pH is something that is crucial to your autoflowers and its importance cannot be overstated. pH is an abbreviation for potential of hydrogen. It is important when growing autoflowers because it is how your plant uptakes nutrients. In this post, we will go over what you need to do to understand pH a little more and how to apply your newly gained knowledge to grow your autoflowers and photoperiods alike!
Defining pH
Without getting too boring or “sciency,” let’s take a little crash course on pH. pH is the scale that determines how basic or acidic something is. This is key to growing autoflowering cannabis because if a soil is too basic or too acidic, it will not uptake nutrients properly from the soil or hydro medium you grow in.
******THIS ARTICLE IS FOR SOIL, NOT COCO OR HYDRO!******
Adjusting your pH is something that you need to stay on top of and maintain. It is not a hard thing to do – and I cannot stress this enough – it’s very important. This is especially true if you are working with “bottled” or “salt based” nutrients. For soil mediums, you want to maintain a pH between 6.5 and 6.8. That is the ideal range of which most micro and macro nutrients are absorbed into a soil medium.
Here is a chart that shows which different nutrients are absorbed at different pH levels.
Maintaining Proper pH
The following are the proper steps to take to ensure that your root zone maintains a proper pH. If you are using “bottled” or “salt based” nutrients that you will be adding on a regular basis, these steps need to be taken EVERY SINGLE TIME. There are no exceptions to this process.
1. Get a pH meter – or at a bare minimum, litmus test strips. The latter will get you within a range, a meter will get a more specific and accurate reading.
2. Test the pH of the water BEFORE watering your autoflowers. This will let you know what your water is all the time. We like to call it a baseline. If your water is way outside the range of acceptable nutrient uptake (like above 8 or below 6), you will need to test the pH of your water every time you water your plants.
3. When you add nutrients, microbes, recharge, etc. to your water, add them to your water first, THEN check the pH. This will let you know if you need to adjust your pH up or down to achieve the range from the chart above.
4. Get something to adjust the pH level of your water. There are plenty of cheap solutions on the internet when you do a quick google search. There are also many organic “around the house” type of options. For the sake of this article we will assume you have one of those methods available to you. If you have a reading of 4.8 you will need to add a small amount of pH UP, then recheck the pH, based on this reading you will again go up or down. Keep in mind that less is more with pH adjusting solutions. Adding small amounts and rechecking is the best way to avoid adding excess to your water.
5. Once you have gotten your solution of water and you added nutrients etc. to within the range of 6.5 – 6.8 let it stand for 12 hours, then recheck the mix. If the solution has drifted to outside the acceptable range repeat step 4 from above.
In Conclusion
This is a way to give your plants the best ability to get those nutrients we spend so much money on! Multiverse Beans is your one stop shop for the best beans in the galaxy! Stay tuned for our next educational article. We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback! Follow us on Facebook and let us know some article topics you would like to see us write about.