As a hydroponics marijuana grower, you need total control over how your plants absorb water, oxygen, and hydroponics nutrients.
Fact is, what you choose as the environment for your cannabis plants’ roots is one of the main factors that determine whether you harvest lots of sticky bud, or not much.
You have hydroponics root zone options of growing in air (aeroponics), water (aquaponics) a film of water (NFT) a pure hydroponics water system (deep water culture), soil, or inert soilless media such as soilless mix, rockwool or coco coir.
If you choose to have a substrate such as in your root zone, the top choices for professional hydroponics marijuana growers are rockwool and coco coir.
Rockwool is like cotton candy except it’s spun from basalt rather than sugar and flavoring.
The reason it’s called “rockwool” is because its texture and consistency somewhat resemble wool, and because it’s made from rock.
Originally, this material was used for insulation.
Researchers in Holland and other European countries where hydroponics was pioneered looked at rockwool’s consistency and realized it could be a great material for hydroponics roots.
Marijuana roots like a root zone substrate that has ample porosity so it holds air and water, as well as the right density so roots can easily grow and move throughout the material.
Rockwool has those qualities, and it’s sterile, so there are no nutritional elements on-board.
This gives you a totally-controllable blank slate when you provide nutrition to your hydroponics marijuana plants.
It’s very important to understand how the “blank slate” effect gives you godlike control over what your plants absorb.
For example if you grow in soil, you’ve got all kinds of elements onboard in your marijuana root zone, and you really don’t know exactly what you’ve got- even if you custom-mix your soil.
These onboard elements have different ratios, forms and absorption characteristics that do not maximize what your marijuana plants can do for you when you grow in a sterile media like rockwool and use professional-grade hydroponics nutrients.
The fact is that even the most cannabis-specific customized soil mixes give you slower growth and smaller yields when compared to a grandmaster marijuana grower growing the same marijuana plants in a properly-run rockwool system using quality hydroponics nutrients.
The rockwool champion is the Grodan Company, based in Holland.
Grodan absolutely owns the rockwool market because it pioneered horticultural rockwool.
We’re talking about Grodan slabs, cubes, loose rockwool, rockwool engineered for flowering plants, rockwool engineered for wetter or drier climates.
Contact Grodan’s technical support people and tell them the kind of irrigation and hydroponics system you run, and they can match a variety of rockwool that’s ideal for your garden.
Ask them about using pH Down to pre-treat your rockwool so it carries a pH charge in the 5.7 to 6.3 range.
Hydroponics marijuana growers report that hydroponics base nutrients called pH Perfect work best for rockwool because they automatically maintain root zone pH at 5.7, the optimal pH for nutrients absorption.
You owe it to yourself to consider switching to rockwool so your marijuana gardening becomes simpler, easier, and more rewarding.
