Hey Sun, i got a couple questions about this,
? First off why is it bad to water everyday, I grow in 3 gallon smartpots, and my girls drink 2-3L of water everyday or every other day, I have fans on the floor keeping a soft aircurrent around the roots and through the smartpots,
A. HEY MIKE ,
This is all pretty much environmental tuning . If u got to water daily Then u got to ,, But the bigger problem is ,, Your environment , watering everyday is just a band -aid to the fix. When rooms are warm, windy , and dry , we'll see fast evaporation rates , Your plants are not drinking that much water ,, it is the room evaporating it . This is what we don't want .Then we'll see every problem in the book ,, Sweating ,, leaf fungus,
potassium leaching , mold ,, i could go on ,,
Another problem is you could be washing out the immobile elements, due to so much watering . Also you are condensing the nutrient solution . If i put so many ppm in a gallon of water , and the water gets taken away after the mixing , well the ppm rise . This can cause all kinds of problems, One will be PH drift.
Point is we have to find the balance between evaporation and plant usage . IT takes some time of the medium being wet with a certain weight pressure to make nutrients react and become available and to be PUSHED threw the root zone,, Containers and roots have a correlation , It's not really Root bound as much as it is pressure . Osmotic pressure come by 2 forms ,
one will be the difference between the amount of ppm on one side of the roots or the other .. and The other pressure is the container weight , When u add water to the container , it gets heavier . This Force is a type of osmotic pressure also . This type is also needed to push nutrients threw . so we need this over a period of time to make all things work together. Again we have to make sure our room is not evaporating our water .
Also Why do you not want to feed nutes into a dry medium. Organics and benefical bacteria especially rely on the wet to dry dry to wet transition, and I feel grow better when you let the roots/soil/medium dry out until their is Little moisture left in the pot. Thanks Looking forward to your response!:volcano:
Dry this is a huge ? what is dry ? dry to me is when the plants have lost tugor which is when the leaves drop down . containers like that Should be wet . before watering and prolly flushed ! the reason is if we let the containers get dry. we WILL build salts . Take a spoon full of nutrients and let it air dry . You will get crystals forming . these are salts . IF we put more nutrients on dry mediums, The salt builds up faster . It now has something attached into the medium to build off of.
ON a very fast track to salt build up .. Also when the container dried out , we do not know which of the elements in the nutrient solution was used up by the plant IF any were , due to the short period ( wetness)
and loss of reaction time . SO having said that .
Say we were in flower . I watered plants in flower ( dry container) I added 1000 ppm bloom food ,, watered with that ,, Ok Now being the container dried up and the nutrients are now no good ,, they are now salt ,, But it was able to uptake SAY 400 ppm outa of the bloom food .
Outa the 400 ppm it took in ,, lets say it was P and K , and lets say it didn;t take up N . now we add that 1000ppm we talk about above ,, AND NOW WE JUST MADE VEG FOOD FOR A PLANT IN FLOWER ,, because the ration of N is now higher than the ratio of P-k , thus giveing us a veg type of food in flower causing the plant to weird out!
The correct mediums do not really need to be dried out.
They will have the ability to provide plenty of oxygen to the roots , What happens to mediums that have problem for being wet ,1 it is not the correct medium , 2.Is the breakdown or nitrification or organic matter , Getting the ph off balance. or the base off balance .
to correct this we have to add lime to our mediums,
ONE other problem from constant watering is washing out lime,, and other immobile elements .
DRY ,, WET .
I use PEAT MOSS (Pro Mix ) You will not over water.
dry is when i can no long keep the medium together when i try to squeeze it into a ball . will not compact ,, falls apart ,
I WOULD NOT USE TRUE SOIL INDOORS FOR ANY KINE WEEDS .
i hope this helps ,, if ya need any more explaining im more than happy to help! the more we understand the better we get!