WEBINAR.
Advances in cannabis cultivation techniques: The power of mineral nutrition, lighting & plant structure
by Nirit Bernstein
Excerpts below:
So our experiments were divided for the vegetative growth separately from the reproductive growth
Nitrogen
"... range of nitrogen concentration from 30 ppm all the way up to 320 ppm milligram
per liter
look at it so what we recommend at least from those experiments but what we came out is for the vegetative stage 160 ppm
for the cultivation for the flowering stage
if we look under 30 ppms the plants were reduced in weight there was chlorosis which demonstrates nitrogen deficiency.
About 160 the plant looks great
however you know that when we actually checked secondary metabolic production the plants that gave us the highest concentration of most cannabinoids and most
terpenes were those suffering hungry nitrogen hybrid plants that received 30 ppm nitrogen"
Potassium
"... We checked five different treatments of potassium 15 ppm all the way up to 240 ppm
vegetative growth set during veg that 15 is on the low side 60 is kind of
borderline and from 100 to 175 gave us the best biomass production and physiological function
what happened again to cannabinoids similar to what happened in nitrogen that under the deficiency contribution of 15 ppm or even 60 ppm where the plants were smaller and suffering from deficiency we actually receive the highest concentration of cannabinoids.
So for example if we look at this, THCA was reduced greatly was much higher under deficiency condition than under higher concentration
there's
no reason to go above 100 ppm [of potassium] especially that we are risking reducing cannabinoids and
terpenes"
Phosphorus
"... We checked five concentration of phosphorus in this case cannabis is indeed unique in a way
we really saw a very wide optimum range for potassium nutrition in cannabis. We definitely did not see any toxicity but also we did not see any benefit to going above about 30 ppm.
from 5 to 90 ppm phosphorus
again what we've seen is very similar to what we've seen for a nitrogen and potassium. That actually highest concentration of secondary metabolite was on these plants that suffered from phosphorus deficiency.
So yield the weight the biomass of the flowers were
not affected in concentration above 30 ppm or maybe a little bit more maybe 60ppm
So if we go from 5 to 90 we can see considerable reduction in cannabinoid concentration and this is the same for THC concentration
it really depends on the growers preference if we are going for larger biomass then probably we're going for a middle range kind of concentration
30 ppm or maybe slightly above it up to 60 ppm"
"We are developing breakthrough technologies in order to
fool the plants to think that they are under deficiency or under some kind of deficiency nutrient stress condition without actually compromising plant development"
