Im planning on starting my first ever micro grow and was I have just everything thought out except how to do the ph. Im going to use black gold organic potting soil. Is it ok if i just water with tap water or bottled water? Or should I buy like a water testing kit Help? If i should get a kit reccomendations? Dont really know alot about ph in general. Thanks
your using organic soil, are you using organic nutes? if so. your ph will auto balance using dechlorinated tap water. The soil should already have some kind of lime ph that will auto adjust ph. This is why I love organics, easy. If your using organic soil with chemical nutrients, your going to want to buy a ph meter and test the water you pour in, and the run off water. Add the two and divde by 2 to get an average and make sure that PH average is within the soil range. So say the water you have in your gallon jug with nutes is 7.0 and your water run off is 6.0 then your soil level should be ~ 6.5 ph is everything, it decides if the plant takes up nutrients or not.
Well doesnt the soil already have the nutrients i would i.need? The black gold organic soil has the worm castings and stuff which are where my nutrients are? And if so i would be safe to use tap.water tht has sat over night? Sent from my LG-MS770 using Grasscity Forum mobile app
Auto-balancing soil? No matter the pH of the water going in? That's pretty amazing, if only it were true. It's not that simple, and that's not how you measure it. You want your runoff to measure 6.5-6.8, not a lower number that you then are calculating/guessing to be "really" something else. How your water pH and soil pH interact is not accurately calculated by taking the mathematical average of two numbers, each component can have a different "weight" on the final results. You have to measure your runoff and then trial-and-error determine the needed pH of the input water to get the desired runoff pH. More specifically, the pH will determine which nutrients the plant can uptake and which might be locked out.
Taking the average was how I was taught on the forum, maybe I was taught wrong. (this was with chemical nutes) "Auto-balancing", with a healty organic soil food web and liming agents, you dont need to worry about any type of ph range tap water or rain water would consist of, as long as decholrinized. and thats what i meant by loss of uptake of nutrients. but thanks for going more in depth.
The pH number will be somewhere between your water and your actual soil measurements, but not necessarily the mathematical average of the two numbers. I've seen situations where the water pH is adjusted more and more and more, only to see the runoff stay exactly the same or barely budge. And I would still say that if your tap water's pH is 9.0 and mine is 4.5 that even if we were using identical organic soil that we each would need to pH buffer our water, and very differently at that.