How to Get Beautiful Flowers in Your Garden using a Flowering Booster
If you are growing flowers in your hydroponic garden, chances are you just have a single goal in mind: bigger, heavier blooms. The bigger your flowers, the more valuable they are. When a flower grows in size, it is usually also deeper in color and stronger in fragrance which can also increase its value. By using a quality flower booster, you can achieve the results you truly desire.
Sadly, too many hydroponic growers don’t take the steps necessary to achieve this goal. If you treat your flowers during the flowering stage in the exact same way that you treat them during the vegetative stage, you simply will deprive yourself of the kind of flowers that you can achieve.
The trick is to make the proper adjustments during the flowering stage of development that will truly get you the most benefit from your garden. This includes using a good quality flowering booster and making a few other adjustments to help get those flowers growing fast. Here are some simple steps to help you in getting bigger buds & flowers.
Check Your Phosphorus to Potassium Ratio – Every gardener knows that phosphorus and potassium and essential elements to a truly successful harvest. These elements help speed up plant metabolism and cell division which lead inevitably to the kind of heavy, large flowers that make gardeners envious. But do you know the correct ratio of phosphorus to potassium?
Conventional wisdom says that it should be approximately one to one, which is why one of the most popular flowering boosters sold is PK 14/15. Unfortunately, in this case, conventional wisdom has it dead wrong.
A flowering booster with this much phosphorus puts you at risk for phosphorus excess, which can create decencies in other essential nutrients. In reality, the best, most effective flowering boosters contain much more potassium and a lot less phosphors, usually at a ratio of two to one, such as PK 9/18. This combo can give your plants the essential boost of nutrients that it needs to really grow to its potential during the flowering stage.
Switch to a 12/12 Photoperiod – Most hydroponic growers stick to a to a photoperiod where they have their lights on for eighteen hours and off for six hours. While its true that light is essential for growing success, no matter what the stage, you actually want to cut back on the light during the flowering stage. By keeping the lights on twelve hours a day in instead of eighteen during the flowering stage, you will not only improve the performance of your plants, but you will also be saving a bit of money.
Use Red Spectrum Light Only – During the flowering stage is when your plants are going to gain the most benefit from bulbs that provide red spectrum light, such as high-pressure sodium. You might also consider using red-only LED lights. These are a bit pricier, but they have the advantage of having a very low heat output.
After you have all of these elements in your hydroponic system optimized, educate yourself on other hydroponic nutrients and flowering boosters that you can use to create those truly huge flowers.
