 Hi there and welcome to my channel. So in today's video we're going to talk about how to mix up nutrients for your hydroponic plants that you can grow indoors. And if you've been thinking about doing hydroponics but finding yourself a little intimidated or overwhelmed by all the information that you may be reading on the internet or watching YouTube videos. When they start talking about, you know, measuring pH and adjusting your PPMs and your TDSs, all of that can be a little bit daunting and confusing and you really don't need to understand it to grow food indoors. So in my video today I'm going to walk you through setting up a container to start some lettuce indoors and we're going to be using these, maybe adjusting the pH, mixing up nutrients and I will show you how you can grow beautiful lettuce just like this without having to have any kind of a university degree or education. So let's get started. So the first thing I want to talk about is what kind of water you should be using for doing your indoor growing. And the method that I use if you've seen any of my videos is the crack key method. So that's basically just growing your plants in water that has nutrients in it. There's no pumps, there's no special equipment other than just setting up your nutrients in a container, putting your plants in there and letting them grow from there. So I just use tap water. We have treated, well, we have treated city water here and if you use well water that should be fine. I would say any kind of potable water that you drink yourself should be okay for your plants. So we will just adjust the pH accordingly once we get to that point. So you can use bottled water if you so choose but it is quite expensive because you can go through quite a bit. So try your tap water first. I always let it sit for at least 24 hours after I filled a large container or two and just leave it sitting in my shower where I do my filling. Let it sit for, like I say, for at least 24 hours. Let the chlorine or whatever type of treatment that might be in there settle. So I like to use root farm. It's got a two-part formula here. You have the base and then this is just an all-purpose which works really well for lettuce. And to start off, when your plants are just little seedlings, you usually go with the weakest measurement that you will find on the back of your container. It's usually called the seedling stage. So we are going to add the nutrients here based on a four liter measurement. And then from there we will check the EC level and the pH level and decide if we need to add a little bit more water or adjust the pH. So I have pre-measured this water in here already and I have eight liters. So I'm just going to double up the amount on the back here because it is a measurement based on four liters. That's why I usually like to mix up my nutrients in these four liter containers. If I'm going to be, you know, setting up something a little bit smaller, you can use a four liter jug like this as well. Mix it up and dump it into your container. So this cap works out to actually be five milliliters. So I will just be using that for my measurements. I usually stir in between the two nutrients. I don't worry about letting it sit that long. I just keep going. So there's not a whole lot of nutrients going into the first round here for your seedlings. So after a bit of googling, I've come up with a list based on the kind of vegetables that I grow downstairs here. So with lettuce I have found that the EC level should be somewhere between 1.2 to 1.8. What is EC? Who cares? Just as long as we can get it to these numbers. That's that's all we need to do. So when you have one of these TDS and EC meters, there is two different ways you can measure. There's a PPM and then there's the EC. Again I'm not going to go into what they stand for and what they mean because I'll just put you guys to sleep. So I always use an EC measurement because I find that it is the more accurate one according to you know what I've learned on reading on the internet. So on this device here I just switch it so that it's going to take an EC reading. Put it in the water and it gives you pretty much an immediate reading. It's a four-digit number that comes out here 2116 and I just round those to 2.1 and according to my lettuce EC level here it's a little bit high. So what do you need to do if it's too high? Just add a little bit of water. So I just pour some in, take the lid off, pour some in, give it a bit of a stir, take another reading. It has dropped down just slightly. It's still at 2.100. It's a little bit high. You don't want your nutrients super strong for your seedlings. It's okay if it's quite diluted and I want the roots to be able to reach this water so adding you know raising the level here is going to be good. So now that level has dropped down to 1796 so that is about 1.8. So according to my chart we're right on par for where we should be for lettuce to start with. Like I said when they're seedlings it doesn't hurt to have it more diluted. So we can add a bit more water and bring that EC level down just a little bit more. So once you're happy with that EC level then it's time to check the pH and these meters are quite easy. You just turn them on and stick them in the water. The reading for a pH takes a little bit longer. They say about 30 seconds you should leave it in there to get a true reading. So the pH up for me is coming out at 6.79. So it's actually pretty much right where we want it to be for lettuce. It's just about at that 7.0. So I just want to show you if it was a little bit high like we can bring it down just a little bit or if it ends up you know being more than 7. So because the pH is a little bit high we want to bring the pH level down. So we just take the one here with the down arrow, the acid base and we're gonna add a few drops of that to this water. Now this thing here measures in milliliters. I'm going to just add two milliliters to start. Again I don't really worry about how much but you don't need to put a whole lot in. So it's something you want to just try test your pH and see where it goes from there. So we do have quite a bit of water here. So I'm going to put the full two milliliters in here. So adding that pH down has now adjusted my my pH level to about 6.02. So we're still in that good range and I think we are ready now to put our plants in here. It doesn't happen very often with my water that my pH level is low but you would just do the same thing if your reading came out below that that range that you need to be in. You would simply go to the pH up and put a few drops into your water. Give it a test and get it to that level that you want. So today I am planting up some arugula and a sage. I did have four arugulas going but one of them died. These I planted a few weeks ago and I'm trying to get a nice root base on them so that the roots will reach the nutrient water now. So these have only been watered with just plain water and now that they are got a nice strong root I'll be putting them into the nutrients and they will really start taking off and growing now. So now I'm just going to take you to one of my cucumber plants which is in the mid growth stage and show you how you can test and adjust your nutrients when your plant is about you know midway through its growth. Okay so we are going to test the EC and the pH on my cucumber here. This is a diva cucumber and it is I would say at the mid early growth stage. It's not sending out any blooms yet or anything. So first of all I always check the EC on it. So I set my meter to the EC reading screen. Just have a container nearby that you can if you can take your plant right out and get out of the way that's good. But those roots are really looking great nice and white. These are all the air roots. So let's sign of a healthy plant so far. It smells like cucumber. Try to get it in there. So it is giving a reading of 2774 which is 2.7 or rounded up to 2.8. So according to my handy dandy cheat card here it should be somewhere in the 1.7 to 2.0. So I think that means it's a little bit high in its TDSs. So a quick fix to that is to just add some water just to try and dilute the the salts in here. I just usually just give it a little pour so we're getting close. So that took it down to 2342 so 2.3. Give it another little splash of water. You want to make sure you're not filling your container too much so that you start drowning those air roots. So that's something you have to always make sure that you got air between the roots and the water. So I'll keep track of that here. Once we get it down to the level we need it. EC now it's at 2.126 so 2.1. For me that's close enough. I just wanted to add in here that if it turns out that your EC level turns out to be lower than the range that you are wanting to get it towards then to remedy that you just simply add some premixed nutrients into your container. Check the EC level until it reaches the range that you want it to be. So then we're going to try testing the pH. Now that we got that EC where we want it I'm going to stick in my pH meter. According to my cheat card we want the pH somewhere in the 5 to 5.5 range. If you can see here it is reading at 6.56. It's a little bit high so that's when I'm going to look to my pHs here and this is the pH down and you do not need to add very much to make a difference. Again I don't worry about measuring or keeping track of how much I put in because I would never keep accurate records if I did it that way. So I usually just take the eyedropper start off with just a milliliter measured up in this stick here. It's not a very big container of water so I don't want to put too much in. Give it a stir. 5.9 so we're very close to that 5.5 so I maybe will just try putting in another small drop or two. Okay so we were wanting to get in between 5 and 5.5. Looks like I've got it down below that 5.5 now so I'm happy with that but it is kind of a fun thing to do with your plants every day or two and see if it does make a difference. So after adjusting the pH I just double checked my EC again and it seems to be good still. That's around 2.1. This should be a happy cucumber. His roots sure look happy. So I just want to show you what I'm talking about when you put your plants back into the water here. You want to make sure when it's fully submerged into here that you still have some airspace for these air roots to breathe. You don't want to have the water so deep that it's going to drown them. So just keep that in mind when you have to add water that maybe once you get it to the EC level that you need it to be then you may have to remove some of the water. So I hope that you found this video helpful and if you are thinking about trying indoor growing using the hydroponic method I hope that I have taken away some of the fears and some of the the questions that you may have of how it all works and how to mix up your nutrients and keep your plants happy and healthy. If you want to learn more about growing food hydroponically using the crack key method I have a whole bunch of videos I will link the playlist at the end. So I hope you will check out my other videos and give hydroponic growing a try.