What's your "perfect" pH?

I use a soilless organic setup and use general organics for nutes, i keep my PH at 6.5 for everything and seem to be doing fine but im hearing no 6.3 is better or 6.0 is the best so what is everyones pH levels whats working for you what test have you ran?

Which medium do you use? Pro-Mix should be 5.8 to 6.2.

Are we talking about the ph of the medium? Or, the ph of what you pour in? Organics tend to acidify the medium. Which means you'd feed higher ph to help hold the medium's ph.

Get a Control Wizard Accurate 8 soil meter ($50) and use it in combination with measuring your runoff ph using your ph pen.

Runoff is useful, but the amount of time the water sits in the medium before being displaced into runoff affects how closely it matches the medium's PH. For example, if you water until you get immediate runoff, that runoff will be slightly affected by the medium's ph. If you water until just before runoff, let it sit 30 minutes, then water again to displace for runoff, it will be much closer to the medium's ph.

Using a decent soil meter like the Accurate 8 helps correlate runoff and saturation time.

Anyway, I'm using organic'ish nutrients and fight acidity halfway through the grow. I water at 6.8-7.2 to maintain 5.8'ish ph for my Pro-Mix. Thus, why you hear so many different ph's from people. When I used GH Flora 3-part (buffered for ph stability), I fed 6.2 to maintain 5.8 medium ph.

it really depends on the strain. if you do true natural organics (no bottled nutes), ph is irrelevant. Ph-ing it will upset the balance of the microbial population in the soil. If you have a proper soil mix there will be plenty of buffers in the soil.

5.8 is my "perf" in my ocd mind. But i let vary 10% or so.

I also use a $30 milwaukee ph meter. Lol. Gave my eco-test a way yrs ago. Need to buy one now. But id say they're happy.

BigTexan said:

I use a soilless organic setup and use general organics for nutes, i keep my PH at 6.5 for everything and seem to be doing fine but im hearing no 6.3 is better or 6.0 is the best so what is everyones pH levels whats working for you what test have you ran?

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6.284

Haha.

Talking about the pH of the water/nutes you pour in i set all mine to 6.5 and they seem to do ok. its just weird to me that some people can use really low pH or really high pH and still be fine. I also use pro-mix i add nothing to it.

BigTexan said:

Just weird to me that some people can use really low pH or really high pH and still be fine.

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Since you mention how strange it is that people use extremes: I drench my plants 2-3 times using water with hydrated lime[1] (1/2 tsp / gal, resulting in ph 11.2.). I pour a half gallon into a 3gal container which is enough to saturate it. I let it sit for 30-60 minutes to reach equilibrium, then feed as normal (ph 6.8 or so). In addition to bringing the medium's ph back up, I get a moderate flush from 50-70% runoff.

I think most new-to-intermediate growers don't recognize how they can monitor their medium ph (runoff and good soil probe). Even if it appears their "I always water using 6.4" works, they might find that 6.0 or 6.6 at times could be better, correcting small drifts that aren't enough to result in a deficiency. It's only when someone gets a deficiency (a bad bag of medium? addition of an organic additive like kelp?) that they delve into the next dimension: medium ph.

I don't think my huge swings are ideal. But, it demonstrates how our plants tolerate swings. It's probably even beneficial to walk the medium's ph up and down through a 0.5 to 1.0 range, making different nutrients available (nutrient availability charts shows how nutrient availability isn't completely overlapping).

If you grew in hydro, you'd monitor you're medium's ph because the medium and nutrients you pour in are one and the same. I think as soil/soilless growers, we lose track of how our nutrients and medium aren't until we run into a deficiency, someone tells us to test runoff ph, and then we're exposed to the new dimension of ph'ing our nutrients to achieve a medium ph.

[1] Warning to newbies: Most references to lime on 420 sites are dolomitic/calcitic, sometimes called Agricultural lime. Hydrated lime isn't desirable and has limited usefulness.

I just go with 5.8 in coco they seem to be happy

5.8 in my DWC makes me all warm and fuzzy. (the DWC has a chiller so it is no longer warm or fuzzy)

I would like to point out that beneficial fungus and bacteria are capable of fixing NUTRIENTS at powers of hydrogen other than the ones your plant uses

Sunshinemix4 . Soilless
6.0-6.2.. 5.9 when going into new pots

No such thing... Ive found it works to your advantage to have the PH move around a bit. in the 5.9 to 5.1 range in hydroponic application, without looking at the "charts" for nutrient availability, N for example seems to absorb better when PH is lower than 5.5 is what I've observed.

Additionally I like to reduce N when blooming, so I let the PH rise, again.. I've observed that blooming seems more aggressive at higher PH.

6.5pH or higher advance #4 mix. Nutes are nectar for the gods. I usually have to add about 4 tablespoons of pH up per 5 gallons to get were i need it.. one of the best grows ive ever seen the guy kept it 7 the whole time.