Hyproponics As you become more advanced in working larger hydroponic units, you may like to do a little testing. Strictly speaking, these procedures are really designed for commercial operators engaged in large-scale production. However, you can quite easily check on the quality of your nutrient solution as it is absorbed by the hydroponic plants. Hydroponics experts regard the balance of the liquid plant food or its pH—that is the alkalinity or acidity of the solution—as a main factor in ensuring that flowers and vegetables grow well. To test the pH, you will require what is called an indicator. This can be bought or ordered from a good chemist. Ask for a Universal indicator. Having obtained a small bottle of indicator, you should proceed as follows.

About a quarter of an hour after irrigating or applying the nutrient solution to the growing medium in a hydroponic container, make a hole some four or five inches deep in the aggregate, near a plant. You should find some moisture at the bottom of this hole. Using a medicine dropper suck up a little of the liquid and put it on a clean white saucer. Before doing this, take care to wash the dropper in clean distilled water thoroughly and also put on clean well-washed rubber gloves. Now with another dropper, also washed in distilled water, take a tiny portion of the Universal indicator from its bottle and squeeze it into the solution you have taken from the growing medium. Watch the colour change carefully. If the result is a red or orange liquid in the saucer, the solution is too acid. A green or greenish-blue colour means that it is too alkaline. The right colour is yellow to ycllow-grccn. That will give you a pH reaction of about neutral or in technical terms 60 to 6-5. Actually anything from about 5-0 to 7-0 is tolerable, but the most satisfactory reaction is in the region of 6-o.




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December 4, 2008