Water and PPM

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felamarley

New Member
Greetings guys, Fela here

I'm total novice who recently got into growing my own veggies and herbs at home. I decided to start growing my own medicine because I figured "F it! why not?" but I must say this has been a very humbling experience.

I'm using a grow tent and LED lights, and using a soil perlite ratio of 3-1, but I mostly wanna know stuff about water. My tap water reads at 300ppm and I've bough some nutrients (calmag, bio veg and bloom).

Can I pls have some advice on ppm, numbers i should be aiming for and stuff like that.

Thanks alot
 
Rurumo

Rurumo

Well-Known Member
If you're on city water you should be able to find a water quality report online that has info like PH, alkalinity, hardness, calcium level, etc. Try to find it, it's good info to have and can help you determine whether or not you need calmag or just epsom salts, or neither. I use citric acid to lower my PH since I have high ph/high alkalinity water. You have pretty high ppms, so I would recommend citric acid as a "ph down" because it doesn't add ppms to your nutrient solution, unlike phosphoric acid. What nutrients do you have? Typically, for seedlings I feed 200-300 ppm, mid to late veg 400ish, and late veg around 500 ppm, up to 700 by mid flower. Those are pretty conservative numbers compared to what some people feed, but the key is to watch your plants and try to avoid leaf tip burn and to generally keep your leaves looking nice and healthy. With the high ppms you are starting with, you will have to be careful when increasing your nutrient ppms, BUT, a LOT of the PPMs in your starting water will probably be bicarbonates. You will probably struggle the most with PH so you will need to experiment a lot with PH down and make sure your soil PH stays within range. High alkalinity tends to lock out iron first, so keep an eye on that. I also highly recommend a micronutrient supplement fed every few weeks-foliar is good. You probably have different micronutrient brands in England and I know stuff like that can be hard to find there. Good luck!!
 
F

felamarley

New Member
Rurumo said:
If you're on city water you should be able to find a water quality report online that has info like PH, alkalinity, hardness, calcium level, etc. Try to find it, it's good info to have and can help you determine whether or not you need calmag or just epsom salts, or neither. I use citric acid to lower my PH since I have high ph/high alkalinity water. You have pretty high ppms, so I would recommend citric acid as a "ph down" because it doesn't add ppms to your nutrient solution, unlike phosphoric acid. What nutrients do you have? Typically, for seedlings I feed 200-300 ppm, mid to late veg 400ish, and late veg around 500 ppm, up to 700 by mid flower. Those are pretty conservative numbers compared to what some people feed, but the key is to watch your plants and try to avoid leaf tip burn and to generally keep your leaves looking nice and healthy. With the high ppms you are starting with, you will have to be careful when increasing your nutrient ppms, BUT, a LOT of the PPMs in your starting water will probably be bicarbonates. You will probably struggle the most with PH so you will need to experiment a lot with PH down and make sure your soil PH stays within range. High alkalinity tends to lock out iron first, so keep an eye on that. I also highly recommend a micronutrient supplement fed every few weeks-foliar is good. You probably have different micronutrient brands in England and I know stuff like that can be hard to find there. Good luck!!
Click to expand...
Thanks for that spot of info, I'll search for thar now.
I've ordered PH down, so once that arrives I should hopefully have better luck.
Right now there just starting, I'm on 4/5days in on one plant.
 

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Flgrow57

Member
My water has high ph also, it doesn’t take much ph down to drop the ph. I shoot for 6.2ish range.

My question is reading the EC meter.
Fox farm says ec range like 2.3
My meter reads 0236, how do you convert it
Just wanting to improve my grow and knowledge
Thanks
 
F

felamarley

New Member
Flgrow57 said:
My water has high ph also, it doesn’t take much ph down to drop the ph. I shoot for 6.2ish range.

My question is reading the EC meter.
Fox farm says ec range like 2.3
My meter reads 0236, how do you convert it
Just wanting to improve my grow and knowledge
Thanks
Click to expand...
I second that. I have a TDS reader, it's all very confusing stuff, even with searching google.
 
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