One crucial aspect that can significantly impact your plants' health and yield is Vapour Pressure Deficit (VPD). In this blog, we'll explore what VPD is, why it matters, and how you can use this knowledge to create an ideal environment for your hydroponic grow room. Understanding Vapour Pressure Deficit (VPD): VPD is a measure of the difference between the amount of moisture in the air and the maximum amount of moisture the air can hold at a specific temperature. It's a critical factor in plant transpiration, affecting nutrient uptake, photosynthesis, and overall growth. VPD is expressed in u ..read more

        In the world of gardening and horticulture, the health and vitality of plant roots are fundamental to overall plant growth. In most indoor grow room setups traditional containers, such as plastic pots, often lead to issues like root circling and poor aeration, hindering the development of a robust root system. The plastic pots are still an essential tool for starting off with seedlings or clones, as they help in developing a strong and healthy root mass before transferring them to your chosen fabric pot size, so they do have a place we just dont finish the grow in ..read more

Oh dear! You've found yourself facing a rather sorry sight in your grow room – those sagging and miserable-looking plants. It's a scenario every grower dreads. While I've encountered it a few times in my decades of gardening, it's still a gut-punch when I open one of my grow rooms and see stressed and wilting plants. Which is what I saw when I came to work one morning and saw my eight-week-old beefsteak tomato plant looking like this: 930AM: The horror! What went wrong?  A piece of plumbing connected to the water pump had dislodged and the nutrient-rich water was pumping back into t ..read more

For many growers, dealing with unresponsive seeds can be quite disheartening, especially if these seeds were a recent purchase. Don't worry; there are some helpful tricks that can come to your rescue. One of the first methods I'd suggest is misting the seed cubes with a gentle solution of Humiboosta. You can create this solution by mixing 0.5 ml of Humiboosta with 1 liter of water. This not only provides a small amount of nourishment to the seeds but also mimics the nurturing effects of a gentle rain. Additionally, you can make some changes to the seedlings' environment to give them a better ..read more

Good habits in hydroponics are as easy to form as bad ones, one of the most annoying tasks is general maintenance of nutrient tanks and hydroponic systems. Most of these tasks are relatively easy once you have the right information and by working more efficiently from the beginning of your projects you will find you have more time for your plants, and less time spent cleaning and correcting problems. Perform these Good habits on a daily basis: Check the pH of your hydroponic solution. Adjust the pH up or down as required. Check the temperatur ..read more

Growing hydroponically is a great way to grow crops, and offers a much greater return compared to conventional farming. However, just like conventional farming there are many variables to take into account, this blog is going to focus on pH and how to manage it whilst growing. Each and every aspect of gardening can be blown out into many segments and hydroponics is no different, ill explain so you can see what im going on about. The amount of human interaction is dependent on the type of hydroponic systems in place, for example; many commercial vegetable farms have lots of plan ..read more

Fungus gnats are those small black annoying flies that seem to fly near your face at the most inconvenient times.  They can very quickly infest your favourite plant pots if they are over watered too much and guess what, these little buggers carry pythium on their feet! Thats right they literally have the pathogen for root rot on their mucky little toes. They feed on decaying organic matter, fungi and your plant roots (especially damaged roots making infection an absolute certainty) The fungus gnat life span consists of about 3-4 weeks depending on the conditions of th ..read more

What is Crop steering? Crop steering is a method of steering plants nutritionally in-conjunction with lighting intensity and environmental changes.  It is a fundamental guide on the amount of water and hydroponic nutrients we feed our plants on a daily basis, this approach to feeding is different for each growing medium and each phase.  The reason you would want to crop steer: Increased crop performance Improve Crop quality Manipulate yields  The volume of water and liquid nutrients we use is subjective to the age of the plant and the size of th ..read more

You would be surprised how many times we see people make LED grow lighting mistakes, hopefully this blog can save at least one person from making these costly grow room errors! Light & Temperature When transitioning from HPS lighting to LED lighting there are a few things to consider. LED lights emit much more light than HPS lights do on the flip side LEDs Emit much less thermal energy (heat) than its predecessor.  The one thing this changes in any grow room setting after making the switch is the leaf surface temperature is different. Plants that are growing ..read more

So many choices, so many bottles which Nutrients are the Best? With so many hydroponic nutrient brands on the market its easy to get pulled in with fancy packaging and hyped promotions but a lot of them leave growers scratching their heads wondering whats going wrong with their plants.  A-Grade hydroponics is here to save you time, money and to help you get great results from the very beginning.  We test everything here at A-Grade Hydroponics. We are not saying the ones that don't make are list are bad but these particular brands just stand out a mile when we do side ..read more