It is important not just how much plants are fed, but also how they are fed. Imagine that the only source of liquid available for you to drink was a highly concentrated sugar solution. Drinking it would only make you more thirsty and cause you to drink more. You would get very fat (Good for us pot growers), but your resistance to disease and your reproductive success would be severly retarded. (not so bad if we keep clean growrooms, and hey we aint growing for seeds right!)
This is a bit like what happens to plants if they are over-indulged with water-soluble fertilisers. They cannot absorb water to replace what they use up and lose through evaporation from their leaves without making the concentration of salts in their system too high. So they are forced to drink more to try to equalise. If the fertiliser solution is very nitrogen-rich, they put on lots of new growth and, at least in laboratory conditions (Our growrooms) appear to be doing very well.
However, without theother nutrients available to build healthy new cells, this new growth is made up of thin-walled, weak cells that are excessivley vulnerable to pests. (particularly sap-suckers like aphids and diseases (particularly fungus diseases). They have a much lower nutrient value as food (dont matter to us) and convert excess nitrogen into nitrosamine, the same carcinogen found in cure meats. (This part is a little disturbing but i dont know if it relates to canna growers)
^^ got this from a permaculture book. I think it m ight help some a little more to understand what is happening in an indoor hydro situation
This is a bit like what happens to plants if they are over-indulged with water-soluble fertilisers. They cannot absorb water to replace what they use up and lose through evaporation from their leaves without making the concentration of salts in their system too high. So they are forced to drink more to try to equalise. If the fertiliser solution is very nitrogen-rich, they put on lots of new growth and, at least in laboratory conditions (Our growrooms) appear to be doing very well.
However, without theother nutrients available to build healthy new cells, this new growth is made up of thin-walled, weak cells that are excessivley vulnerable to pests. (particularly sap-suckers like aphids and diseases (particularly fungus diseases). They have a much lower nutrient value as food (dont matter to us) and convert excess nitrogen into nitrosamine, the same carcinogen found in cure meats. (This part is a little disturbing but i dont know if it relates to canna growers)
^^ got this from a permaculture book. I think it m ight help some a little more to understand what is happening in an indoor hydro situation