So we’ve been keeping you up to speed with how awesome the NFT is doing on the back porch, now time to give you a little behind the scenes. We couldn’t be happier with our first run and growing on a large scale and we were doing it the easiest way we could think of.

Typically with a hydro system, you want to change your reservoir every week. It is recommended to you RO water (reverse osmosis) which should have a ppm (parts per million) of 0. Tap water generally has a ppm of about 200. When you use tap water with a ppm greater than 0, what this means is there are particles in your water that might not necessarily be beneficial to the plants, or even worse, could be harmful.

How did we do it to start? We took the garden hose, running city water and stuck it in the system. After we filled it up, we through some nutrients in and made sure that our ppm’s were around 800 (accounting for the city water). We let it rock out, and just monitored the ph every day. The ph climbed every 24 hours, so every morning we had to dump in some ph down to keep it at the level that we wanted. When the water level got low, we put the hose in then adjusted our ppm’s. That’s all we did, and you’ve seen the growth we got.

6 weeks in to our growth, and we decided to actually change the reservoir over to RO water. We did 35 gallons of RO water and then 25 gallons of rainwater (which usually has a ppm right around 0; if it doesn’t register that’s good). Then, we added our nutrients. We’ve been using the Dutch Master A and B for this first run, with a little bit of Liquid Karma and some Hygrozyme. Once we had our water at 60 gallons, we added 500mL of the A and 500mL of B. (After you add a nutrient, it is important to check your ppm. Let the system run. Since this one is a large system we give it a few minutes, but smaller systems should register faster.) We then added 300mL of the Liquid Karma and 300mL of Hygrozyme. After checking our ppm we were sitting at about 600 which is between quarter and half strength.

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