super noob PH question. am I screwed?

Super noob question but i will be starting some auto flowers very shortly and I live in the middle of nowhere and cant get my hands on a PH test kit, So my worry is how can i confidently water my plants if i don't know the pH?? .......Can i use bottled water??? Or should i just be using tap water and monitoring the plant's stress ?

Do you get limescale on your taps? Too much limescale can be a bad thing, but unless you get a mental amount, your tap water is probably fine. PH does cause a lot of problems, but it isn't really caused by tapwater. Overfeeding and soil/grow medium has more to do with it..

If is city water and not from a well, you should be fine

( rain water ) ? all the plants out side grow, so I would guess your plant would as well. bottled water the ph is to high . in ice mountain . and few other brands. there has to be at least a pet store or swimming pool store where you are, they have ph test kits.

yeah if your living in the middle of nowhere, your best option is to collect rain water (wish I had the option) plants love it

tap water will in most cases be just fine, the real question is what will you be growing in ?

you can get ph meters shipped to the middle of nowhere off ebay or amazon pretty easily

I've been growing in soil lately and I don't even PH my water anymore. Straight out of the tap with no issues. When I grow in DWC then a meter is a must have.

Well.. missing some info here. Everyone is assuming you are growing in soil, if thats the case you should be fine with just tap water. For bottled water, get distilled, not drinking water because they tend to add things to it. When using distilled you will probably need to supplement your feeding with cal/mg (even with city water you may). Adding some dolomite lime to your soil will help buffer the pH and also add in from cal/mg.

If you are doing Hydro, you need to figure out a way to get a pH meter, there is no way of getting around it.

I may make myself unpopular but I use filtered city water and I absolutely need to PH. First of all, once you start using nutes they have a huge impact on the PH. With my water, I come out close to 6.5 with my nutes added but when feeding onl;y water I adjust down from around 7.8 on average.

I know soil is a buffer and all that but all I can say is that when I have gone without a god PH regiment, my plants suffer. When I PH everything, no problems.

Buy a PH pen and stuff to adjust on-line. Or find any pet, hardware, or mega-store - they will have them somewhere for fish or pools. Aquarium PH adjusters seem to be okay to use.

order a Ph meter off ebay.

Ok thanks guys , I realize how important PH is and will be making the 3 hour trip to my closest pet store to get a test kit.

And I will be growing outdoors in soil.