Hydroponic gardening is wonderful for so many reasons, but we growers still run into problems from time to time. In fact, as a beginner, there can be more problems than gardening in the soil!
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Nitrogen toxicity is one of these annoying problems. Nitrogen is one of the most important nutrients for plants, but too much can cause serious harm to your garden. If left unchecked, nitrogen toxicity can completely kill your plants.
- General Hydroponics FloraNova GrowDyna-Gro Foliage ProGeneral Hydroponics FloraNova BloomDyna-Gro Bloom
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What is Nitrogen Toxicity?
Plants need a lot of nitrogen, especially in their vegetative stage of growth. Most of the time it’s hard to give them too much, but every now and then you can get too excited and flood your nutrient reservoir with excess nitrogen.
When that happens, your plants cannot handle the surplus and begin to struggle. This happens most often in the flowering stage of growth when plants need less nitrogen than they did in earlier stages. If you keep nitrogen levels stable and don’t properly adjust your nutrient mixture, you could be setting your garden up for nitrogen toxicity.
How Much Nitrogen Does Your Plant Need?
Note: These are general rules of thumb, not specific prescriptions for particular types of plants. Every type of plant is different and requires a different mix of nutrients for optimal growth. However, there are consistent patterns between all plants that you should know.
Vegetative Stage
During this stage, your plant will feast on nitrogen as it develops the stems, roots, and foliage to support energy production during the flowering phase. Almost any type of hydroponic nutrient will do well here. If you are looking for recommendations, both General Hydroponics FloraNova Grow and Dyna-Gro Foliage Pro are great options.
Flowering / Blooming Stage
During this stage, your plants are transitioning from developing a lot of leaves and stems and focusing their energy on buds, flowers, and fruit. If you give your plants too much nitrogen during this phase you can seriously impact its development. Two good nutrient recommendations here are General Hydroponics FloraNova Bloom and Dyna-Gro Bloom. If you can’t source these locally or online, you can make do with a fertilizer designed for cacti, because they have similar nutrient requirements to a blooming plant.
Signs of Nitrogen Toxicity
While the signs of nitrogen toxicity vary slightly based on the plant that you’re growing, there are some universal signals that point to nitrogen toxicity as the problem you’re facing:
- Extremely dark green leaves“Burning” of leaf tips, causing them to turn brownSome leaves turning yellow, due to abundance of nitrogen but lack of other nutrients
These symptoms are exacerbated if the pH of your solution is off or if you are over or under-watering your plant. All of these cause your plant to stress easier, making the effects of too much nitrogen more pronounced.
Ruling Out Other Potential Plant Problems
Before you jump to treating your plant for nitrogen toxicity, it’s a good idea to rule out any other potential causes.
First, make sure you aren’t over or under-watering your plant. If you’re growing hydroponically, you shouldn’t have to worry about this because the roots are likely sitting in a nutrient solution of some kind.
Make sure your nutrient solution is being properly oxygenated with air stones, and that the pH and temperature of your nutrient solution are within normal ranges.
Finally, check the air temperature of your grow tent or grow room and make sure it’s not too hot or cold.
If your garden passes all of these checks, it’s very likely you have a nitrogen toxicity problem and you can move on to treatment and prevention options.
Treating Nitrogen Toxicity
If you guessed that the solution to nitrogen toxicity is “stop giving your plants so much nitrogen,” you’d be right! But treating an existing garden suffering from nitrogen toxicity isn’t quite that simple, though it’s still pretty easy to fix.
Check the PPM / EC of your solution and ensure that is within normal ranges for your plant’s stage of growth. If it isn’t, you can:
- Dilute the solution with fresh water, being sure to calibrate your pH afterwardsChange out your nutrient reservoir completely with fresh water and nutrients
If your plant is in the flowering phase, nutrient levels look good, and you’re still suffering from symptoms of nitrogen toxicity, you should probably do a complete reservoir change and add fresh nutrients. It might be the case that you have too much nitrogen as a percentage of total nutrients in the solution, causing poor results during the flowering phase.
If you’re growing in soil but don’t feel that you’re over-feeding your plants, you may just have soil that has a higher concentration of nitrogen than normal. To fix this, filter and pH some water and pour it in the soil that houses the affected plants. This will flush out some of the nutrient contents of your soil and hopefully solve the problem.
