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However, because not everyone can start out with soft and/or purified water, our expert team developed FloraMicro Hardwater, which reduces the problems associated with hard water and maintains proper nutrient balance. It is formulated to compensate for the elevated calcium levels in your base water. 

But where is the cut-off? When do you know you need Hardwater versus normal FloraMicro?

Here is the answer:

Use FloraMicro Hardwater when your starting water contains over 200 ppm or Calcium above 70 ppm.  Always test your starting water, especially if you know that it’s prone to being hard. Using FloraMicro Hardwater will help you avoid nutrient imbalance, which can lead to severe deficiencies or, more likely, toxically high levels of certain nutrients.

If your levels are only slightly high, try blending the normal and Hardwater FloraMicros together. If your water contains 30 to 50 ppm Calcium, you can mix the original FloraMicro with FloraMicro Hardwater to create a perfect Micro blend for your plants.

Share your experiences using FloraMicro Hardwater with us! Are there other tricks you use, when dealing with hard water? Leave a comment and let us know.

Stay tuned for new videos as we continue to post them. Connect with us by subscribing and becoming our YouTube friend. Leave a comment on your favorite and let us know what other types of videos you would like to see from us! Find our GeneralHydroponicsUS YouTube channel HERE!

Check out the installation of our new Cogenra Hydrid Solar panels below. These babies now power up many of our facilities here at GH headquarters, saving energy and fuel.

I’d like to try growing a giant pumpkin next year, using General Organics humus and fertilizers. I think it would be easy to challenge some past pumpkin champions with a prize-winning GO pumpkin! Has anyone tried growing pumpkins hydroponically? It’s easy enough to do. You just need to have enough space for the long, trailing vines and the large, heavy fruit. Three years ago, Jesse grew this 485lb guy here at GH and entered into the Half Moon Bay Giant Pumpkin contest. It was grown with Flora Nova, Alice’s Garden, Floralicious Plus and SubCulture B. Check out the size of that baby!

 Some people are growing them vertically, with the pumpkins hanging in mid-air, as they grow. Check out these awesome photos!

 Photo from Discover Hydroponics

 Photo from Linneyville

If growing pumpkins isn’t your thing, you can still carve them every year! With the proper tools and motivation, you can get really creative with your designs. Many people use stencils to make it easier but you can free-hand some interesting shapes and faces as well. If you want something to aspire to, check out these amazing sculpted pumpkins! The artist, Ray Villafane, has truly perfected the art of pumpkin carving.

I hope that served as some inspiration for your Halloween weekend! Enjoy, dress up and be safe out there everyone! Happy Halloween from General Hydroponics!

We decided to support them in the best way we can (from the other coast): by donating some of the best of our GH & GO products to help improve their gardening success! We sent them coco fiber, to add to seedling mixtures, potting soils and all types of growing media. We sent them several General Organics fertilizers, to enrich and enliven the soil. We also donated Alaska Humus, which increases biological soil diversity, nutrient availability and overall stability.

We can’t wait to see how this awesome organization continues to flourish in the future!

We’ve been talking lately about our new root-enhancing product, RapidStart®. RapidStart® delivers a powerful blend of natural plant extracts, amino acids, and nutrients to generate prolific root growth. It stimulates abundant root branching and development of fine root hairs that enhance nutrient uptake. We’ve seen what it can do for bell peppers and lettuce. Now, you can learn more about RapidStart® and watch a time-lapse video that really shows the difference it can make.

Behold our latest video! Jesse explains how the product works and shows you the spectacular footage that proves its effectiveness. Enjoy!

Our friends in Michigan, Northern Lights Hydroponic and Garden Supply, had an awesome booth at the Arts, Beats and Eats festival this year! They were showing off all kinds of awesome plants and were giving away some choice GH and GO samples. Check out those fabulous GH banners on their booth!

Northern Lights is located in Madison Heights, MI. They carry a complete line of hydroponic, indoor, and outdoor gardening supplies, including many General Hydroponics and General Organics products! We are grateful to them and all our excellent retail stores for helping to spread the word about all our high-quality products.

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!

Edible Schoolyard is a wonderful project that first began in our neighborhood (in Berkeley, CA) teaching kids how to grow their own food. It has since grown enormously and many school gardens (and garden-based curriculum) can be found all over the country! Kids are learning to garden at a younger age; they are learning what it means to eat healthy and how to grow their own food!

We love to support innovative programs like this because it helps our awesome community to grow and strengthen. We feel we have a responsibility to educate and prepare the coming generation. As we all know so well, being able to grow your own food is not only a fun hobby. It can be a vital life skill!

So, we decided to offer our support to one particular Edible Schoolyard that is teaching kids how to grow food right in the middle of the in the biggest city in the country: New York City. We donated Coco fiber, Alaska Humus and General Organics fertilizers to Edible Schoolyard NYC.  With those GH ingredients added to their soil, those kids will be able to grow bigger, healthier, more nutritious crops! Gardening success is at their fingertips, with a little extra help from their friends at General Hydroponics. Keep up the good work, little gardeners!

Stay tuned to the GH blog for an update from Edible Schoolyard. We’ll see how our products helped their garden!

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 retail stores that carry General Hydroponics products are really the backbone of our community. They provide a way for us to get all our amazing products to you, the gardeners! They offer education, instruction and even the occasional party! We are grateful for the continued support of all our retail locations.

Today, we want to highlight New York City Hydroponics, located right in the heart of the Big Apple. City Hydroponic operates two fully supplied hydroponics stores that carry all the equipment you need to grow your own fresh fruits, vegetables and herbs in all the different types of NYC indoor gardens. They opened their first store, Bronx Hydroponics and Garden Supply, in 2009 and recently opened a new location: Brooklyn Hydroponics and Garden Supply. They are a community-oriented business, serving the gardeners and urban growers of their neighborhoods. They carry lights, systems, nutrients and everything else you could possibly need.

Education is a huge part of their vision. So, not only do they provide all the products you need for your growing operations but they teach classes for both novice and experienced growers. Free monthly workshops are presented by their experienced staff and the occasional distinguished guest, including our very own East Coast representative, Randall. He taught a class in June and plans to teach more workshops there in the near future. 

Lorraine, from Bronx Hydro, sent us some great photos from one of their recent classes. Check out their great space!

Zach tried RapidStart® on some lettuce and the difference was amazing! In the first two pics, we see leaves and roots growing with base nutrients. The last two pics were taken less than two weeks later. Look at the dramatic difference both in vegetative and root growth! RapidStart® launched a major growth spurt!

RapidStart® delivers a powerful blend of natural plant extracts, amino acids, and nutrients to generate prolific root growth. It stimulates abundant root branching and development of fine root hairs that enhance nutrient uptake increasing plant growth.

Before RapidStart (leaves)

Before RapidStart (roots)

After RapidStart (leaves): 2 weeks later

After RapidStart (roots): 2 weeks later

FloraNectar™ Grape Expectations helps your plants maintain optimal metabolism and growth while sweetening the aroma of your fruits and flowers. The unique blend of ingredients contains all natural raw cane sugar, molasses, malt syrup, select plant-based esters, L-amino acids, organic acids, polyflavonoids, vitamins and essential minerals.

FloraNectar™ Grape Expectations helps your plants regulate enzymes that aid in optimal metabolism. Metabolism is the KEY to sustaining life processes within a plant so optimization leads to better growth and output, not to mention flavor!  With superior metabolism, plants can achieve balance between photosynthesis (converting light into sugar) and respiration (converting sugar into energy). These processes make the fuel that is needed for every stage of plant growth, but especially for fruit and flower production! Balance between respiration and photosynthesis leads to more sweetness. And we know that more sugar, in this case, is a very good thing! Think of all that sweet, juicy fruit and those aromatic flowers!

This plant enhancement promotes sturdier plant structure during the vegetative phase and really provides for your plants’ energy requirements through all phases of growth. But, where Grape Expectations really shines is during the flowering and fruiting phase, when nitrogen levels have been reduced. It ensures optimal metabolic rates which lead directly to an abundance of sweet, flavorful fruit, ripe for the picking!

Use FloraNectar™ Grape Expectations as a part of your regular feeding program! It’s available NOW at your favorite hydroponic store!

Fifth Season Gardening Co. operates beautiful garden centers throughout North Carolina and Virginia.  Since 2000, the Fifth Season family has been providing quality indoor and outdoor gardening products.  Each store has its own unique flair – if you are in the area, check them out! We sent them some samples of the General Organics line and FloraDuo, to try out on some crops in the store. They decided to grow green leaf lettuce under 360W LED lights, in Rockwool.

The FloraDuo® gave this lettuce all the essential macro and micro nutrients that it needed, including specific ingredients to help resist pathogens and insects. It is a 2-part formula, FloraDuo A and FloraDuo B, designed for all growing methods: including hydroponics, soil, and coco blends.

Diamond Black™ is derived from 100% pure Leonardite, a naturally occurring form of carbon drawn from prehistoric peat bogs. These organic compounds improve nutrient absorption, stimulate microbial activity, promote soil structure and increase nutrient retention. Together, these two products got this lettuce really going! Check out all the photos to see all the stages of growth!

NOTE: Please use caution when using GO DiamondBlack™ (and any other organic-based nutrient) in irrigated systems.

   Seedlings during the first week of growth, in the Rockwool (LED lights off)

     One week of growth, with the LED Lights on.

    After 2 weeks of growth, they are really taking off!

               4 weeks of growth: Look at that! It’s ready to begin harvesting.

Looks like the GH FloraDuo® and the GO DiamondBlack™ did the job! By providing the foundation of quality nutrition with the Duo and adding the enhancement of the DiamondBlack, that lettuce is packed with vital nutrition. Let us know how those salads taste!

With the clever use of plastic tubs, foam board and net cups, he creates his own floating raft to grow lettuce. By adding GH nutrients, he is harvesting lettuce from this system in just 4 weeks. That is pretty impressive for a homemade system! Our nutrients really kick production into high-gear, giving plants everything they need for healthy growth and high yields!

The floating raft technique is what many commercial hydroponic lettuce growers use, but on a much larger scale. (Check out this awesome video of a commercial hydroponic operation in action!) Many hydroponic businesses also count on General Hydroponics for their nutrients. Whether you are a business, a home gardener or experimenting with a DIY system like this, GH nutrients really are the universal recipe for growing success.

This homemade floating raft is really great for simple crops like salad greens. Full instructions on how to make this can be found here. However, if you want to grow bigger, heavier crops that bear fruit, we recommend a stronger system that can handle longer roots and bear more weight. Additionally, if you don’t want to spend the time (or just aren’t the DIY type), you can find all more information about General Hydroponics’ systems here.