If you’ve read our previous articles about growing media trials you should be well-prepared to run your very own trial.
Take time to evaluate
Make sure you schedule time to properly close down the trial and review your findings with your team. Only by reviewing the data in an unbiased way you can make an informed decision and get the most out of your trial.
If you are unwilling to switch to different growing media or change your practices, there’s no use in conducting a trial as you will not review the data fairly. In that case your trial is destined to be a waste of resources.
Compare and relate to your goals
If you’ve collected the data like we described in our previous article, you should have a clear basis to evaluate.
Mark the most relevant differences and make sure to also take your plan and goals to hand again. Focus first on the properties and findings that are directly related to the things you set out to discover. Next you should have a look at all other remarkable or maybe surprising findings and think about the importance of these differences.
Discuss
Make sure to talk to you head grower and other employees involved in the trial to see what they think. Involve the person that collected the data closely and ask for his or her help to interpret the data. Ask for a critical evaluation and review together.
Next steps
At the end of a trial you should be able to determine what you’d like to do next. In some cases a trial shows some interesting findings, but the scale might turn out to be a bit too small to base large decisions on. In that case you can consider to trial the mixture on a larger scale, or make some larger changes in your cultivation methods to trigger bigger differences.
We would always advice you to discuss your trial with our Sales Advisors. Together you can see if your findings are representative for what your supplier has experienced with other growers. Eventually you will have enough information to choose the best mixture.
