Welcome back everyone to the Epic Gardening Podcast.

We're going deep this week on all sorts of topics around nutrients, growing media,

how it all interacts, and trying to give a better understanding, especially to beginner

growers on how to really think about this, especially if you're growing in a hydroponic

situation where you don't have the soil to rely on to do a lot of this work for you.

So we've got Mike Chang back on the show, he's the in-house agronomist for a growers house.

So Mike, we've talked a lot about nutrients.

We have not talked about something I think really important and also somewhat confusing

for beginners, which would be just this, first of all, the entire concept of pH, but

also how to manage it and why is it actually so important that you keep your media or your

soil in a certain range?

Yeah, so a lot of, there are a lot of misconceptions of kind of misunderstanding of what pH is.

So pH is basically the balance of hydrogen, hydroxide, hydronium, which is H30, and the

cat ions and anions in your solution, which we went over earlier, which is the positively

and negatively charged particles, just ions in solution.

The big thing about pH is it affects pretty much all of the uptakeability of all of your

macro and micronutrients.

As far as the ideal pH range goes, you'll hear a lot of anecdotal talk of 5.8 to 6.5,

and that is typical for most dicats and most plants, but you have things like berry

bushes that love like 4.5 or acidic soil, and they've adapted to kind of uptake micronutrients

and macronutrients a little bit differently at their root zone sites than most other plants.

So a lot of this comes down to the charge of these ions and how they either interact

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