Nutrient Refresh Frequency?
10:46 pm in Nutrients, Nutrition by Mortimer Pickle
Hello fellow window farmers!!
I’ve just set up the window farm, and have started snap peas from seeds. (The kids and I have successfully grown snap peas for years in our outdoor garden, so I know they’re a winner!)
The seeds sprouted quite nicely, even just placing them directly among the clay balls. Now that they’ve sprouted, I’ve added liquid nutrients to the water, based on the recommended dosage. My question is – the dosages are based on *weekly* amounts, but the plants don’t consume anywhere near the 2L of water Ina a week. So, is the recommended approach to:
. Completely replace the full reservoir of water weekly, and replenish with a full dose of nutrients?
. Top off the water with (say) 20% of the nutrients weekly, with a full replacement every other week?
. Some other approach?
I’m new to this, so guidance is appreciated. Is bi-weekly reservoir cleaning and replenishment recommended?
Many thanks
mp
I also have been struggling with trying to understand how much nutrition should be put into topped off water. For some reason, I took the instructions to mean that any extra water I add into the reservoir should be at 20% nutrition strength — therefore I calculated that as my reservoir had 9ml of nutrients originally, every time I topped off (about 2 cups) I should be including 0.5ml of nutrients (2 cups should be at 2.25, which would get divided by 5 to get the 20% strength result).
I have no idea if this is correct or not. Haven’t done math in a while!
Any suggestions would be great.
Thanks,
Carlo
Thanks for the comment. I am planning on cleaning out the reservoir every 2 weeks, and replenishing with fresh water and the full nutrients. So the only time in question is those alternate weeks (or mid-week top-off. I may just use plain water — especially if the top-off amount is small (one or two cups) compared to the full 2L reservoir.
My lettuce plants matured in 4 weeks and i did a full reservoir clean out every 2 weeks. For top offs I would use full strength nutrient until my gallon of nutrient was empty then I did 2 to 3 top offs with just water. It was not very scientific but lettuce plants seem to be pretty tolerant. Other plants are likely to be less so. It is not very straightforward to know how to top off the reservoir as even PH and solids measurements do not tell you which of the nutrients the plants have consumed. The longer you wait between full cleanouts, the further you will stray from ideal.
Thanks Tony. I plan on a similar approach, with a full reservoir cleanout every 2 weeks.
I’ll just have to see how the peas (and the one edamame) do with top-offs. Depending on top-off-frequency I’ll either do plain water or diluted nutrients.
what is a full resevoir cleanout? does that mean starting with a fresh clean water only in the basin?