mccumcumber
Well-Known Member
Disclaimer: I have only been growing cannabis for two years now, these claims are based off of my personal observations and are meant to be discussed and built upon by the support and help of other members. This is also primarily intended for soil growers, because that is what I do!
Ok, so, you want giant frosty buds? Most hydro store owners will tell you to buy the most expensive nutrients... this is not always the best idea. In my opinion, nutrients are a lot like spices, and your medium (if using soil) is lot like your steak and potatoes. Surprisingly enough, a good base soil is really all you need. This will give you your basic steak and potatoes. If you don't like steak or potatoes then this analogy/thread probably isn't for you.
I would recommend for most people's first go around to use just base soil. It puts less variables out there and lets the first time grower become comfortable with watering. I view watering like putting oil on the pan. You want enough oil to make sure the steak doesn't stick, but you don't want too much, because then you've just ruined your steak. The same is true with water. Too little watering will result in a crappy plant and too much watering will also result in a crappy plant. Watering to me is pretty instinctual. There are a lot of cool ways to tell when you need to water your plant, and you will figure them out after your first time growing... unless you just really don't give a shit about your plant and consistently fuck up. Once you find YOUR way to tell when the plants need water, and how much water they need you are on your way to becoming a successful grower!
Now, some people just like to cook steak the way it is, and eat their potatoes the way they are. I am not one of those people. I prefer to marinade my steak and put some garlic in my potatoes. Marinading your steak is like making making a soil recipe. You can use your own, or use a famous person's recipe. In my current grow I am using subcool's super soil... and I'd have to say that I am very happy with it. Like a marinade, a soil mixture is a combination of your base soil (steak) and different organic (maybe inorganic but I can't think of any examples) fertilizers, trace elements, and nutrients. Each fertilizer should have a npk rating as well as whatever other essential nutrients are in it. Now, some people think you can just add up all of the npk values and that would be your total npk, this is only true if you use an even amount of each fertilizer. If you do not, then some math is necessary. Lets make an example!
These are false numbers and I by no means recommend using just this in a mix, it's just an example so you can see how to add up npk values.
Say you are adding a bat guano with a npk rating of 1-5-2 and fish bone meal (fbm) with a npk rating of 0-10-1. Lets say you added 4 pounds of your bat guano and 1 pound of fbm.
You have added 5 pounds total of fertilizer and 4 pounds of that is bat guano, so 80% of your mixture is bat guano, leaving 20% of you mixture as fbm. To find out the npk rating of your mixture you multiply 0.8 (80%) to the bat guano's npk and 0.2 to the fbm's npk and add the numbers up. In this case:
((0.8 * 1-5-2) = 0.8-4-1.6) + ((0.2 * 0-10-1) = 0-2-0.2)= 1-6-1.8
Yes some basic mathematics is necessary, but knowing what you are doing is priceless when it comes to growing, so it's worth the mathematics.
If you intend on making your own soil recipe (which is totally possible) keep in mind that fertilizer act like spices in your marinade. Yes they are very helpful, but a little bit goes a long way. DO NOT load up a soil/steak with mostly fertilizers/spices, it will result in garbage. And, as many cooks out here know, there are other essential ingredients to marinades as well, such as wine. Lots of people, including myself, use a lot of wine to marinade their steak. Wine is very similar to worm castings. I cannot emphasize enough how useful worm castings are in any soil recipe. Just think about how many dead worms there are in a typical outdoor plot of land. There's a fucking ton. There are other things like garlic which compose the trace elements. Such as dolomite. I would highly recommend using a good soil recipe first, then, in future grows, try making your own, or tweaking the recipe a bit, once you understand what each element in the recipe is doing. Also, like a marinade, soil recipes need to sit for a while. I would recommend at least a month of letting your recipe sit.
Onto the spices while cooking! After a marinated steak with some garlic added to my potatoes, I pretty much call it a day when it comes to additional spices. I may add a little bit of chili pepper though to give it an extra kick. I would consider this to be foliar feeding. Foliar feeding can get really tricky indoors, because you can burn your leaves with those HIDs hitting the water/nutes on the leaves. I usually put my foliar spray on my plants during their last hour or two of their dark cycle to help eliminate this problem. There might be better/more productive ways to do this, but this method works for me.
Lets say that I forgot to add some spice to my marinade, or I just wanted to add a spice while cooking. This would be like adding liquid nutrients. To find the npk value of your liquid nutrients is the same as finding the npk values for mixing fertilizers. Be careful not to add too much nutrients/spice. The recommended values are a generalization, and may not be right for your plants. Adding nutrients is a lot like watering, you really need to find your own way of telling how many nutrients a plant needs. A good rule of thumb is, if your plants look happy, you're probably doing a good job.
Also, ONLY FEED WHEN YOUR PLANT WANTS TO BE FED! (again, something your going to need to figure out through experience) Overfeeding/over spicing results in garbage.
I also like to add a tiny amount of sugar to my steak toward the end of cooking it, as I do with my soil. I don't use just plain sugar, and neither should you. Options are molasses, sucanat (sugar in the raw), and expensive nutrient solutions like bud candy, which, more or less, do the same thing. I recomend (if using molasses or sucanat) to add 1-2 teaspoons per gallon of water for week 4-7 of flowering.
Knowing when your steak/bud is done is all you need to do next. Cloudy trichs are the way to go in my opinion, maybe with 5-10% amber.
Hopefully someone finds this to be useful. Have a good day and happy growing!
Ok, so, you want giant frosty buds? Most hydro store owners will tell you to buy the most expensive nutrients... this is not always the best idea. In my opinion, nutrients are a lot like spices, and your medium (if using soil) is lot like your steak and potatoes. Surprisingly enough, a good base soil is really all you need. This will give you your basic steak and potatoes. If you don't like steak or potatoes then this analogy/thread probably isn't for you.
I would recommend for most people's first go around to use just base soil. It puts less variables out there and lets the first time grower become comfortable with watering. I view watering like putting oil on the pan. You want enough oil to make sure the steak doesn't stick, but you don't want too much, because then you've just ruined your steak. The same is true with water. Too little watering will result in a crappy plant and too much watering will also result in a crappy plant. Watering to me is pretty instinctual. There are a lot of cool ways to tell when you need to water your plant, and you will figure them out after your first time growing... unless you just really don't give a shit about your plant and consistently fuck up. Once you find YOUR way to tell when the plants need water, and how much water they need you are on your way to becoming a successful grower!
Now, some people just like to cook steak the way it is, and eat their potatoes the way they are. I am not one of those people. I prefer to marinade my steak and put some garlic in my potatoes. Marinading your steak is like making making a soil recipe. You can use your own, or use a famous person's recipe. In my current grow I am using subcool's super soil... and I'd have to say that I am very happy with it. Like a marinade, a soil mixture is a combination of your base soil (steak) and different organic (maybe inorganic but I can't think of any examples) fertilizers, trace elements, and nutrients. Each fertilizer should have a npk rating as well as whatever other essential nutrients are in it. Now, some people think you can just add up all of the npk values and that would be your total npk, this is only true if you use an even amount of each fertilizer. If you do not, then some math is necessary. Lets make an example!
These are false numbers and I by no means recommend using just this in a mix, it's just an example so you can see how to add up npk values.
Say you are adding a bat guano with a npk rating of 1-5-2 and fish bone meal (fbm) with a npk rating of 0-10-1. Lets say you added 4 pounds of your bat guano and 1 pound of fbm.
You have added 5 pounds total of fertilizer and 4 pounds of that is bat guano, so 80% of your mixture is bat guano, leaving 20% of you mixture as fbm. To find out the npk rating of your mixture you multiply 0.8 (80%) to the bat guano's npk and 0.2 to the fbm's npk and add the numbers up. In this case:
((0.8 * 1-5-2) = 0.8-4-1.6) + ((0.2 * 0-10-1) = 0-2-0.2)= 1-6-1.8
Yes some basic mathematics is necessary, but knowing what you are doing is priceless when it comes to growing, so it's worth the mathematics.
If you intend on making your own soil recipe (which is totally possible) keep in mind that fertilizer act like spices in your marinade. Yes they are very helpful, but a little bit goes a long way. DO NOT load up a soil/steak with mostly fertilizers/spices, it will result in garbage. And, as many cooks out here know, there are other essential ingredients to marinades as well, such as wine. Lots of people, including myself, use a lot of wine to marinade their steak. Wine is very similar to worm castings. I cannot emphasize enough how useful worm castings are in any soil recipe. Just think about how many dead worms there are in a typical outdoor plot of land. There's a fucking ton. There are other things like garlic which compose the trace elements. Such as dolomite. I would highly recommend using a good soil recipe first, then, in future grows, try making your own, or tweaking the recipe a bit, once you understand what each element in the recipe is doing. Also, like a marinade, soil recipes need to sit for a while. I would recommend at least a month of letting your recipe sit.
Onto the spices while cooking! After a marinated steak with some garlic added to my potatoes, I pretty much call it a day when it comes to additional spices. I may add a little bit of chili pepper though to give it an extra kick. I would consider this to be foliar feeding. Foliar feeding can get really tricky indoors, because you can burn your leaves with those HIDs hitting the water/nutes on the leaves. I usually put my foliar spray on my plants during their last hour or two of their dark cycle to help eliminate this problem. There might be better/more productive ways to do this, but this method works for me.
Lets say that I forgot to add some spice to my marinade, or I just wanted to add a spice while cooking. This would be like adding liquid nutrients. To find the npk value of your liquid nutrients is the same as finding the npk values for mixing fertilizers. Be careful not to add too much nutrients/spice. The recommended values are a generalization, and may not be right for your plants. Adding nutrients is a lot like watering, you really need to find your own way of telling how many nutrients a plant needs. A good rule of thumb is, if your plants look happy, you're probably doing a good job.
Also, ONLY FEED WHEN YOUR PLANT WANTS TO BE FED! (again, something your going to need to figure out through experience) Overfeeding/over spicing results in garbage.I also like to add a tiny amount of sugar to my steak toward the end of cooking it, as I do with my soil. I don't use just plain sugar, and neither should you. Options are molasses, sucanat (sugar in the raw), and expensive nutrient solutions like bud candy, which, more or less, do the same thing. I recomend (if using molasses or sucanat) to add 1-2 teaspoons per gallon of water for week 4-7 of flowering.
Knowing when your steak/bud is done is all you need to do next. Cloudy trichs are the way to go in my opinion, maybe with 5-10% amber.
Hopefully someone finds this to be useful. Have a good day and happy growing!
