Choosing a soilless media for your hydroponic garden can be a real challenge when there are just a few small differences from one brand to another. But when it comes to the end game of a healthy mature crop, these small differences can have a big impact on plant performance. It pays to note the details because in them lies the key to what’s best for your plants, their longevity, vigor and overall health.

To simplify hydroponic gardening, you need soilless media that is complete from day one. That ensures that every seedling is well nourished from the start. This is why Sunshine Advanced Rain Forest Blend includes an organic nutrient package that boosts performance in these early weeks when plants are just getting started.

Other growing mixes often lack this early life nutrition, forcing you to add fertilizer for a more vigorous start. That is always risky because tender seedlings can be badly damaged by too high a nutrient load at the start of life. By the time you see the signs of this deficiency or toxicity, it’s too late.

Sunshine Advanced Rain Forest Blend is uniquely fortified with mycorrhizae, the most important soil borne organism to plant life. Our soil scientists have integrated these living organisms into the mix so they are well established when plants arrive. Putting these microbes in direct contact with young roots allows them to enter through the root hairs to live symbiotically within each plant. It is well known those plants with such a relationship maintain a healthier immune system, root better, reach further into the soil and take up even more nutrients.

Despite the high concentrations of fishing industry byproducts in other soilless media, mycorhizzae are absent altogether. This eliminates the potential for symbiosis between mycorhizzae and your plants, thus slowing development, reducing disease resistance and inhibiting a truly maximized root system.

Rain Forest Blend earns its fertility from earthworm castings, humic acid, kelp and alfalfa meal, which yields readily available nitrogen. Fishing byproducts may contribute nitrogen to other products, but often the nutrients are not readily available because it’s in the ammonium nitrogen form. While this form is taken up by plants, they must use vital growth energy to change it to nitrate nitrogen before it becomes beneficial. This extra work load slows plant growth. Sunshine Advanced Rain Forest Blend contains enough kelp to offer the same marine nutrient load without problem ammonia build up and the ever present threat of unrecognized sea salt accumulations.

Sunshine Advanced Rain Forest Blend is carefully crafted to ensure excellent drainage both early and late in the process. As organic matter breaks down, other bark based media will not hold its structure risking compaction that cuts off vital oxygen from hard working roots. To maximize the benefits of an adventurous root system fortified with mycorhizzae, media must remain porous to guarantee all nutrients reach every inch of root zone. With generous perlite and our highest percentage of aged fir bark, there is little chance growth will slow late in the vegetative process as plants struggle to thrive in media that is growing more dense by the day.

Finally, the simplicity of using Sunshine Advanced Rain Forest Blend eliminates the need to add peat so you can use it as is. Our two step system of Plant Fuel nutrition takes the guess work out of growing plants hydroponically. Keep it simple so the microbes and their plant hosts have what they need when they need it. Above all, know that Rain Forest Blend is complete from day one, as designed by the diligent soil scientists who put their name and reputation behind development and extensive testing of every Sunshine Advanced product.

What I looked for in this sales equation was simplicity and science. Having to use fifteen different bottles of concentrate to feed a crop to maturity is excessive and complicated when you consider the risk of interacting negatively with ordinary substances to wipe out your entire crop. Another company decided that a Humvee and a gold chain on the bag would somehow ensure rap star wealth to any grower that uses their products. Still more are headquartered in Amsterdam and Australia where they naturally pass on the cost of shipping half way around the world to the customer.

And then I came to the delightfully simple Sunshine Advanced booth. There was no smoke and mirrors here, just product samples and two mild mannered members of the staff who know their brand inside and out. They didn’t try to baffle anyone because they don’t have to. Sunshine Advanced has been around long before these other companies were even thought of, and that’s time for proving a truly valuable product. The SA folks emphasize that science is the only real definitive in this market, which is verified by Macro Micro Laboratories to ensure that each of their products is built on hard data.

After lugging a big bag filled with heavy samples of potions from a half dozen nutrient producers, I was relieved to find that Sunshine Advanced didn’t use complexity to prove their products work. With their Plant Fuel offered in just two bottles, one for vegetative phase and one for reproductive phase, any beginner can get it right. Simplicity does by no means eliminate all the goodies added to the other solutions, because if they work, they’re in Fuel. This emerging field where anecdotal information is treated as seriously as the text book basics of plant growth is rife with rip offs. After all, these companies are young, and have not yet made the mistakes and corrected them over years, even decades necessary to prove a viable product in the horticultural world. In fact, many of them may be gone in five year’s time – the industry is just that volatile.

Consider this world of indoor growing products a lot like the dietary supplement industry that is wholly unregulated and littered with bold, but unsubstantiated claims. So rather than investing your money in the latest cure-all priced into the stratosphere, a proven company like Sunshine Advanced will be around tomorrow and next year to stand behind its naturally simple, organically verified and scientifically developed brand.

Always test from the most recently matured leaves, in this case just below the flowers.

“The plant is the final judge,” says Dr. Harry Mills of the aptly named Micro Macro International labs, which uses real science to determine exactly what your plants need right now. Even if the plant looks picture perfect, it may harbor a deficiency that could reduce flavor, oil content and overall vigor.

“It’s what the plant has taken up that matters,” stresses Mills. “That’s the only real way to know what you need. We test each sample to see if what you’re doing provides all 16 essential elements of plant growth. If we just tested soil or water, that just tells us what’s present, but not necessarily what’s available to plants.”

Mills knows the truth about nutrient uptake and how certain conditions can make a nutrient unavailable. “Only by drying and crushing the plant’s tissues can we determine if it’s properly accessing nutrients, and whether or not there’s enough of all sixteen for the plant to reach its full potential.”

Two cups of fresh cut material is required for an accurate sample.

With today’s hydroponics, the mix and match approach to plant nutrition can be far from scientific. There is no way to determine if what you’re doing is working to its fullest advantage. “Each plant should be producing at the highest level possible for its unique genetic makeup, but without scientific testing you can’t know if all nutrients applied are being utilized. Only with hard data can you fine tune individual micro and macro nutrient concentrations.”

Although MMI offers an extensive battery of testing, Dr. Mills stresses that individual and commercial hydroponic growers are best served by testing a sample of the plant. “Test just before the plants move into a new phase of growth. Start at the seedling stage, then again just before bud production, and finally as the plant is reaching full maturity.” This data tells you if you’re on the right track or if you need more attention. It can also be applied to how you manage next year’s crop since it’s based on solid scientific data.

The benefits to testing your plants are many, but above all it allows a high degree of nutritional accuracy. Every grower has guessed at what plants need at one time or another, and sometimes you guess wrong. When you test your plants it eliminates guesswork to ensure that every crop you grow produces at its highest level. As you move into a new growth phase, there’s an opportunity to correct deficiencies immediately. Moreover, there’s less chance you’ll add a nutrient that is already dangerously high just because it’s a component of your plant food product.

To ensure your samples represent all the plants, gather equal amounts from the corners and center for an accurate reflection of the entire garden.

Hydroponic horticulture is a highly scientific process, but there’s a lot of folk practice that can get in the way. When there’s a great deal of money on the line, or just your summer veggies, you can’t afford to guess wrong. And when the desired result is a consistently good harvest time and time again, the cost of testing pays for itself.

This example illustrates the MMI leaf analysis results.

How Much Growing Media To Buy

1 cubic foot = 1728 cubic inches

Sunshine Advanced soilless media is packaged in compressed bales starting with the smallest, one cubic foot. When opened up the material expands in size to about double the original volume so a one c.f. bale yields two c.f. of media. A loose bale produces enough material to fill about seven one gallon pots. The table below requires that you determine two factors before calculating the amount of Sunshine Advanced you’ll need.

Pot Set Up

Step 1: Select your pot size, which should be gauged on standard nursery pots from one gallon to as large as twenty.

Step 2: Determine how many pots you’ll be using for the entire operation.

Step 3: Decide what sized bale is easiest for you to manage, either 1, 2, 4.4 or 6 cubic feet.

Step 4: Plug these numbers into the Pot Fill Table below to easily calculate how much gross media you’ll need to get the job done.

How Much Fertilizer To Buy

Plant Fuel is key to the success of your garden. The amount you will need is directly related to the size of the pots you select and the age of the plant. Consider an eleven week growing season for most kinds of vegetables and herbs, noting the withholding of all Fuel in the eleventh week.

The Max Grow solution is used during the entire period. Max Flowers is not added until the plants are ready for reproductive mode at about the fifth week, which then peaks just before harvest. Each gallon of Max Grow concentrate diluted at these rates will result in an average yield of 32 gallons of ready to use plant food. During the bloom cycle, each gallon of Max Flowers concentrate yields 36 gallons of fertilizer.

The Dilution Rates chart below helps you easily see the varying dilution rate for both types of Plant Fuel as it applies to each week of this process.

To help you see the overview and better understand the overall needs in advance, our Feeding Chart provides an easy reference guide. These convenient sums aid in cost estimating how much Plant Fuel to buy and how to integrating that amount into your overall budget for the project. These figures are based on a schedule of feeding every other day over the course of a seven day week. They are also calculated for plants in one-gallon pots. For larger pots such as two- or five-gallon, be sure to multiply these numbers to provide the larger proportions necessary for adequate nutrition.

The ability to cost estimate your entire growing process is simple when you combine a brand of soils and fertilizers that are mutually compatible. Why reinvent the wheel with a unique formula of varying products when our plant scientists have done the work for you? Our studies have proven the effectiveness of the Sunshine Advanced products, eliminating the risks associated with over or under feeding which can ultimately impact your productivity and income. Use our charts, do the math and plan your project from day one. Then you can expect a perfect harvest the first time, every time.