Getting sick of looking at nutrient schedules....

Yesdog

Yesdog

Well-Known Member
looks like my plants are going to have to deal with 2n-1p-4k (ppm) lol. thankfully i had to add like 10ml of ph down- should be a shitload of phosphorus
 
T

THE KONASSURE

Well-Known Member
I have a 1-2-3+tm+cal/mag "bumper crop" powder and potassium sulphate

I use both to "bulk out" expensive "hydro" and "coco" nutes

sometimes I just use the a+b shit sometimes I just use my powder shit

hell sometimes just potassium sulphate solo does a good job, (mostly in the last 1 to 4 weeks)

but yeah £10 for 5kg of powder food and potassium sulphate is cheap too

So when GHE and Plant magic and canna and such drop there prices than maybe I`d use more of them but the bumper crop powder is great and cheap, hell kinda tempted to just use that and my home made boosters, but its nice to have some branded stuff, makes you feel like its got the right stuff in it, lol
 
Yesdog

Yesdog

Well-Known Member
THE KONASSURE said:
I have a 1-2-3+tm+cal/mag "bumper crop" powder and potassium sulphate

I use both to "bulk out" expensive "hydro" and "coco" nutes

sometimes I just use the a+b shit sometimes I just use my powder shit

hell sometimes just potassium sulphate solo does a good job, (mostly in the last 1 to 4 weeks)

but yeah £10 for 5kg of powder food and potassium sulphate is cheap too

So when GHE and Plant magic and canna and such drop there prices than maybe I`d use more of them but the bumper crop powder is great and cheap, hell kinda tempted to just use that and my home made boosters, but its nice to have some branded stuff, makes you feel like its got the right stuff in it, lol
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Hah, yea I'm about at the point where GH trio is really starting to lose its value to me. In the future I might just keep the Micro and go with salts for everything else. I'd use salts for the micro but I honestly don't trust myself to mix dry micronutrients right.
 
T

THE KONASSURE

Well-Known Member
Yesdog said:
Hah, yea I'm about at the point where GH trio is really starting to lose its value to me. In the future I might just keep the Micro and go with salts for everything else. I'd use salts for the micro but I honestly don't trust myself to mix dry micronutrients right.
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Yeah doing micro is tricky unless your mixing up kg`s at once then it must be pretty easy

you can get some premixed "trace" powders and stuff

but maybe just switch to Plant magics "roots" or something but the Micro from GH is pretty good I like something like that or plant start or something

you know something mild is good for when there very young

I have a big bottle of plant magic soil grow, I use that when there little or to fill out veg food, its cheap and drops the ph a wee bit

but I mean they say something like 15 to 30ml per gal but 30ML per gal don`t even give 200ppm`s, its cool I only paid 5 ot 10 quid for a 5L bottle

same with my coco a+b hard water bloom from plant magic, 2 x 5L bottles think I paid £10 or £20, honestly I`m kinda tempted to buy it again when it runs out, its around £34 for 2 x 5L bottles again on ebay.... Just it`s nice to use going into flower till week 4/6 to make sure I get enough cal/mag

and its got buffers and lowers the ph so if my water butt`s much over ph6 I use more of the a+b, if I`m closer to ph5 then I use the powder food

also got a veg and a bloom food liquid feed I got cheap that has seaweed and stuff in it too, they seem to put ph up so I use them when ph is low in my butt if I wanna bring it up a bit

but I doubt I`ll re-stock them when they run out, I mean there good for loading PGR`s into and using as boosters but not worth the hassle of having extra bottles when I could just adjust the ph before hand
 
Yesdog

Yesdog

Well-Known Member
Hmmm yea I'll definitely have to reformulate once i start running out of the GH trio (or at least micro). Just find something cheap with some micro and maybe buffers.

That's interesting using dry vs mixed for pH control- I don't even know how much phosphorus is even in ph down, but i use the shit like its going out of style...
 
firsttimeARE

firsttimeARE

Well-Known Member
www dot hydro-gardens dot com

Buy yourself some CaNO3, MKP, 5-11-26 mix and go to wal-mart and buy some epsom salts and be done with it.

Way more flexible. You're not stuck with whats in the bottle. WAY CHEAPER. Less than 2 cents a final gallon of solution.

25lb bag 5-11-26 $45
25lb bag CaNO3 $24
5lb bag MKP $12 (flower only)
8lb bag MgSO4(epsom salt) from walmart $6

3g/gal CaNO3
1g/gal MgSO4 (epsom salts)
2g/gal 5-11-26 w/ micros (1.28oz/gal liquid measurement, more on that later)

In veg it works out to 2-1-2-2-1-0.5 NPK Ca Mg S

So back to the liquid. I bought a 14gal food grade plastic container off ebay. Was like $36 shipped. I made it a 100:1 concentrate for the 5-11-26. So 2200g of 5-11-26 with 11gal of distilled water. I put the mix in first then stir up after each gallon I add. It seals up air tight and is blue so I put it out of the light in a closet in the basement. It stays pretty well. I found some floaters (colonizing bacteria) and scooped them out and nothing repopulated so thats good.

I got it tested and its pretty consistent with the ratios on the label with slight variations. The reason behind this is the mix is in a 25lb bag and the closer I can get to putting as much as possible (5lbs or so each batch) the closer I am to the guaranteed analysis. If I were to add 6g per 5 gal bucket (only really fits 3gal) at a time thats 3/5675th of the bag vs 1/5 of the bag.

It is a lot of mix and will do 1100gal of end solution, so depending on what you're doing you could tone it back to your needs and get it checked. Anything is better than just tossing grams of it in buckets.

Flower formula is easy, just tone back the CaNO3 to about 2g/gal and on week 3 add MKP at 0.5g/gal.
 
Yesdog

Yesdog

Well-Known Member
firsttimeARE said:
Oh an that is max strength (1.8EC) I use 2/3rds of that and target around 1.2EC
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holy shit, this is some good stuff! Might be a while before im ready to make several gallons of my own ready mix- might just start with some kind of nitrogen booster or something. But this definitely looks like the right route
 
Yesdog

Yesdog

Well-Known Member
are there any other good/stable salts for nitrogen? Guess KNO3 + CaNO3 are probably best.
 
rkymtnman

rkymtnman

Well-Known Member
mytwhyt said:
I guess i should have posted what it is... GH Floranova Bloom... Scottyballs got me started using it after reading
his RIU waterfarm thread... https://www.rollitup.org/t/pineapple-express-g13-labs-seed-to-harvest.344359/
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GH decided to get in on the action of the Lucas formula and designed a new nutrient copy of it (but added some fulvics/humics too for good measure) and then patented it. 8mL/gal is the exact Lucas formula.

i didn't like it. mixes up too thick for my liking and i had a lot of crap settle at the bottom of my res even when using a waterfall in it.
 
Yesdog

Yesdog

Well-Known Member
rkymtnman said:
GH decided to get in on the action of the Lucas formula and designed a new nutrient copy of it (but added some fulvics/humics too for good measure) and then patented it. 8mL/gal is the exact Lucas formula.

i didn't like it. mixes up too thick for my liking and i had a lot of crap settle at the bottom of my res even when using a waterfall in it.
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I'm really starting to think the high Ca can be problematic with really high micro contents like that. Plus... is it really even possible to get micro deficiency when using micro at the recommended amounts? I feel like doubling down on all these chelated micros and Ca cant do anything good for your solubility. This is also my suspicion on why Lucas requires RO (besides just the 'simplicity'), you simply cant have any hard elements in your water or it'll effect solubilit, uptake and pH (at the high end of hard minerals). Only reference ive seen of 'safe' things to add to lucas is PK booster at the end, and PK should be extremely soluble (hell, still might push out some hard elements tho).

Hmm, usually by the time ive got SI/cal-mag/micro all mixed (semi-hard water, mixed to about 120ppm before micro) I already get a bit of precipitation, and I havent even gone over 5ml/gal for micro so far (and using fractions of recommended SI/cal-mag). I can't imagine running the full 8. I'm also running almost... 2ml/gal pH down I'm sure this does no good for the calcium content of the water (locking it up maybe). If a mineral/element drives up your pH, it will precipitate at high pH (and opposite for acids). So I would almost have to start adding acid before micro which i think is a big no-no?

Our city water was coming out unusually hard a few days ago (the city 'bumped' a treatment tank and flushed a bunch of lime/carbonates into the water). Added a bunch of pH up (like maybe 5ml to a cup of water) and got precipitation. So... add in a bunch of other hard alkaline minerals and it definitely reaches some limits there.

I'm pretty afraid to add that much more calcium basically, lucas might have just the right amount of Calcium, but it's gotta be on the high end. I'm also to stubborn to switch to R/O, but it wont do me much good anyways because i want to run SI (for heat resistance). Already at 130ppm Ca with my current mix + tapwater, if i ran 8ml of micro Id be at about 200ppm Ca (lucas caps out at 140). I'm realllly starting to like the idea of a low-calcium low-nitrogen base. These both seem like easy enough issues to identify and fix without having to change your res.

Just for fun- here's what it took to pH my final mix. came in around pH 6.5, took maybe 1.5 ml/gal ph down. Used the phDown SDS to find out the actual NPK (elemental ppm: 3-25-0 ppm at 1ml/gal), so i'm also adding a shit ton of P (extra 35ppm almost).




You can see the first pH 'jump', that's when i changed out the rez. Also interesting to see the CO2 content when I filled the new rez (I normally cause little bumps in CO2 with my breath, but tent was actually closed most of the refill). The final mix gassed off CO2 for almost 2 hours, best guess is its the mix neutralizing the carbonates and/or the bennie microbes.

EDIT: I also decided to leave my 'broken' veg mix where it is- it ended up being low P, but I pretty much just evened it out with all this ph down.
 
rkymtnman

rkymtnman

Well-Known Member
when i was strictly using Lucas, i used RO and probably 5/10 (8/16 is too strong at my altitude) and pH came out perfect every time 5.8

since then i've slowly started changing it a bit. added Si which raised my pH above 6.3

then switched over to well water and to balance that out started using fulvic acid to aid in nute uptake.

i'm back dialed in again. mix up a batch and i add 3 capfuls of Down and i'm at 5.8. stayes there for a week until i dump the res.

repeat, repeat, etc.

now i don't have to run to walmart to buy jugs of RO and life is easy.
 
Yesdog

Yesdog

Well-Known Member
rkymtnman said:
when i was strictly using Lucas, i used RO and probably 5/10 (8/16 is too strong at my altitude) and pH came out perfect every time 5.8

since then i've slowly started changing it a bit. added Si which raised my pH above 6.3

then switched over to well water and to balance that out started using fulvic acid to aid in nute uptake.

i'm back dialed in again. mix up a batch and i add 3 capfuls of Down and i'm at 5.8. stayes there for a week until i dump the res.

repeat, repeat, etc.

now i don't have to run to walmart to buy jugs of RO and life is easy.
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Beautiful. That's pretty much where I want to be at. Getting my batch of FulMag today! What are you using for fulvics?

I think ultimately I want to get to that point: tap water, fulvics, si, 5/10 (at least in bloom). I don't care about pH fussiness that much, I have that constant graph at my disposal so I can adjust very quickly if needed, and also head off slow 'ramp up' trends. More worried about pH extremes while mixing and destabilizing hard minerals, but that still might mean nothing as long as you mix in the right order.

I'm going to try and keep it up with the live res tho- was reading more about humics yesterday and apparently they oxidize rather easily (and consume oxidizers), plus are a food source of their own for microbes (i think that was more humics vs fulvics tho). Started brewing the humics with my tea and adding it just as part of my 'tea' regiment to avoid any infection it might cause on its own.
 
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