There are dozens of nutrient brands on the market and hundreds of different products that all are created to grow amazing hydroponic crops. For consumers, choosing a nutrient line can be puzzling!
Compared to lights, irrigation, and other components of a grow – nutrients are one of the least costly investments overall, and yet they can end up being the most costly if growers make the wrong choice.
We believe that the best way to simple, easy success for a hydroponic cannabis grower is to make sure that the base nutrients and supplements are working in harmony.
For that to happen, they have to be formulated as a complete feeding program. Growers can try to do this themselves, from scratch, through trial and error. But they would have to figure out where to source the best ingredients—and how much to source—then mix the optimal concentrations and ratios for every week of their grow. A horticultural degree would also help do all this hard work…
But we’ve already done the work. Emerald Harvest has designed its entire product line to work together like a perfect puzzle to provide your plants with the optimal concentrations and ratios of the finest‐quality ingredients available.
Watch this brief overview video about our nutrient product line.
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2.
THE IMPORTANCE OF NUTRIENTS
A persistent problem among the poor in London in the late 19th century was goiter and a closely related condition called cretinism. Cretinism involved intellectual challenges in addition to the thyroid swelling of goiter.
For decades, nobody could explain why this was happening. Finally, scientists discovered that an infinitesimal amount of a single element essential to human life was missing from poor city dwellers’ diets. Iodine. All they needed was iodine.
When London and other cities started adding small amounts of iodine to their water supplies, the goiter and cretinism epidemics vanished. A few micrograms of iodine – about the size of salt grain—was enough to prevent goiter and cretinism.
The same holds true for many other nutrients – an at certain times of a human’s life certain nutrients must be increased or decreased, added or removed, to ensure optimal health.
3.
LAW OF THE MINIMUM
Like humans, plants cannot survive or thrive without at least the minimum amount of every essential element. Scientists often call the essential elements “essential plant nutrients” or simply “essential nutrients”.
Liebig’s law explains that if any essential nutrient doesn’t meet the minimum, the plant suffers. It doesn’t matter if a plant gets more than enough of all of them but one; if even one essential nutrient falls beneath its minimum, the plant will suffer a deficiency, with yield and crop quality leaking away.
This illustration of a barrel shows that if one of the staves is shorter than required, the barrel simply will not fill beyond it. Our insistence on dialing in the right concentrations and precise ratios of these nutrients is what enables us to guarantee simple, easy success.
The Emerald Harvest nutrient line is a complete feeding program that’s been purity and quality tested in the lab—with proven results in the field, grow after grow after grow. That’s why we’re confident in our 100% satisfaction guarantee.
4.
MULDER’S CHART
One piece of the puzzle that we pay meticulous attention to when we’re designing our nutrients is how different nutritional elements react with others.
Some nutrients are synergistic: If you apply more of one, the plant needs more of another—and will take up more of it.
Other nutrients are antagonistic: If you increase the supply of a nutrient, the plant will take up less of another—perhaps too much less, causing a deficiency.
Mulder’s chart shows which nutrients are antagonistic and which are synergistic.
For example:
Phosphorus and magnesium are synergystic. When you feed more phosphorus to boost blooms, you should also feed more magnesium. The plant needs more of each, or it will suffer a deficiency.
Boron and calcium are antagonistic. If you feed a crop too much calcium, you run the risk of boron deficiency—not because you’re not applying enough boron, but because plants won’t absorb as much in the presence of calcium; boron will get “locked out.”
5.
USE ONE LINE OF NUTRIENTS
That’s why it’s crucial to feed plants an optimized nutrient line—one that’s formulated precisely so that each of the products works in harmony with the others. In an optimized nutrient line, the base nutrients and all the supplements fit together like a perfect puzzle, satisfying all the synergies and correcting for all the antagonisms in their ingredients.
Growers run the risk of disrupting the delicate balance of synergies and antagonisms if they take a Frankenstein approach to their feeding program: mixing and matching different products from different brands that might not be formulated to work together—or even be compatible.
If plants don’t have the right nutrients in the right concentrations and ratios at the right times in the crop lifecycle, growers cannot get the most from every harvest. They cannot maximize crop potential for maximum return on their grows. They just can’t, even if they nail all the rest of it—the lights, temperature, air quality etc.
That is why it is crucial to use one product line – especially one like Emerald Harvest – that has been specifically formulated to provide optimal nutrition in the precise amounts at the right time in the plant’s life cycle.
Our insistence on dialing in the right concentrations and precise ratios of these nutrients is what enables us to guarantee simple, easy success.
The Emerald Harvest nutrient line is a complete feeding program that’s been purity and quality tested in the lab—with proven results in the field, grow after grow after grow.
