What Water is best for Organic?

[tacomuybueno]

where do you hang the nylon sack of activated charcoal? i'm going to try this method. sounds like a smart idea. me now! the only reason i started using distilled water was to keep my beneficial bacteria alive, but that is turning into big buck$. i didn't know how to get rid of chloramine. which happy frog do you use? ik seen that there are two different happy frogs. i heard a good recipe is happy frog the first few in., then a mix of happy frog and ffof, then ffof on bottom. plus your lime and perlite of course. thank you.

 

[Rrog]

This from MicrobeOrganics:

"...just placing a small amount of compost or molasses in water neutralizes chlorine or chloramines.

Having made many many brews of ACT and having checked many of those with a microscope, I am completely confident that a bit of molasses will neutralize all chlorine. A pinch of compost does it even faster.

that adding a couple drops of blackstrap and waiting 10 minutes treated my chloraminated water just fine. It also treats my current water, which contains only incidental chloramines along with the chlorine added by the municipality.

2 drops per gallon, and I get good brews. If I drop the compost straight into untreated water, I don't. One pinch of compost serves equally well. Since it's now a matter of convenience, I use a pinch of compost per gallon to treat water for ACT (1 ppm chlorine according to city), and since I water with a pump sprayer, I use 2 drops (OR SO!) blackstrap per gallon to water.

 

[huckelberrymadness]

i use spring water and to put down the ph level i use organic lemon juice it works good!

 

[TheNaturalist]

I have a little bottle of stuff made to remove clorine from water for use with fish. It looks like a bottle of eye drops and instructions say add 1 drop per gall to remove all chlorine, I wider if this would work well with tap water for organic growing?

 

[Rrog]

What's wrong with molasses? Why the need to buy anything?

 

[Da Almighty Jew]

1 drop of molasses? that is interesting. I didnt know just a drop of it would neutralize the bad stuff

 

[Rrog]

One of the organic movement's biggest celebrities provided that data.

 

[Rcb]

i see how people are saying that ro would be bad for organics but say i was using the general organics line they have a cal mg supplement that comes with the line, would that make ro water a better choice?

 

[Rrog]

Nothing like well water or at least de-chlorinated tap. I don't use my RO at all anymore and I have a new jug of GO Cal Mag. RO water with this supplement does not have the mineral diversity of well or tap water

 

[FR33MASON]

If your municipal water supply uses chlorine, then time is the only thing that removes chlorine as it efervesces out of solution (the water) and into the atmosphere.
The most rapid way to get chlorine to remove chlorine with out boiling is to agitate the water and create as much ripples in as wide a surface area as possible as the gas exchange occurs at the meniscus (water surface). Good circulation within the tank, barrel or whatever, is also key to rapid chlorine removal.

Chloramine is chlorine atoms locked in with ammonia which is liquid at room temperature. This disallows the chlorine to escape into the atmosphere. The bond between the chlorine atoms and ammonia must first be broken.

The best way for an organic grow to treat this is to either take water from an established aquarium (20% by volume), buy a commercial bacterial culture, or use barley straw. All the aforementioned have bacteria that consume the ammonia and break the bond with the clorine which is free to escape to atmosphere. It takes me 24 hours to fully treat my water which has chloramine by using water from my aquarium and a powerhead with an airline.

 

[Favre2Harvin]

Some good info on here. great read.

F2H.

 

[+ WitchDoctor +]

My tap water also comes out at a Ph of 8.5. Most organic gardeners don't Ph their water, but I use RO with a Ph of 8.5, so I feel that I need to.

I add about .5 tsp of organic lemon juice per gallon to bring my ph down to about a 7 and my plants are happy.

I don't disagree with anyone else that this step may not be important for other people, but fungi like an acidic environment, so it's seems counter-productive to me to intentionally use high ph water when I spend all this money on mycos..

I also use .5 tsp per gallon of Molasses or Agave with every watering, and it doesn't bring my Ph down much without using lemon juice.

 

[Rrog]

Canna likes a bacterially dominant soil. Canna will adjust its root secretions to ensure this.

 

[Jack Harer]

My tap is 8.5 pH. My bottled water source is an even 7. I haven't tried RO and don't really want to because I hear you have to add cal/mag to it. My soil has beneficial fungi and microbes that I want to preserve, but run off is 8.5. I want to fix my soil/water's pH without using pH down. How do I do this? Apple cider vinegar and lemon juice lower the water pH, but it will rise again, and run off is still 8.5.

Plants are young, there should be enough nutrients in the soil for them to grow with no issue for at least another month but they are suffering because of the pH level.

If I use pH down, the microbes are dead, If I add them to the soil, they will just die off anyways when I add pH down to the next watering. So what the point of being organic when your water's pH is too high to grow??

I watched a buddy grow massive LA confidential plants with just superthrive ever other watering and with straight tap water. He used Foxfarm soil with nothing added. MY plants look like shit compared to his and they are much older. He never adjusted pH and never flushes, they are just huge.

Also, if my runoff is very dark, how do I tell what color it is with the litmus hydroponics solution test? I have to use a meter? Still waiting for my calibration solution to calibrate my POS Milwaukee meter.

Should I just use fish emulsion in water (to acidify) every watering and then flush with RO water every so often? If so who often should I flush?

so many questions, I'm real discouraged this year with this damn coco soil. Should have just kicked down the 15 bucks for Foxfarms, but this soil is OMRI listed.

That ought to tell you something. Quit trying to fix what aint broke. ONCE AGAIN, the important pH value in this equation is the pH value of the soil itself, NOT the value of whats going in or coming out. If you water with 8.5 water, as the water sits in contact with the soil, it will change to the pH value of the soil. Hopefully, that is 6.8 or thereabouts.. The lime (or liming agent ie: dolomite) is what will bring the pH down. pH will remain stable until there is no longer a liming agent present. That means that if your soil pH when you start the grow is 6.8, unless you can somehow wash out all of the dolomite or lime, your pH will remain stable.
Runoff is no indicator of pH, as it has just "run past" the soil, and wasn't in contact with it long enough to be affected. When you quit obsessing over pH, you'll have a much better time doing this, and your plants will thank you a thousand fold for not screwing around with them so much!!!
pH in soil is not that critical. And the high pH of your tap water will NOT kill off the beneficial microbes. Get a grasp or understanding of what pH is and how it affects things. You'll be that much further ahead of the game if you can do that!

 

[Rrog]

Nice rundown Jack!

 

[Milovan]

That ought to tell you something. Quit trying to fix what aint broke. ONCE AGAIN, the important pH value in this equation is the pH value of the soil itself, NOT the value of whats going in or coming out. If you water with 8.5 water, as the water sits in contact with the soil, it will change to the pH value of the soil. Hopefully, that is 6.8 or thereabouts.. The lime (or liming agent ie: dolomite) is what will bring the pH down. pH will remain stable until there is no longer a liming agent present. That means that if your soil pH when you start the grow is 6.8, unless you can somehow wash out all of the dolomite or lime, your pH will remain stable.
Runoff is no indicator of pH, as it has just "run past" the soil, and wasn't in contact with it long enough to be affected. When you quit obsessing over pH, you'll have a much better time doing this, and your plants will thank you a thousand fold for not screwing around with them so much!!!
pH in soil is not that critical. And the high pH of your tap water will NOT kill off the beneficial microbes. Get a grasp or understanding of what pH is and how it affects things. You'll be that much further ahead of the game if you can do that!

absolutely correct no doubt whatsoever

 

[+ WitchDoctor +]

The lime (or liming agent ie: dolomite) is what will bring the pH down. pH will remain stable until there is no longer a liming agent present. That means that if your soil pH when you start the grow is 6.8, unless you can somehow wash out all of the dolomite or lime, your pH will remain stable.

Did you mean to say the lime will bring the ph up? Because I was under the impression that lime brought ph up, and not down.

 

[Rrog]

Yes, that is what he means. Lime will help bring initial soil pH above 7. Acids will bring pH below 7.

Fungally dominated soils tend to be more acidic because as a group they produce more acidic enzymes. Cannabis, however likes bacterially dominated soils which are more basic (higher pH) enzymes. The plant will tailor its root exudates to customize the microlife population the way it wants. It likes certain bacteria around so it secretes bacterially favorable food. Certainly EM fungi are all a part of this web, but the bacterially dominant soil that the cannabis creates will tend to be higher in pH. You move it down, and the plant will creep it back up.

 

[+ WitchDoctor +]

Sounds good! Does that mean you feel that adding lemon juice to the water to bring down the pH is pretty much just a wasted step? When other people talk about there tap water pH, it's usually around 7ish, and mine is 8.5 or higher. I'd obviously be open to the idea of not using it anymore because it's a pain in the ass to get lemon juice out of the fridge all the time, and it's a pain in the ass to juice lemons lol...but I actually started pHing with water in the first place because I was having lockout issues and couldn't figure out why. I started adding .5 tsp on lemon juice per gallon..and everything worked out. But if you're confident that that's a wasted step I'd like to run 4 against 4 and see what happens.

The pH of rain water is about 5.7 though....so if using RO water wouldn't we want to bring pH closer to that even growing organically? Or is would that not even matter because it's indoor?

 

[missnu]

With all the things you can use to lower the pH of your water it is not the pH of tap water that stops anyone from using it, or rather it shouldn't...what you need to check is the ppm or EC...I am on a well and the water pH is at least 8.5...I use the color solution so if it is so high or low, I don't know if it is that number, or lower than that...I just know it isn't right...lol. Anyway back to what we were saying...

You can use your tap water as long as the ppm's are alright...if they are crazy like 500 then use bottled or spring water...it has minerals added to it to just mimic natural water...distilled water is good for hydro, but not soil...