Also an afterthought, but like. I’m old enough to remember when a bunch of people got cancer screwing around with hormone regulators on their plants when hydro was newfangled and everyone hadn’t shut up about it (spoiler: some still will not shut up about it). So I am very, very slow to hop on Everybody’s Best Bottle Solution until I know exactly why and what it is. And often if I know exactly Why And What It Is I can recreate it at home myself other ways. Like, now that I’m done with the thousands of moving costs to Not Die, have I reupped my calmag to not rely on the calmagiron in my pipes? Sure? But I restarted with just Superthrive nitro which is basically straight kelp, because that WASN’T something I could just pull out of my environment or supplies as easy. But for all the Brand Recognition or Default Assumed Growing Conditions, I am yet to see a single mofo rec or pick up the things I do use with budget. And it’s not because they’re Inferior. It’s because those same connections told me things that were supposed to be sealed behind NDAs on how the dispensaries do things on a budget, respectively, for high yield low cost per plant (eg the Promix-Escobar trick.) Like no everyone here just loves paying 3x as much for no good reason beyond it being the weed equivalent of brand name rims. I am TIRED.
You can grow however you want and use whatever you want, makes no difference to me. I’m just letting anyone reading know that no matter what or how you do it, if you put high enough concentration of chlorinated water into your soil it will kill your microbial life. You can replace and kill again at your own pleasure if you’d like. I don’t care, it’s your grow. An essay about your street cred is completely unrelated.
Thank you for the kind words. My mother’s parents were farmers. My parents had a big garden. I learned a lot from them. Crop rotation, compassion growing, adding wood ash, picking pests by hand, composting, etc.
I also grew up on the banks for the Missouri River and saw where hemp grows.
As for chlorine, I fill milk jugs with warm water and let it sit for a few days to off gas. Outside I have a filter for the hose.
The way I grow works for me. But I do like reading the forum and pick up some good tips to put on my list of things to try.
Best to you!
That’s me right there. I wish I had more time to spend reading, researching, and scrolling on this forum to continue to gain knowledge.
As far as the know-it-alls go @Starky they’re never going to change know matter what you say or do. You can literally slap some in the face and they just come back for more. I’m not trying to tell you how you should handle your affaris (I would never) but it’s on you - if he/they won’t take the hint(s) and you can’t handle what they’re offering, walk away, don’t put yourself through the stress. That’s what I do, I don’t waste my time with em. It’s like the one’s who always have to be one up on you, they had a bigger boat, had a better vacation, caught a bigger fish, have better growing techniques - doesn’t matter, always one up. I have relative I won’t carry on conversations with just for that reason.
I’m always trying to learn even from the arrogant 
like you metioned. I believe everyone is well intentioned no matter how obnoxious their personality may be.
Everyone here is trying to help their fellow growmies, sharing their knowledge and experiences. I am constantly learning, even in areas I thought I knew rather well 
Welcome to the community, it’s a nice place to hang out. Happy growing 
I distance myself from one relative because of they are a one upper. They ask a question acting like they are interested in my life but it is just a ploy.
How is your granddaughter?
then it is “my grand kids blah blah blah”
Have you gone to any concerts?
“we sat in the second row for blah blah blah”
Where are you vacationing this year?
“we are going to blah blah blah”
And it continues like that until I beg off to get a drink, make a call, or go to the restroom.
Oh worm, I’ll stop being vague, I’m in Missouri. Speaking of Things People Do That Clear, did you hear about the friggin Cannabis recall going down right now? Like, gee, that didn’t take long for someone to do a bunch of skeevy sh*t. Another reason I am, again, tentative about using solutions I don’t understand or buying whatever from whomever. About 80% of one brand’s sold stuff turned out to be, essentially, Spice. If you remember the Spice craze. It’s a bit more complicated than that but it was Hemp infused with the lab made THC type and so on. And as someone who had a bad experience with Spice when it was new, I am intensely mad.
And yeah, that works if/when you’re trying to get rid of the chlorine. Ironically, Timberline literally needs the chloride to be worth two fifths of a shit. It’s just the nature of it. But it’s what I had free access to when I restarted, and my plants were 2+ feet tall at 6 weeks, so I clearly was doing something right with my literal fill dirt.
Compassion growing IMO is a huge key of it widely missed here. There have been grows when I was better equipped, and essentially running the same setup as someone else, and my plants were still doing me better no matter how anal they got about their EC or whatever. And I’m like. It’s because I give a shit. The plants are my children with a 3-4month lifespan, that’s why. A meter ain’t gonna give you that. And you can’t really teach that online. Too many folk grew up with “buy this dirt, buy this meter, buy this light” etc
The thing I’m most anal about is PPFD/UMOLs etc. Lighting basically. Because these plants will even grow in the goddamn desert if they have good sunlight, and that’s the one thing you can’t skip on, in inside grows. You can tweak your dirt for better results or add things or try nutrient applications but you can only do so much to replace light.
One of my favorite tricks that would give someone a hemorage is to put in about 1/4th dosage of base nutrients in a big humidifier during humidifier weeks post-seedling and just. Leave it be. Lmao.
I wish i had that experience. My family is long line of diesel mechanics and USN Sailors. So I’m amazed everything’s i DON’T kill a plant.
Yeah prev experience can help, but you can make up for it with new experience. And surrounding yourself not even necessarily with weed heads but general aggie people. Like outside of my circles, my two biggest confidants on this stuff are Good Ol Farm Boys. They aren’t just here in a series of copy-paste learnin’. I come from a theater family, actually. But I did have several years experience going off the grid in yeehawbama where I made a few acres self sustaining and that helped too.
I’ve totally thought about doing this as well! I haven’t yet, but I’m planning to.
I literally am from and live there!! Lol
I’m a really private person and really only have one friend, he was in the Navy as well and can barely name dirty when he sees it. We were electronics techs.
But i do follow and watch a lot of videos and i do a ton of reading. Then i just try our what i think might be interesting. It’s worked good for me so far.
If you are having issues here you can work with a Mod.
If it’s outside this forum I sure wouldn’t tell him you’re on it haha!
“Please stop dispensing advice that I don’t need or want!”. If that doesn’t work, add a few profanities to the statement. You might find it liberating haha.
I set it on a low setting, I don’t know how your humidifier works but mine has 3 that are High- Constant; Med- Interrupted; Low- Pause between. I’ve done Med and Low. Med makes me nervous so I tend to leave it on low. It’s the same concept as a folial spray, just lessened volume of nutes to avoid burn, still keep an eye on it if/when you first try it just to see how the plants react in case your portion ends up a bit high.
I lived out in Mount Olive, my friend!
My wife’s sister is like that. Always a better story. Lol
You have used the words chloride and chlorine interchangeably. I am getting myself confused. Can you help with my confusion?
Typos honestly. And lazy use of language. And sometimes letting autofill/swype do whatever. Chloride is derived from chlorine though. IDK if you use any crops that use chlorine fertiliser. I fully admit it really doesn’t matter to me which is said so I don’t bother about it. Like chlorine in soil comes from chloride in rainwater and so on. like the best way to explain it, like chlorine is a periodic table name, chloride comes from chlorine but can be anything with chlorine in it. There’s some stuff about ions I don’t 100% understand in the most technical definition but it combines with other elements basically so like. Chlorine attaches to potassium or magnesium and becomes magnesium chloride etc. Don’t expect the fancy end of the chemistry talk on me with that one 100%. It becomes part of plant uptake. TLDR They’re Essentially The Same But Not 100%. Chloride is more what it becomes once it contacts, say, Magnesium or some other nutrient, best I’ve understood its explaining to me on the chemistry front.
Here, actually, this explains it better than my brain shaking out 12th grade chemistry and farm knowledge,
“Plants take up chlorine (Cl) as the chloride (Cl-) anion. It’s active in energy reactions in the plant. Most Cl- in soils comes from salt trapped in parent materials, marine aerosols and volcanic emissions. […] Chloride supports the transport of nutrients such as calcium, magnesium and potassium within a plant.”
It can oversanitize soil and kill microbiomes but is also ironically a nutrient that a lot of growers are unwittingly packing in with their soil formulas and the like, so it’s more about balance, application and practice of it. I was using literal fill dirt trash soil that had none, and was actively cultivating my own microbiome into it, and even needed to add it so the plants could. yknow. eat. The oversanitization thing tends to come with people dumping it in on top of things they didn’t realize already dumped it in on top of dirt that pre-emptively dumped it in and so on, or conflicting with the biodome created.
Also in final note as I’m tired of all the Well Akshullies.
When not discussing hydro, Chlorine under 150 ppm is not considered toxic to plants. For example, my city water runs 22.5 chloride. And yes, listed as chloride, because chlorine dissipates incredibly quickly which is why some municipalities use chloramines instead. Mine does not. By the time most chlorine reaches the user it’s already a chloride. In fact, most other things people consider feeds (boron, calcium, magnesium, potassium, even molybdenum) are in low doses in tap water. I always make sure to pull up my municipal water tests before using anything. But for example, pulling it up now-- “Total Chlorine” with an N is 2.68. Chloride is 22.5. Both are hilariously far beneath plant toxicity, and none of my plant supplements come pre-loaded with Chloride forms. Water must contain some 65 parts per million to kill soil microorganisms at a depth of 6 inches. Mine will never come close and basically everyone shitting bricks online is all doing it because someone else trained them to. Even heavily chloriNated water at 5 (as opposed to my 2.68) will not kill microorganisms past the top half inch of soil. It is a very very funny garden myth mostly antagonized by people pumping their dirt full of other stuff that imbalances it and then screaming about chlorine. Or people who grow in very small containers where nothing is truly more than 6 inches from any given edge.
“A Colorado State University Extension article mentions a study in which researchers irrigated soil with highly chlorinated water for 126 days straight. Just 48 hours after they ceased watering, the soil microorganism populations rebounded to their before-treatment levels for all depths of soil.”
Unless someone is truly drowning their plants, on the daily, growing in a choking planter too small for proper root or true biome development, this should not be a thing for someone, ever, unless they are indeed dumping in other chloride based compounds to point of saturation. Since I give my plants 2 cu ft dirt each at minimum and only flush rarely, it will literally never be a problem for me, and never has been. Probably because I have never relied on titanic amounts of bottled nutrients or forum old wives tales. Growers can have all the opinions about it they want, but farmers and colleges worldwide have different takes. As do my plants that often grow at exponential rates due to the chloride availability for their growth compared to people that freak out about it and tell me I’m wrong. “That doesn’t make SENSE, how did you use TIMBERLINE and get a plant THAT BIG THAT FAST?” because I’m not afraid of chloride.
So anyway yes I’ve had it up to my ears with that one and people can come at me all they want.
I have a BS and MS in chemistry. Sorry if my question offended you.
No, no. It’s every person that keeps this going, I’m frustrated at the growing community. It’s @ every person that has to hop on and ask about it or continues to endorse it. So don’t even take it all @ you. It’s at a culture that’s developed. It’s at above responders. It’s at a lot. because I literally woke up frustrated about this. The amount of consumerism that has been bred into the hobby in the last ten years has made me chew glass. And the arrogance about it to boot. So even beyond @ you in particular, because I was already typing this when I woke up before your notif:
This page also uses conservative margins for safety. The actual point of things like sodium problems start kicking in above 50, usually around 70, and you’ll notice if your plants are having trouble taking in or retaining water. Chloride is also closer to the 50 range. But the amount of people that reverse osmosis this out just to pay to add it back in, even in dirt mediums, is mind boggling. Mostly because of fundamental exaggerations about Chlorine.
Here’s my city water.
Sodium high for the conservative chart, but still in the safe range. Because again, I don’t dump excess mixed fertilisers in that become their own salts in the soil. The only thing truly out of range here is the Sulfates, which I haven’t heard a single person make a squawk about in the history of ever, because the chlorine/chloride fear usurps all when you could even dump pool water on them and only kill the top layer.
And Sulfates? Sulfate poisoning is real, real hard to do and my plants have never shown signs. They process sulfurs/sulphates real damn well.
Nobody likes hearing they’ve been convinced by a series of old wives tales on the internet that they were convinced to spend $1000 to remake really fancy tap water but it’s what the majority of people are doing. All the time.