When watering your plants, it is essential to use water at the right temperature. This is because the roots of your plants are very sensitive to extremes of temperature. Using water that is too hot or too cold can put your plant under stress and cause damage.

As long as you don’t overheat the roots of your plant and you protect the leaves and crown from the heat, watering with hot water will have no harmful effects. In fact, it’s better to water with hot water than it is to water with very cold water.

Effects. Continually watering plants with hot water will “cook” a plant’s cell walls, effectively killing them and killing the plant. Plants with dead cells will lose their turgidity, and they will wilt all over and die.

Some gardeners boil water if they believe in contains impurities or chemicals that could be dangerous to their plants. Boiling water will kill most contaminants, theoretically making the water safer for sensitive plants. The water must cool to room temperature before using, however, or the heat will kill the plants.

Carbon dioxide is the most common cause of acidity in water ¹⁵. Photosynthesis, respiration and decomposition all contribute to pH fluctuations due to their influences on CO2 levels. This increases H2CO3, which decreases pH. The effect is becoming more evident in oceanic pH studies over time.

Water left out will absorb a small amount of oxygen, a very small portion of which—about 0.13 percent, says DNews—converts into carbonic acid. That carbonic acid then converts into carbonate or bicarbonate, lowering the pH of your water and turning it ever so slightly more acidic.

24 to 48 hours

Treat your drinking water if it’s acidic or basic. If the drinking water is acidic (low pH number), add pH drops or tablets to neutralize the acid. Alternately, if your drinking water is basic (high pH number), add a few drops of lemon juice, which is naturally acidic.

When it comes to chemical or mineral fertilizers, they’re much less thick and easier to dissolve in water. If you mix your water in with this kind of nutrient, it can last three or four days up to two weeks.

Bottom line: just keep it simple. Feed the plants once or twice (with half the amount of nutrients each time) a week and give plain water the rest of the time.

Light will cause algae to grow when both water and nutrients are present….and heat will cause micro-organisms to multiply very rapidly. Avoid both and you should be OK for short term storage. I always kept a lid on my extra nutrients, more to avoid spills than for any other reason.