Your plants are what they eat

By Scott Misener

There are three basic stages of growth - rooting, vegetative, and fruiting/flowering. When rooting cuttings or germinating seeds, very little nutrient is needed. In fact, too much nutrient will actually hinder the rooting process. Those first roots that pop are lined with delicate root hairs that you can't even see with the naked eye. An overabundance of nutrient will burn all those little hairs right off your plant and you will find yourself back at square one. A very light solution of seaweed and filtered water is all you need to provide your plants with enough nutrients to develop a root system to sustain the seedling's growth. Only when those little plants begin to take off and grow is it time to move the little plant to a soil container or hydro system.

If you are using new soil it is unnecessary to fertilize for the first couple weeks. Most potting soils on the market today are fortified with nitrogen and phosphorus in the form of earthworm castings and bone meal. Watering with plain water will wake up these nutrients, making them available to the plant. Over the course of a few weeks, nutrients will be washed or leached from the soil through the process of watering. That's when most people fertilize.

Now let's be realistic. Plants have been around a lot longer than us humans have, and they did just fine without regular applications of fertilizer solutions. Plants want to grow. Plants want to live and they will fight for it. What happens is that humans think they have all the answers, as usual. We pour all the latest concoctions dreamed up by a chemist in a lab into the tender environment that the root system calls home. The contemporary indoor gardener tends to make things more complicated than it needs to be. Be careful. This industry is gimmicky. There is another way of thinking. I have talked with a lot of people who just laugh at all the nutrient varieties offered today. They all claim to have had the best results when they used new soil and watered with plain water! No nutrients!

That argument works for soil, but not for hydroponics. Plants need more than just water in hydro systems because mediums used in hydro systems offer no form of nutrient. You have to provide everything they need. A successful feeding schedule begins with some basic understanding of nutrients.

There are many nutrient programs on the market today that range from simple one-part solutions to more complex programs that require ten or more components! A common thread to all these nutrient programs is that they are formulated as complete lines. You're setting yourself up for failure if you mix and match components from one company to another. For example, a popular nutrient on the market is Botanicare. Botanicare is essentially a four part nutrient program that consists of a grow or veg formula, a micronutrient, a bloom or fruiting formula, and a catalyst. When you use the grow and micro from Botanticare but choose to use the bloom formula from another company, let's just say Earth Juice's bloom, you run the risk of either doubling up on certain nutrients or missing out on crucial components altogether. In short, you will experience nutrient lockout and deficiencies, and a deficiency will just slow you down and stress your plants.

It may appear that nutrient manufactures are dividing the components on their nutrient lines to make the gardener spend more money, and that is probably true in some cases, but there is a legitimate reason for doing so. Almost everything you feed your plants are metals. If you throw all the metals together in a concentrated form in one bottle, they will grab onto each other. Those molecules will form a particle too large for your plants to uptake through the small openings in the root systems rendering the nutrient solution useless. In hydro this can be fatal for your plants.

Now say after me, it is better to starve your plants than to overfeed. Ponder this statement and come back next week. We have a lot more to cover on this subject.

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