Hello Epic Gardeners welcome to Monday's episode. This is April 17th, 2017 and today we are talking

about nitrogen toxicity. It sounds really serious and actually it can be but

typically gardeners especially hydroponic gardeners run into the opposite problem

a nutrient deficiency or a nitrogen deficiency.

However, in hydroponics, especially as a beginner, it is very easy to give your plants too much nutrition.

Remember, we're growing in water and we're adding the nutrients.

So if you add too much, you're going to be bathing your plants' roots in a solution that is too concentrated with

nutrition. Specifically nitrogen. So nitrogen is one of the most important nutrients for

plants, but too much again can cause serious harm to your garden. And if left unchecked,

nitrogen toxicity, the symptoms of that can completely kill your plants.

Plants needed a lot of nitrogen, this much we know, especially during their vegetative stage of growth.

Most of the time, it's pretty hard to give them too much, but every now and then you can get too excited and flood your nutrient reservoir with excess nitrogen.

This typically happens because you don't change out your nutrient reservoir and you just top it

off and you haven't done a correct measurement on exactly how much nutrient solution is

remaining. So you might be just topping up and adding way too much. That's the

most common reason that this happens.

So how much nitrogen does your plant need?

These are going to be general rules of thumb, not specific prescriptions for particular

plants, because of course every plant is different, every plant requires a different mixture of nutrients.

However, there are some consistent patterns between all plants that you should know.

First, the vegetative stage. During this stage, your plant will feast on nitrogen as it develops

the stems, the roots, and foliage to support energy production during the flowering phase.

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