Five tips to successfully manage your nutrient solution in a recirculating hydroponic setup
Although a significant portion of hydroponic growers use run-to-waste setups – where the nutrient solution is ran through plants and then lost – the industry is now moving towards the…
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About the default fertilizer database in HydroBuddy
Hydrobuddy is an open source calculator that seeks to help growers create their own hydroponic nutrient solutions. In order to do this, the program includes a database with a list…
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A new conductivity model in HydroBuddy
On my previous post you can read about how I ran experiments to develop a conductivity model using empirical data in order to improve our ability to predict EC values…
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Building a model to predict EC in hydroponic nutrient solutions
Electrical conductivity (EC) is one of the most useful parameters in the practical preparation of hydroponic nutrient solutions. This is because knowing the expected conductivity of a nutrient solution can…
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Keeping plants short: Using day/night temperature differences (DIF)
In this article series about “keeping plants short”, we have explored the reasons why short plants are desirable and how this can be achieved using gibberellin inhibitors. However this is…
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Monitoring the quality of fertilizer stock solutions
Hydroponic concentrated nutrient fertilizer manufacturers are not held to any routine quality standards by regulatory authorities in most countries. Although fertilizers need to be properly registered and their intended minimum…
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Why red and blue LED grow lights never took off
Anyone who has been growing plants for a while has probably seen a chart showing the absorption profile of chlorophylls A and B, as shown in the image below. From…
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In-depth books to learn about hydroponics at an advanced level
Growing plants without soil requires a lot of knowledge. As a hydroponic grower, it is now your duty to provide the plant with the needed chemical and environmental conditions that…
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Six things you need to know before using plant hormones
Plant hormones are small molecules with no nutritional value that are used as chemical signaler within plants. A hormone will trigger a chemical signaling cascade that will cause the plant…
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Keeping plants short: Synthetic gibberellin inhibitors
Plants grow both vertically and horizontally. A plant will develop branches along its stem – expanding horizontally – and the stem will grow towards the sun, making the plant taller.…
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