling WaterFarm®, is perfect: compact, easy to set up and get going. This is our low-maintenance system. You can learn more about this system here. PowerGrower® is another good beginner’s system. It has a hex shape, just right for one plant at a time. You can easily grow one 5 foot tomato plant in just one PowerGrower®.

POWERGROWER

Do you want to grow many plants at once to, for example, donate veggies to your local food bank? Then try a complete system, made up of multiple modules. The WaterFarm® comes in an 8 pack, for multiple plants, but the best multi-unit system for beginners is the EuroGrower®. The EuroGrower® provides users with a simple, yet elegant approach to home hydroponics, especially if you want to grow several different crops at once. You can successfully grow big, healthy plants with the EuroGrower® because it is easier to manage and control. It has a simple, re-circulating system and tops feeds with just one reservoir.

You may also want to try the MegaFarm®, if you want to grow larger plants, like fruit

AEROFLO2 30

 trees (mmm, fresh avocados) or four smaller plants, all in one container. If energy conservation and sustainability are your main priorities, the EcoGrower® is the hydroponic system for you. It’s reliable and simple to use. We will have solar-powered EcoGrowers® available soon, as well, so stay tuned! If you are looking for high growth rates, look no further than the AeroFlo2 or the RainForest. These high-production systems offer legendary growth rates and very high yields, much higher than some of our other systems, which means that they also sometimes need a little extra attention. The AeroFlo2® is a turbo system that will crank out amazing plants for those who are keen to sustain them. The Rainforest® is especially great for cloning and plant propagation. It has a vortex sprayer that mists the underside of roots for constant water circulation, without harming tender young roots. Seedlings can be started in the Rainforest and later moved to other systems, like the WaterFarm®. Most beginners prefer to just buy seedlings but propagation can be fun to explore too! Once you have pinpointed your hydroponic needs and goals, you can choose the system that is right for you!

RAINFOREST 66

If you want to see some of our systems firsthand, before you decide which one is right for you, you can see them at the Gen Hydro booth at the Max Yield Indoor Gardening Expo next weekend and talk to our expert staff about each one. You can also see some of them at our retail partners. Click here to locate a store near you!

Stay tuned to this blog for more in-depth analysis of each our hydroponic systems as we continue to update our series called “Sizing up the Systems” (Part one and Part two are already posted).

Know your pH

pH is very important to healthy growth of any kind: all living things require a more-or-less balanced pH, including any hydroponic plants that you grow. Hydroponics depends heavily on good water quality. So, a good place to start is checking the pH of your water and knowing what the ideal pH levels are for good plant growth.

 What is pH? pH is a calculation of the free ions in the water. It’s measured on a scale from 1- 14, with 7 being neutral. The low end is acidic (a lemon is a 2) and the high end is alkaline, or basic (lye has a pH of 14). Pure water has a pH of 7 but most tap waters have many components added to them that can alter pH (possibly chlorine, water softeners, fluoride, etc).

When the pH is not at the proper level, a plant will lose its ability to absorb some of the essential nutrients required for healthy growth. Lower absorption can lead to all sorts of problems like increased disease susceptibility, stunted growth rates and reduced fruit production. Hydroponic nutrients contain all elements needed by plants. Under normal circumstances, all elements should be available and nutrient deficiencies will not occur. A pH imbalance can cause nutrient deficiencies by creating mineral interactions. The ideal PH level varies from plant to plant but, generally speaking, most plants prefer a slightly acidic growing environment, with a pH between 5.5-6.5. The ideal pH for Hydroponics is 5.8, while the ideal pH for Soil is more basic at 6.3. The chart to the left shows how nutrients are absorbed at varying pH levels.

When first starting out, it’s a good idea to measure the pH of your water every day, until you get a feel for your system. Measure your water and then add your nutrients. Within an hour, check the pH and adjust accordingly. Repeat this process until pH stabilizes. The easiest, most inexpensive way to test the pH of your water is with pH test indicators, which makes it very simple to measure. If you find that the pH of your water does need adjusting, you can do so easily with pH UP™ and pH DOWN™, which are two GH products especially designed to serve this very purpose!  When using an organic product (like GO) we recommend adjusting your water’ pH before adding the organic nutrients and then letting the pH adjust itself. Organic compounds will cause the pH to fluctuate regularly and there is no need to manually adjust as you will be driving yourself crazy and the plants will be doing just fine. For more information on pH, please click here.

We begin with the gold standard, our best-selling module, the WaterFarm®. Versatile, durable and compact, the WaterFarm® hydroponic system is popular for good reasons. Because it’s made of such high-impact plastic, the system you buy is the system you will have for many years to come. This is the best choice for growers with smaller spaces to work with, as the units create a high-density installation.  However, even though it’s compact, you can still grow many types of plants, large and small. Tomatoes do wonderfully in the WaterFarm® systems, as do avocados, coffee plants and more. Check out these photos from Stephen at Garden Connections in Ohio, to see the WaterFarm® in action:

Coffee in a WaterFarm

Tomatoes in a WaterFarm 8-pack

Are you ready to really get your hydroponic itch scratched? Get the WaterFarm® 8-pack: eight module units, connected to one GH controller for a full-on high-production system with everything you need. How much can you grow with an 8-pack? The sky’s is the limit! (well, ok, maybe the ceiling is the limit).

The WaterFarm® system is a great place to start, if you are new to hydroponics. No matter where you live, you can grow hydroponically and get the fresh fruits and vegetables that you want. Even a small space can be put to work for you. With our complete sets of nutrients to pair with the system, you can get amazing, lush, delicious crops that no outdoor garden could touch. Plants are protected from disease, pests and the weather and they don’t have to compete with weeds for nutrients! Everything they need is right there.

Leave a comment and let us know how the WaterFarm® works for you. What fruits and vegetables grow best in it? If that one isn’t your favorite system, which one is and why? We’ll be covering our other systems in future blogs and we need your input!

FloraDuo is the latest General Hydroponic product to hit the market! This new nutrient is complete, balanced, and very simple. And like all of General Hydroponics’ formulas, it is highly concentrated and cost effective. FloraDuo makes all the essential macro and micro nutrients available to your garden and also provides plants with specific ingredients to help resist pathogens and insects.

Let us know in the comments if you’ve tried FloraDuo, and please submit any questions too!

Hydroponic Economics has a good, simple post with tips for troubleshooting your drip system.

My good friend Mark sent me this excellent video of his sister-in-law Gail brewing up a nice batch of compost tea. Instead of keeping a giant pile of rotting compost, she uses our Ancient Forest and Floralicious Plus and a few other select ingredients. Her instructions are simple, and her results are amazing- tomato plants to die for.

Related Content:
Actively Aerated Compost Tea Q&A
What does it do? Floralicious Plus

If you ask 10 growers about their techniques, you will get 11 different methods for growing. Everyone has their own particular way of doing things, and everyone will insist that their way is the best. When beginners ask me about how to get started, I tell them the best thing they can do is find a mentor. Having someone with experience to guide you in designing a room and system is invaluable.

Turning to your local hydro store expert is a great place to start, but you can now take your learning to the next level. Here in Nor Cal, one option is the Technical Indoor Gardening Institute. The Oakland school offers a robust curriculum, with a focus on helping growers reduce their impact on the earth. The school covers the basics for novices with classes like “Room Design, Layout and Installation” and “Nutrient Management“. Growers with experience and success can improve their yields and profits with courses on “Plant Pathology and Microbiology” and “Starting a Sustainable Business“. And even most Jedi growers don’t know how to pull off “Plant Tissue Culture“. The instructors are experts, the learning environment supportive, and most classes cost less than running a 1000 watt light for one month.

For more information and a complete schedule of classes, visit TechnicalIndoorGardens.com

These sweet example setups were at the Grow 2010 show in LA. I personally rock ebb and flow, but I have to say, if I ever switch, it will be to an Aeroflow for sure!systems

Red Myst writes:

I am growing in a home-mixed organic soil that’s based on 50/50 mix of cocotek/sunshine peat moss. Added to this base was earthworm castings, Ancient Forest, perlite, pumice, Fox Farms Ocean Forest, Organicare Indoor Aeration Mix, Royal Gold Basement Mix, and a blend of dry organic fertilizers including a 4-3-6 ‘Tomato Tone’ fertilizer, Peruvian seabird guano, Jamaican and Indonesian Bat Guanos, Kelp Meal, Dolomitic Lime, Green Sand, and MgO. It is a rich soil that will usually get me into early flowering without need for extra feeding, but I still like to add Bio Root and Superthrive(drop a gallon) to at least every other watering and administer foliars using Nitrozyme marine algae product every 7-10 days.

I am now 1/3 to 1/2 way into fruit production I am alternating watering with a G.O. BT Bloom, CaMg+, Bio Bud combination and a Jamaican or Indonesian bat guano tea. I alternate between these two cocktails. I just recently decided to brew up the humus tea, figuring it could only help break down and make available whatever still remains in the soil, and I really wanted to introduce Floralicious Plus to see what kind of a difference it makes in flavor.

This brings up a question I’ve been contemplating. The Ancient Forest humus tea instructions say to brew at least two or three days. If I want to go longer, can I(or should I) add a little black strap molasses to the brew to ‘feed’ the microbes, or will they be okay without it. If so, how often and how much? Also, how long can the tea be brewed (and maybe topped off with fresh H2O, humus and/or Floralicious Plus) before you would recommend starting a fresh batch? Okay, so maybe I have a few questions;-)

Lastly, I just took some of the 2-day humus tea brew today (1 gallon) and added it to 2 gallons of straight R.O. water. I then added BT Bloom, CaMg+ and Bio Bud at moderate label rates. The pH of this mix was pretty low (around 4+/-), so I raised it back to 6-6.2 using Potassium hydroxide. So, the question is: Did I kill off or injure my microbial population with this move?

Okay, that’s it for now. Thanks for your magnificent support!

And the answer from our own Randall:

Wow, that soil mix your’re putting together is RIDIC! Now that is some diversity. As you state, this is a RICH mix which does not require much ‘feeding’, although adding BioRoot early on is a great idea, and you can add a little more than 1 drop per Gallon. Try 1-3 tsp per Gallon. I would even suggest a VERY LIGHT application of BioThrive Grow during your short vegetative stage.

The Kelp foliar spray you apply every 7-10 days is also great. I love Kelp (BioWeed) as a foliar spray @ ½ tsp per 1 Liter of good water. I would ONLY do this during vegetative growth and I stop foliar feeding during flowering. AACT as a foliar spray during vegetative growth is a great plan.

You are halfway into your flowering stage, using the GO line along with 2 kinds of Guano AACTs, and you are now brewing up AACT with the Ancient Forest. You are correct that the AACT will help breakdown and make available nutrients and supplements to the plant, along with increasing the plants root growth and biological diversity in the soil mix, helping to increase the overall potential and vitality of the plant.

When you are growing a plant in soil, it is almost like the plant itself is secondary to the soil and the biology in the soil. Provide a nice, diverse range of microbes in the soil, add, enliven, and feed the microbes with AACT, and thus: FEED THE SOIL. Feed the soil, feed the microbes in the soil, and they in turn feed the plant. The symbiotic relationship of soil microbiology to plants roots is paramount! Plants roots give off sugars, called ‘exudates’, which soil microbes eat. The soil microbes eat the plant exudates, and the waste product provided by the soil microbes is the food and fuel for the plant. There is an element of communication at the root zone were plants give off specific exudates for specific microbes. You are enhancing and encouraging this with high quality organic soil mix, Ancient Forest, and AACT.

The microbes cultured in the Jamaican and Peruvian Guanos will be different from the microbes in the Ancient Forest. AF will potentially have more biological diversity in a AACT brew, however, each base food source for AACT, whether guano, manure, castings, or humus, will provide specific benefits for soil and plant growth. Basically, it’s hard to say one is ‘better’ than another due to the infinite amount of variance in specific gardens and plants. Generally, the more biological diversity, the better. AF contains a wide variety of different kinds of beneficial bacteria and fungi.

A big factor is the food (energy) source you use to ‘feed’ the microbes of the AACT. You add dormant microbes (from the AF, Guano, compost, etc.) to good water and add O2 with an air pump, which ‘wakes up’ the microbes from dormancy. What you provide as a food source for the awoken microbes will determine the diversity of microbes that will be cultured in the AACT, along with the amount of TIME you brew your AACT.

Floralicious Plus may be the best food source for AACT. It is comprised of extremely high quality complex sugars, vitamins, polysaccharides, fructans, humic/fulvic acids, plant/marine extracts (and much more) to feed and sustain beneficial microorganisms. Another suggestion for the food source for your AACT is FloraNectar, our sugar and carbohydrate supplement. FloraNectar contains high quality cane sugar, molasses, malt syrup, vitamins, minerals, and more. Both of these GH products will make an EXCELLENT food (energy) source for the microbes of AF or any other AACT base. (1-3) oz of either FP or FN per (5) Gallons of good water as an AACT food source.

OK, answers to your questions. #1, you ask about the amount of TIME necessary to brew AACT. Basically, you need to brew your AACT at least 6 hours, and you can brew AACT for up to three days. I would not suggest going longer than 3 days. Keep in mind that the longer you brew your AACT, the less microbial diversity your brew achieves. The brew evolves toward a monoculture with more TIME. This is because with time, different microbes will eat and replicate and outcompete different microbes, so over time, certain microbes can dominate the brew, making it a monoculture. This can be a bad thing. Not to fear, just don’t brew longer than 2 or 3 days at the most. Personally, I prefer to brew my AACT for 12-24 hours, no longer than 1.5 days. If you wanted to go longer, you can certainly add molasses and other food sources to the brew, but I would not go longer than 2 or 3 days. If you add molasses, 1-3 oz per 5 Gallons of water is good, just make sure the molasses is organic. When you are adding food sources to the AACT, be conservative with feeding.

#2, I would brew a batch of AACT for 12-36 hours and then start a new batch. Remember that the TEMPERATURE of your water plays a HUGE roll in so many aspects of AACT brewing and root zone ecology. Keep the water consistent at the 65-72 degree F range.

#3, Yes, you killed/injured/lessened the efficiency of your AACT by adding Potassium Hydroxide to your Tea. OK, so keep in mind that we are dealing with soil and root zone ecology here. We are dealing with millions of microbes and a ton of LIFE all up in your soil. Allow the life in your soil to balance itself out! In Hydroponics, the pH of your water is a fundamental factor as it allows access of nutrients to your plants in a water based growing environment, void of beneficial microbes. Without a balanced pH in hydroponics, plants will not be able to uptake nutrients as efficiently. pH in soil gardening is NOT as fundamental to successful gardening as pH is in hydroponic gardening. Soil microbiology has a lot to do with this. This is not to say pH is not vital and extremely important in soil, I am suggesting that it is not as fundamental to soil agriculture as it is in hydroponic agriculture. I am suggesting to not add pH up and pH down to AACT. The soil and the microbes can act as a pH buffer. Fluctuation in pH level may even be beneficial as it allows different nutrients more availability at different pH levels. Not to say you should allow your pH to get to 4 or 8 without concern, or that you should not monitor your pH. The point is that you should monitor your pH but NOT react like you would in a hydroponic scenario.

In soil, I find that pH range can be as great as into your mid to high 4’s upwards to your high 7’s. I have grown healthy and vibrant plants in soil with pH levels of my water source, that in hydroponics, would not fly. This is the beauty of the microbes in your soil. Let the microbes in your soil and your AACT balance your pH, rather than adding chemicals to artificially raise or lower your pH. That said, I also have clients who will have a very low pH in their feed water in soil and they will add a small amount of pH UP with success, so it is not like you eliminated your usage opportunity by adding pH UP, I just would not recommend it. I would follow the plant in this situation (and most situations). Plants never lie, they will tell you when they are happy, and they will tell you when they are sad. React to plants more than act. If you are in mid flower, using the same RO water and AACT, etc, and your garden is thriving, I would roll with the AACT with a low pH, rather than adding pH UP.

Good luck with your garden, Red Myst! Keep us updated on your progress!

Randall’s Recipe for Actively Aerated Compost Tea

General Hydroponics’ FloraSeries is the formula that has produced more high yielding grows than any other in the world. It is the cornerstone that the entire hydroponics industry was built on. Some things never change. There is nothing we will ever alter in our definitive 3 part nutrient.

Despite our dedication to the integrity of our original recipe, in the 3 decades since GH introduced FloraSeries, we have grown and blossomed as a company. Our researchers continue to create cutting edge, advanced nutrients for all types of growers. The GH engineers constantly strive to implement new technology and increase our use of renewable energy. And our visual designers are always at work on eye-catching and informative labeling.

Introducing the new art for FloraSeries. Everything about the new labels has been improved. The classic elements that you recognize in Micro, Grow, and Bloom now have more real estate on the bottle. The text is clearer, and the information you need the most, the NPK, is even easier to find at a glance. It is a fresh perspective on our most consistent product.

Related Content and Knowledge:
FloraSeries Q&A
FloraSeries Bottling Video
FloraSeries Nutrient Calculator
FloraSeries in Antarctica

I am stoked to share this video from the MAKE YouTube Channel! Becky Stern set up a RainForest 318 on her rooftop in Brooklyn, NY. The video explains step-by-step how she set up her GH system, potted up her plants, and maintains a thriving garden. Plus there’s a post with more details over on her blog. She’s killing it with a great looking hydroponic herb garden.