A Beginners Guide: Nutrient Deficiency

hi Ethan walls are here with bright Agrotech once again today we will be talking about nutrient deficiencies what are your common deficiencies how to diagnose them and how to treat them [Music] what is the nutrient deficiency a nutrient deficiency is going to be one of the main factors that will affect the growth appearance and the taste of your plant so it is very important to understand what it is basically what you are having is a plant is not getting enough of a certain nutrient so it will display symptoms be it banal chlorosis entervan or chlorosis necrosis anything like that that will give you a clue as to what is lacking in your plants diet common deficiencies that you will see within your plants as you learn from our previous video n P and K are the three major macronutrients they're the big players when it comes to plant health so nitrogen phosphorus and potassium will be very common nutrient deficiencies that you will see they will tend to show themselves very quickly within the plant another common subset that you will see nutrient deficiencies in tend to be a group of micronutrients calcium magnesium and iron tensho nutrient deficiencies especially in hydroponics they are very common in our previous video you learned that plants require a certain level of nutrients which we measure as EC this level of nutrients is very important as well as the ratio of nutrients to one another for example the ratio of nitrogen phosphorus can make a big difference if you're trying to grow a green crop but you're using a fruiting or flowering fertilizer which will have a high phosphorous to nitrogen ratio you're probably going to see nitrogen deficiency so for example if we have too much of nutrient a on hand in solution nutrient B can become locked out based on chemical reasons certain reactions that will happen within your solution that will either convert nutrient B to a different chemical format or tosit to precipitate out of solution which makes it unavailable to your plant how do you tell if your plant has a nutrient deficiency fortunately each and every nutrient that a plant requires has a specific function in relation to the plant's metabolism and growth processes so if it is deficient these systems within the plant will begin to suffer and will display outward symptoms that you can recognize as long as you have the education to do so often the effect that a nutrient deficiency has on these metabolic and growth processes within the plant will display a physical symptom that you can see some of these symptoms that you need to keep an eye out for are chlorosis which is yellowing of the foliage you also have necrosis which is foliage depth so either drive around crispy foliage or mushy black rotten foliage in addition to chlorosis and necrosis you need to be on the lookout for various factors such as where these are occurring versus new growth is that old growth does it affect the middle of the leaf doesn't start at the tip of the leaf and move backwards you will also see combinations of necrosis with chlorosis you may see a necrotic ring surrounded by chlorosis you may see a Berkley tip that fades to chlorotic tissue past that plant nutrients are either known as mobile or a mobile within the plant so a mobile nutrients is a nutrient which the plant can actually physically move through itself when it experiences a deficiency so mobile nutrients will be moved by the plant from older growth slower growth on the plant to newer growth at the growing point this is basically a survival mechanism and it keeps the growing point of the plants alive now nutrients which are immobile within the plant as you can imagine the plant cannot move them around so the first place that you will see deficiencies from an immobile nutrient is on the new fresh growth how do you treat your nutrient deficiencies the first step in this is to recognize them it's always best to have a good nutrient deficiency diagnosis team which will give you a breakdown where you can look at a symptom and it will say go air B and it'll eventually lead you on that tree to what is deficient in your plant if you are unsure it is always best to consult with your local County Extension agents they will have great knowledge to help you out with nutrient deficiencies it is best to avoid Google on this one unless it is from a peer-reviewed source usually from a university otherwise doodle image searches who knows what you'll come up with you may wind up with very very wrong information on your nutrient deficiency once you have found out what specifically is deficient within your crop the first short-term step is to treat it by supplementing with that nutrient that is lacking this can be done in a number of ways by increasing the level of that in your nutrient reservoir also you can pull your feed with many of these nutrients although you must be very careful with foliar feeding follow the manufacturers recommendations on your nutrient supplements there if you do not if you mix it too high of a concentration you can burn your plants really really badly and possibly lose your entire crop long-term solutions to fixing nutrient problems involve either changing your nutrient mix switching to a new supplier or making regular supplements for this nutrient for example we commonly see iron deficiencies in our system because we run UV filtration UV filtration causes the iron to precipitate out of solution so we add iron on a regular schedule weekly basis best to use a calendar and keep it regular please keep in mind that when your plant is experiencing a nutrient deficiency it is sick but it is not dying you can bring it back to good health one thing to note here is that when you diagnose and begin to treat this deficiency you won't see proper healthy growth on that tissue where you notice deficiency a lot of times you will still see that leaf will be ugly it'll be burnt it'll be chlorotic but your new growth will flourish and it will be healthy now we will do a quick review over what our common nutrient deficiencies are and some quick little diagnosis tips on the most common ones first up the biggest player in plant growth is nitrogen it is the green up nutrient it's what makes you have lush verdant growth and big strong plants it's the most important one so this is the key takeaway is learn how to recognize nitrogen deficiency so for nitrogen deficiency it is a mobile nutrient within the plant if you were paying attention earlier mobile means that the plant will move it from old growth to new growth under deficiency symptoms nitrogen will cause a complete and total chlorosis of the leaf veins tissue between the veins all of that and it will typically start from the tip of the leaf on older growth and move backwards and end and start moving up the plant another common symptom with nitrogen deficiency is very stunted growth it will be much smaller than it should be for its age so we have a lovely example right here for nitrogen deficiency if you notice this leaf right here was an old leaf probably one of the first true leads on this lettuce plant and you'll notice just about everything on this leaf the veins the surfaces in between belief veins are all chlorotic and yellow so it starts with the oldest growth and move back from the tip of the leaf down all the way back and will eventually move up to leads above it but this right here is a classic example of what nitrogen deficiency looks like this is not the particularly best example because there also may be some magnesium deficiencies on here which we will get to in a minute phosphorus deficiency is another very common one it can be a little bit hard to diagnose and that it is typically not going to display outward symptoms very noticeably or very fast typically what you'll first see is a general overall stunted growth and the plant is just lacking in health but you're not going to notice those nitrogen deficiency symptoms unless it is also deficient in nitrogen as well another common symptom of phosphorus deficiency that will occur in a little bit more advanced of deficiencies in plants is that lead will begin to turn a little bit darker or purple in certain instances so this is not true phosphorus deficiency this is supposed to be a purple plant but we are using it as an example in this situation of that darkened coloration and stunted growth that you may see with a phosphorus deficiency so you will see purple or a little bit of red sometimes dark or bronzing of the leaves and bear in mind when diagnosing phosphorus deficiency that yes indeed some plants are supposed to be purple or supposed to be red so it's not always a great end indicator this is the time where you really need to know your plant variety before you go in and try and diagnose the last of the big 3 4 plant nutrient deficiencies is potassium it will exhibit somewhat similar to phosphorus in that it won't be outwardly visible it'll be a little bit sneaky at first in the early stages of deficiency you will just kind of notice the plant will overall be lacking in health a little bit a little bit stunted as your potassium deficiency progresses it will begin to show a little bit of chlorosis starting on the leaf margin right around the edge of the leaf and unlike nitrogen instead of moving back in towards the middle of the leaf and a v-shaped taking out the entire leaf calcium will tend to stay concentrated right around that margin and it will move from the tip all the way out along the edge the back of the leaf and will leave the middle portion of the leaf typically untouched sometimes you will see a a bit of necrosis as well along with that chlorotic tissue along the margin phosphorus and potassium much like nitrogen are also mobile nutrients which means that the plant will move those nutrients from the old growth to the new growth so you will see these deficiencies just like nitrogen on the older growth starting at the bottom of the plant and moving up the plants to newer tissues these next three nutrient deficiencies that I'm going to talk about are very very very common in hydroponics and often times even if you're feeding with a so called complete and balanced nutrient mix you will still see deficiencies with some of these here and there and we will get into reasons as to why that's happening in just a minute but these three nutrients are calcium magnesium and iron magnesium is a very common deficiency in hydroponics that is typically why we recommend if you are running a multi part nutrient solution that you supplement in a little bit of magnesium sulfate just because they tend to go deficient in hydroponics it's just something that plants tend to do so what magnesium does is it is also a mobile nutrient which means you will see your deficiency start on the older lower growth first it can look very very strikingly similar to nitrogen deficiency so what you will really begin to notice with magnesium deficiency is that the older leads will go chlorotic much like this but if you look here you'll notice that this is what you would call intervene old corrosive so if you notice the veins are still green but the tissue in between the leaf veins is chlorotic and the interesting thing with magnesium is it doesn't just turn yellow like it does with nitrogen and Flora's is caused by other nutrient deficiencies your plant tissue will turn almost completely white magnesium is also a great deficiency that you can supplement with foliar feeding it will respond very quickly to this it is also one of those deficiencies that when you do correct that old chlorotic growth is going to stay nasty and chlorotic looking but your new foliage will show immediate improvement almost all right kids we're down to the final two and they are really really fun ones they are immobile nutrients so this means that you will see both of these deficiencies concentrated towards the top of the plant at the growing tips so we will start off first with iron deficiency so our first example that we have here of an immobile nutrient deficiency and this is a very very common one is iron deficiency a lot of times even if your nutrient solution has iron in it it's probably not quite enough and this is due to a number of reasons so if we look right here we have some basil plants one of the reasons you see a lot of iron deficiency in basil is it is very iron inefficient it just does not utilize this nutrient very well but as you can see it is an immobilization see at the growing tips of each branch instead of the older leaf below it it causes inter vanil chlorosis much like magnesium where the veins still stayed green so as I mentioned basil you'll typically see iron deficiencies in it because it is an iron inefficient plant it just doesn't move it very well Russian red kale is another big one that I've really noticed that just does not use iron very efficiently another reason you may see iron deficiencies in your system is if you are running a UV filtration system if you are you running UV filtration what happens is that ultraviolet light causes a chemical reaction with that chelated iron in your solution and it makes it precipitate out of solution so basically it will become a solid again and sink to the bottom and it is in a plant in available form at that point so the plants you know the iron is still there in your solution but the plants just can't use it they can't take it up it's one of these odd situations and that's why it's very very common and so to overcome this as I said we typically add iron once a week to our system when we do these additions we unplug our UV filtration system for a period of 24 to 36 hours and that allows the plants to take up this iron that we've supplemented with another great way around it is foliar feeding iron is a great one to foliar spray with and it has very quick results and that bypasses the whole UV filtration loop of that system alright so now that you know how to diagnose and treat iron which is a very common deficiency I answer tons and tons of questions about it we'll move back into the farm and we will show you a little bit about calcium deficiency and also how to diagnose and treat it alright the final deficiency that we will tell you about today is one that I probably answer the absolute most customer service questions about it seems like I get at least one a week and that is calcium deficiency it is extremely common in hydroponics particularly if you are growing in indoor environments there is specific reason to that but before I get to it I will show you the deficiency symptoms to look out for for calcium so calcium is not a mobile nutrient within the plant so you are going to see this deficiency displayed typically speaking on the newer growth of the plants and the older growth won't be affected quite so much but calcium is a great one for showing necrosis and that is dead burnt crispy little leaf tissue out on the margin of belief that you're seeing right here and typically it will start from the very tip of the leaf which many people will confuse with pit burn which is a symptom of adding too much nutrient or running your EC at too high of a number so it is very easy to confuse with that but with health and efficiency it will kind of tend to be splotchy along the margin it won't you know start at the tip and just start burning back it'll start here and then a little over here a little over here and just kind of be random spots along the edge so as I said before calcium is not a very mobile nutrient within the plants so the reasoning why you see calcium deficiency a lot in indoor environments or greenhouse environments is because you are highly skimping on your HVAC system you need a lot of airflow you need to maintain the appropriate temperature and you also need to control your humidity so if your airflow is low and you just don't have a lot of air moving past the leaf of the plant calcium will actually not move within the plant out to the growing tip of the leaf so since it's not moving there it is deficient there the more airflow you get past belief the more your plant is going to respirate the more it's going to move liquid within its xylem and phloem in the plant tissues so it's going to carry it out to that growing tip when you have better air flow past it another common problem that will compound on this typically if you don't have great airflow you're probably going to have high humidity I recommend trying to control your humidity at very maximum of about 60% you know anywhere in the 40 to 60% range should be completely and totally fine for your plant growth getting higher than that number or much lower than that number will have adverse effects and definitely being higher on that number will cause calcium deficiencies like this one that you see here and another key component of it is that lettuce is a cool weather crops so in the summertime when you see that HVAC systems are having a really hard time keeping up in your grow room you're not getting adequate airflow you're not getting adequate cooling you're not getting adequate dehumidification these are really times of the year when you will see huge calcium deficiencies and lettuce is one of the biggest crops to display these calcium deficiencies and it can be such big difference that we have noticed within rooms for ventilation we'll have a fan on this side and a rack full of towers the towers immediately next to the fan will have big beautiful perfect looking heads of lettuce and then as you get farther and farther away from that fan each tower looks progressively worse and worse and shows more burning shows smaller stunted heads so this is a real common one and hydroponics particularly in indoor grows I would like to reiterate so this is a big one to be on the lookout for and I hope I gave you all the information you need to help take care of this one so I stopped getting so many questions about it typically speaking for many of the common nutrient deficiencies that we've gone over today you can buy various solutions to these problems at your local hydroponic store online hydroponic shop some of them you can even pick up at your local grocery store oddly enough but these are all things which are just typically speaking that nutrient by itself so you can treat just that deficiencies a classic example is magnesium sulfate or epsom salts you can get this hydro shops you can get this at your local grocery store it's something that's great to supplement in your reservoir to help eliminate magnesium deficiencies it's also really really great as a foliar spray certain things like chelated iron for example is a little bit less common you're probably not going to be able to find it at most local shops unless they are hydro specific or just very very horticulturally specific shops so it is sickly best to buy those from an online source if you've not find it readily available in your hometown in this video we have gone over what nutrient deficiencies are how to diagnose the nutrient deficiencies and how to treat the nutrient deficiencies we have also covered a number of the most common nutrient deficiencies and a little bit greater detail giving you brief key points on how to diagnose and treat these deficiencies as well as some of the science behind what is causing these particular decision so the big take home point of this video is to remember that a nutrient deficiency is caused by a plant not receiving enough of a particular nutrient it may be present in the solution but just might not be available to that plant also keep in mind that one of the best ways to diagnose a nutrient deficiency is to get a nutrient deficiency diagnosis key these can be found online just make sure you are getting them from a reputable source I know Montana State University has a very nice clear tech team that you can access for free online and it will just give you a basic list of symptoms that you can run down and follow through the key which will lead you to that if you are still not successful diagnosing via keye it can be quite difficult particularly if you have multiple nutrient deficiencies at one time remember that it is always a great idea to contact your local County Extension agents they will be more than happy to help you diagnose your problem once again i'm ethan walter here with bright Agrotech we really hope you enjoyed this video today and learned a lot from it please remember to Like comment and share on this video and if you have any particular questions regarding the content of this video or perhaps maybe you would like to see more in-depth videos on each particular nutrient and how to diagnose and correct that particular deficiency please just let us know we'd always love to hear the feedback from you until next time you [Music]

Channel: ZipGrow

Views: 936,500

Rating: 4.7258377 out of 5

Keywords: hydroponic, indoor growing, bright agrotech, hydroponic nutrients, nutrients, guide, hydroponics, gardening, indoor farming, fertilizer, hydroponic growing beginner, hydroponics nutrients, hydroponics for beginners, hydroponic nutrients for beginners, hydroponic fertilizer, best hydroponic nutrients, nutrients for hydroponics, vertical farming, general hydroponics, hydroponic lettuce, growing, zipgrow towers, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium, deficiency, plant growth, NPK

Id: 9SotrCwqfHo

Length: 23min 59sec (1439 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 22 2017

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