Latest / Hydroponics Daily / What to look for on the hydro shop shelf & surprising microgreens findings

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What to look for on the hydro shop shelf & surprising microgreens findings · Hydroponics Daily

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  Hello there and welcome back to
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  Hydroponics Daily, your go-to podcast for everything soilless cultivation.
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  I'm your host, Dr. Russell Sharp, and on yesterday's podcast we talked about
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  preservation of fertilizers and biostimulants and inputs, and I thought I'd
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  just give a brief appendix to that,
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  addendum, whatever you want to say, and just talk about some of the microgreens
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  experiments we've been doing and some of the interesting results from that.
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  So one of the things that people often mistake for bad preservation is you go
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  into a grow store and you see all the bottles sucking in and you think oh it's
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  been badly preserved and that's not.
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  Necessarily bad preservation that's normally an organic product
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  it's got some sort of organic product in there and it's pulled the
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  the air in as it's been consumed very common
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  on a lot of sort of biostimulant products
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  really common in organic fertilizers there
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  is a way around it but i'm not gonna know when your
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  competitors making a mistake don't interrupt them sort
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  of thing you so you'll see a lot of organic
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  fertilizers they look like they've been sucking a lemon their
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  cheeks are sucked in it just looks it looks unprofessional
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  and it warps the
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  bottles makes them unsightly and you
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  can't read the labels properly from especially if they're behind a counter so
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  nothing wrong with the product inside them actually so that's fine what is bad
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  preservation if it's bloated if the bottom is bulging out and the bottle can't
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  sit well on the on the shelf that's when you know that the product's degraded
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  over time so watch out for that.
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  And also the final one is if it's got floaty bits in it.
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  I used to make seaweed extracts for Plant Magic when they were not bought by
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  Nutri-Culture and they were not with Global Air Supplies way back when they
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  were in their own company.
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  I used to sell them seaweed extracts and we preserved it with food grade preservatives as we do.
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  But the problem is that when you dilute that product, the preservatives no longer
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  work because they're on the edge of their effectiveness so that when you dilute
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  them, they don't have any long-term preservation effects.
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  They were diluting the seaweed extract and and
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  it was you when you found a bottle of their foliar spray
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  on the on the shelf it had all floaty bits in it because the
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  microbes were free to live on the seaweed extract again so always look out for
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  floaty bits you'll see that in a few hydroponic products hopefully not in the
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  the evolution product i've not seen it on the shelf for a long time i would
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  imagine they've sorted that problem now so that's not a problem that's a uk based.
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  Product if you're interested i don't think they sell it in america anyway but
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  keep an eye out there's lots of products on sale in america that are badly preserved
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  or anywhere else in the world
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  okay so that was the addition to the
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  preservation episode from yesterday and then
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  just talk about what i found with my microgreens experiments we've
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  been doing here so i spent about a thousand pounds on a
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  microgreen setup here in the lab and the
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  first experiment was a rather worrying result i
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  found that when growing pea shoots adding fertilizer
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  has no effect on how good the crop
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  is doesn't increase the yield and it didn't eat
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  increase the quality and if anything it was a bit more tangier and people didn't
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  like that some people did some people didn't and so that was a bit disappointing
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  i was like oh my god i spent all this on optimizing the fertilizer regime for
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  microgreens and it turns out that they have no effect and that was without grow
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  media as well So if you're growing pea shoots, two takeaways there is don't need a fertiliser.
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  You're growing pea shoots, microgreens.
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  The second one is you don't need to add growing media, cocoa or peat or anything,
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  soil, anything, compost mix.
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  It's just a source of contamination you'll get perfectly well just
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  growing them on moist paper towel and water
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  so pea shoots away you go cheap as chips and
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  you can just use the the the
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  peas that you'd buy in a health food shop so the the
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  dried peas so of of the seven plants i tried growing them from the just store-bought
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  seeds then from a health store i think five out of six worked really well the
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  only one that didn't was quinoa so and peas worked really well as did.
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  Spelt grass or wheat grass and there
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  thankfully we are seeing a really big result
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  of adding fertilizer so i'm just looking at my shelves
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  now and i can see the the shelf
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  that had just water in the wheat grass is looking yeah pretty
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  poor 0.5 mil per liter it's looking
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  good and then one mil per litre is looking really good so what
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  i'm going to do is i'm going to push it even more so the next trial always
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  do dose response trials to see see where
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  the top of the curve is where does it plateau out and it
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  could be it platters out at one milliliter of
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  gold leaf or liquid gold as it's called in the uk per litre
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  or it might plateau out at four who knows so let's
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  see see how far we push it again eventually we'll get to the point where growth
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  is reduced or it just becomes economic un-economical to apply that much fertilizer
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  probably where growth is reduced i would imagine and then the other trial i've
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  been doing is spring onions still trying to grow flipping spring onions.
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  Hydroponically and they are doing my knotting as
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  we say here in the uk they are just weak and
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  i've tried growing them in the dark to begin with growing in
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  the light i've tried growing them in various growing medias i'm just
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  a terrible spring onion grower what other trials have
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  we got growing going on at the moment i've got
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  a trial again i'm going to do another trial on peas just to
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  see if soaking them in fertilizer solution during
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  the first eight hours when you soak the solution has an effect rather
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  than putting them in the fertilizer once they've
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  been soaked for a week whether it's that initial soaking helps
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  and then what are the trials we've got
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  one got one more trial and that's looking at
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  pre-treating wheat seeds with
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  our slugger product which is a liquid ferric phosphate
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  product and completely unrelated to hydroponics but
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  the hydroponic the the micro green setup allows
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  us to run that quick trial to see if we can coat our seeds in ferric phosphate
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  before we put them out in the field and if we can then potentially we've got
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  a really good way of preventing slugs from eating them so watch this space of
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  no relevance whatsoever to hydroponic growers because unless you're growing in a,
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  outdoors in the UK, slugs and snails are probably not going to be a big issue for you.
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  Anyway, that's been Hydroponics Daily today. Not one big interesting topic,
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  but lots of little tidbits. I hope you enjoyed it.
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  If you did enjoy it, found any value, and you've not left an Apple podcast review
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  yet, please do so, because it helps me out tremendously.
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  Okay, we got to number 12 in the charts. Something crazy.
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  We were so close to breaking the top 10, and then we faded away a bit
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  now so come on one if you can if you get into the top 10 i'll i'll i'll put
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  another reward in for your podcasts i'll i'll have a really juicy podcast episode
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  for you all right that's enough waffle until tomorrow thank you very much for listening goodbye.