Latest / Hydroponics Daily / Potassium in hydroponics
Transcript
- 0:00Welcome back to Hydroponics Daily. Today's subject is potassium and the chemical
- 0:05symbol for potassium is K, confusingly, and it's K because of the German word
- 0:11for potassium begins with a K.
- 0:13It's important for enzyme activity and enzymes are important to all life on earth.
- 0:18It's important for cell turga, so keeping cells inflated with liquid inside,
- 0:24pushing against the cell wall, making sure the plants don't wilt and then
- 0:28also stomata control control controlling whether
- 0:31the stomata the pores in the leaves are open or closed that's
- 0:34very important and potassium has
- 0:37a crucial role in signaling for that that process
- 0:40deficiencies of
- 0:43potassium are rare probably one of the rarest
- 0:46in hydroponics and it's rare because
- 0:49all feeds contain ample amounts of potassium and
- 0:53really you'll you'll far more
- 0:56commonly see symptoms of of of toxicity from
- 0:59too much potassium than you will from from too little and that's
- 1:02because all the additives that when you're trying
- 1:05to get nitrogen and other compounds potassium in they're often.
- 1:07Linked to potassium you want to avoid sodium
- 1:10so people put potassium salts in there and and
- 1:14so you've any base feed has got plenty of potassium
- 1:17then people go on with pk products and that adds more potassium
- 1:21i've never been a big fan of pk boosts and
- 1:23things like that i'd rather go on with an iron fertilizer in
- 1:27flowering add some real weight to my product rather
- 1:30than a potassium based product and and
- 1:33so really you're very rarely going to see it the only time you're
- 1:36going to see it is when you're watering without feeding into
- 1:39an inert media so say you you've vastly
- 1:42underestimated how much fertilizer you're going to need and then
- 1:45you only apply it once or or once a week
- 1:48or once a fortnight and you're going on with water and all that
- 1:51potassium is being washed out and you've got lots of runoff then
- 1:54you might see symptoms of potassium deficiency but if
- 1:57you're seeing that you'll be seeing symptoms of nitrogen deficiency first the
- 2:00classic exam symptom is yellowing at the leaf tip and at the margin the edge
- 2:06it's called the margin so potassium deficiency very rare there's loads of potassium
- 2:10in in gold leaf or in the uk liquid gold and and i wouldn't really worry about
- 2:16it it wouldn't keep me up at night. Got an interesting story.
- 2:20When I was doing my undergraduate degree in plant science, there was a fellow
- 2:24student who wasn't that clever, and he got confused between potassium and phosphorus
- 2:29because he just saw, oh, I'm doing my dissertation on,
- 2:32on potassium deficiency and he just went
- 2:35to the cupboard and got all the chemicals with p
- 2:38in them thinking that that was potassium i mean how he
- 2:41got through a level even gcse you know high school
- 2:44chemistry i'll never know but yeah he he
- 2:47ended up doing his his dissertation his thesis on on phosphorus in the end because
- 2:52that's what he'd been doing he got mixed up between the two don't get mixed
- 2:55up between the two remember potassium is with a k and it's important for keeping
- 3:00your plants turgid and full of vigor and keeping those stomata open when you
- 3:05want them open and closed when you want them closed.
- 3:07Okay, any questions about potassium in the link below?
- 3:11And what else we say about potassium? Yeah, that's probably about it really. Okay.