abe23
Active Member
Just curious about what kind of water people are giving their plants and how...
do you use tap water/ro system/gallon jugs from kmart? How often do you flush?
Here's my deal: A couple of months ago I started using straight tap water because I was tired of buying RO/distilled water and my plants just started flowering and were extremely thirsty. Within a week they had pretty much stopped growing and were looking decidedly unhealthy, so I flushed and things started looking much better after that -very quickly actually, like within a day or two. After reading up a bit and testing my runoff and tap water, I realized that my problem was the high pH of my tap water (btw 8 and 9 when it comes out the faucet) and that I wasn't letting enough water run out leaving my roots sitting in a salty muck of horridness at the bottom of the pots....
My remedy was to get 2 5-gallon buckets from home depot and an 20$ aquarium pump from the pet store along with an airstone and tubing. I fill the buckets, put in the airstone for about 24 hours before watering and by then the pH is around 7. The difference has really been dramatic compared to the tap water and the plants love it as much if not more than the RO water!
do you use tap water/ro system/gallon jugs from kmart? How often do you flush?
Here's my deal: A couple of months ago I started using straight tap water because I was tired of buying RO/distilled water and my plants just started flowering and were extremely thirsty. Within a week they had pretty much stopped growing and were looking decidedly unhealthy, so I flushed and things started looking much better after that -very quickly actually, like within a day or two. After reading up a bit and testing my runoff and tap water, I realized that my problem was the high pH of my tap water (btw 8 and 9 when it comes out the faucet) and that I wasn't letting enough water run out leaving my roots sitting in a salty muck of horridness at the bottom of the pots....
My remedy was to get 2 5-gallon buckets from home depot and an 20$ aquarium pump from the pet store along with an airstone and tubing. I fill the buckets, put in the airstone for about 24 hours before watering and by then the pH is around 7. The difference has really been dramatic compared to the tap water and the plants love it as much if not more than the RO water!