Welcome back everyone to the Epic Gardening podcast Mike Chang is back on the show we are

talking about nutrients and how they interplay with pretty much every other aspect of growing

plants.

So Mike is the in-house agronomist for growers house, big hydroponic retailer so he goes

pretty deep in that world but today we're talking about microbes we've had entire guests

on Mike talking about you know the soil food web and how it all interplays but you know

it's interesting to hear your perspective on first of all I guess a sort of a naive

question can you use microbial life in a hydroponic system or is that not recommended?

Yeah you absolutely can especially if you're doing in a nerd media like say cocoa, rock,

things like that.

It's actually pretty advantageous to use beneficial cultures if not for you know their obvious

benefits like increasing your nutritional availability, water availability, availability

things like that but in a hydroponic environment it helps to serve as kind of competitive exclusion.

So if you have those beneficials in your root zone they kind of take the spot that

a pathogenic microorganism could have taken if your beneficials weren't there in the

first place.

Okay that makes sense.

If you're going to use it in so it makes sense in hydro that you would need to introduce

it right because it's you're sort of building the environment.

In soil how would you approach it would you just sort of let it be and sort of let the

soil food web sort of develop itself or would you give it a kickstart?

You know I think giving it a kickstart always helps but I think a big key with especially

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