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Easily Available Water

March 30, 2021

The composition of growing media determines which properties it brings to your greenhouse and how it supports your plants. In this article we’d like to go deeper into one of the important properties of growing media: Easily (or Readily) Available Water (EAW).

What is Easily Available Water?

This is the amount of water that is left in the growing media after irrigation. Plants can take up this water with little capillary force. This means it takes the plant little energy to take up the water through its roots. Crops can then use this energy for growth and development.

As you might realize already, growers can actually use the EAW to steer crop growth. If you need a plant to be more compact, you can choose to use growing media that offer a lower amount of EAW. This way the plant needs to work harder to get to the water. In that case less energy will be left for growth. This is only desirable for some specific crops and mainly used in the cultivation of ornamental plants.

Medicinal cannabis and EAW

Your cannabis plants however need to develop a large amount of strong and healthy foliage for you to get a high yield in the end. As you can see it’s important to grow your medicinal cannabis plants in growing media with the right properties.

Growing media for medicinal cannabis

With our growing media containing high-quality European peat your cannabis plants are sure of optimal support. It offers great structural support and supreme hydro dynamics. The even water distribution enables exquisite root development and these growing media benefit growth through a high amount of EAW.

Watch this short animation video to see how peat-based growing media compare to other growing media when it comes to the amount of Easily Available Water:

If this was interesting to you, please also read the following article to learn more about other buffer capacities these growing media offer:

Cannabis Growing Media and pH buffer

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