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The Essential Plant Nutrients · Hydroponics Daily

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Welcome back to the Hydroponics Daily. Today is a subject that's close to my
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heart. It is the essential plant nutrients.
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And so every fertilizer regime, every fertilizer range will have these nutrients
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in them because without them, plants will not grow.
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And the important point to consider here is every single one is essential.
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In the absence of any of these, plants
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will not grow at all so they're all equally important however some
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are required in higher amounts than
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others and those are the six macronutrients
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macro meaning big and so the main
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one is nitrogen phosphorus then and
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potassium they're the primary macronutrients and they
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are needed in the highest amounts by far and they're
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called primary because of that primary macronutrients and
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they are any fertilizer can tell
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you the npk value because that
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that's why they're so important and then in agriculture if you're
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in a far if you're farming in a field you might just apply
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npk or you might even just apply np or nnk you can get away with farming and
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just apply nitrogen it's that crazy because the soil provides the other nutrients
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however in hydroponics there you're not growing in soil you're growing in inert
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media and you have to add all 12 and they have to all be available.
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You have the secondary nutrients, they are calcium, sulfur and magnesium.
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They are needed in high amounts. What else can we say about them?
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These are the ones that are normally missing from a base feed.
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So if you go to a garden centre, not a grow shop, buy a standard fertiliser
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and try and grow hydroponically, you're in for a world of pain because if you're
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buying a liquid, it won't contain calcium.
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And if you're buying a powder, it won't contain sulphur. And many hydroponic
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fertilisers, the granular ones, what they call salt fertilisers,
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they don't contain sulphur.
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Godleaf is unique in the fact that it contains every single one of these essential
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nutrients in a soluble form and in the ratios required by the plants and they're
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all available and they're all soluble.
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So that makes it groundbreaking, amazing and unique because it contains calcium,
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which normally interacts with phosphorus.
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If you try to mix up all the nutrients in a big vat and copy this product,
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then you'd get calcium interacting with phosphorus and
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calcium interacting with sulfur and you'd get gypsum that would
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fall to the bottom and calcium phosphate you know
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the stuff that's in your bones just fall to the bottom and wouldn't be available
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it would block your filters and your plants wouldn't grow
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properly in addition to that you've got the the
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iron that's what makes gold leaf gold and that's
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needed in high amounts we sell a lot of iron into spores turf and
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things like that to it's required for for chlorophyll
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production zinc boron copper molybdenum manganese
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we're going to go into a load of detail on these nutrients
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we're going to do a daily hydroponics daily on each
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every single one of those nutrients what to look for for deficiencies
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how to apply them what they what they're needed
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for they're all required for another essential component but
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these are the 12 essential nutrients now some of
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you will be wait i've heard there are other essential nutrients
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and there are there are things like chlorine sodium cobalt which are needed
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in absolutely minuscule amounts in so much so that there is already enough in
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the inert grow media and the water and just contamination.
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To supply them you're never ever going to get a situation of having a chlorine
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deficient plant in hydroponics and you're never going to have or cobalt deficient
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so i don't consider them to be,
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unless i'm writing a scientific paper i just don't include them
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in essential nutrients because they don't help the system they
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don't they just add confusion and there
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are other nutrients that are not essential but help
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plants grow and they improve the
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growth of plants but they're not essential for the growth of plants the obvious
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example is silicon and so that
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makes cell walls rigid a third of
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all the dry matter of bamboo is silicon and yet it's not essential so you can
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grow a bamboo plant without silicon so we'll talk about silicon later it's um
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you can add silicon additives to the feeds and gold leaf and liquid gold is
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a great product to add them to because you don't need to worry about the pH.
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What are the elements? There are things like vanadium. There are a lot of elements
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that are needed for beneficial microbes.
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So if you're growing a legume, there are beneficial microbes that are needed
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for the growth of the microbe, not essentially the plant.
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But if we're keeping it simple, these are the 12 you need. And these are the
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12 to focus on if you're a hydroponic grower, unless you're growing something really crazy.
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And then there are other nutrients that substitute for these if these are not
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available. and there are other elements that are poisonous like aluminium is
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highly toxic to plants or arsenic which is toxic to plants and humans and you want to avoid them.
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There are some fertilisers out there that have been analysed by reputable labs
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that have contained all sorts of crazy stuff like uranium and things like that.
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So you want to get your fertilisers from a trusted source and make sure they
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contain these nutrients and these nutrients alone. Okay, thank you very much.