Welcome back my friends, I hope you're doing well in this transitionary period in the

garden.

Hopefully, a fall garden is going in the ground or in a hydroponic system for you.

We have Mike Chang back on the show.

He's the in-house agronomist for Growers House, which is an absolutely massive hydroponic

retailer.

I've been working with them for a few years now and love the guys on the team.

So Mike, we've been talking pretty deep on nutrients.

Now we're sort of moving into how these nutrients interact as well as if you are a hydroponic

grower of any scale, how will you sort of have to work with that growing media to get

the right results?

Yeah, I think a good place to start is just kind of defining what we're working with here.

So in soil science terms, the ions that are present in your soil solution, which is

the liquid in the soil, are referred to as cations and anions.

Those are positively and negatively charged particles respectively.

So things like calcium, ammonium, magnesium, those things are considered cations because

in solution, when they're dissolved, they have a positive charge.

Things like phosphate, sulfate, fluorine, those are anions because they inherently have

a negative charge wind dissolved in solution.

Makes sense.

So when you hear about a phrase that I hear tossed around all the time, you know, cation exchange

capacity or CEC, I think sometimes that can go over, you know, beginner growers head,

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