Your first hydroponic recipe
Your first hydroponic recipe
You have a hub, a reservoir, and a pump. Now what tells the plant how to grow? A recipe. Think of it as Docker for plants — portable growing instructions that describe pH, EC, light, and dosing targets independent of your specific hardware. Here is how to pick and run your first one.
Start from the marketplace
The fastest path is not to author a recipe — it is to download a proven one. The recipe marketplace is full of community grows with real outcome data. Filter by plant and growing method (NFT, DWC, Tower, and so on), sort by outcome-derived rating, and download the one that matches your setup.
What a recipe actually contains
- Target bands for pH and EC, with soft and hard limits.
- A light schedule — photoperiod per growth stage.
- Stage transitions — seedling → vegetative → harvest, with the targets that change between them.
- Safety limits the platform enforces so a bad recipe can't run a pump dry or dose your reservoir to a dangerous pH.
Running it
Pick the recipe in the Start Growing wizard, bind it to your reservoir and probes, and the hub's controller takes over: it reads, compares to the band, and doses only when needed. You watch the compliance band fill in on Analytics.
Before you press start
New to hydro? Two reads first: the Growing Methods guide to confirm your system type, and the Water & Chemistry primer so your source water isn't quietly sabotaging every grow.