Embrrassing Fert Question

[TorturedSoul]

Haven't grown for a while. Never bothered with soil indoors because hydro with GH was so easy, so fun, so productive. But once upon a time someone talked me into getting rid of everything. Of course she left soon afterwards but that's life.

Now... I have pretty much nothing. No good genetics, no good lights, no ferts, no cash.

Any cash that I don't spend on the necessities of life I give to my mother. She has cancer and is not able to work like she used to. Shouldn't have to work at all at her age but again that's life.

So I've mixed up some "soil" with 3 parts perlite, 1 part vermiculite, 1 part peat moss, 1 part cactus soil (filler lol), a bit of pellatized lime, a bit of cal/mag, a pinch of charcoal, blood, sweat, tears.

My choice of ferts at present are whatever I've found under my kitchen sink:

Miracle Grow - Everyone knows what's in this garbage.

Shultz Instant Ultra-Pure Concentrated African Violet Food (8-14-9) - Ammoniacol N 0.7%, Nitrate N 0.4%, Urea N 6.9%. "Potential Acidity 180kg CaCO3 per ton"

Scotts Liquid Plant Food Concentrate (All-Purpose 7-7-7) - 0.7% Ammoniacal N, 1.3% Nitrate N, 5% Urea N, P2O5 7%, soluble K2O 7%, Chelated Cu 0.07%, Chelated Fe 0.12%, Chelated Mn 0.1%, Chelated Zn 0.07%

Plus whatever vitamins I've got in the med cabinet and whatever is in my water besides enough chlorine to make a healthy person vomit ha ha.

Oh yeah, I've got some CFLs which sucks and some seeds from some really crappy mostly-sativa crap that I'm sure wants to grow 22 feet tall over the course of probably a 20-week flowering period <SIGH>.

Any advice? Other than to give up now? Assuming that I can scavenge some decent lighting before it's too late, is there any hope of fruition with one of these three ferts?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Cherma]

Any advice? Other than to give up now? Assuming that I can scavenge some decent lighting before it's too late, is there any hope of fruition with one of these three ferts?

Somethings have a better outlook than others, you have more than others might and can work from that.
How many CFL's (26watt?) how big ana area to grow in do you have?
Start out by using the mix above as you stated for the soil medium. If that is your choice of ferts to use, the 7-7-7 would do as an all around. In small or as needed doses along the way. The hope of fruition will come when you apply some basic assertion to make it happen. There is hope, and you have it.

 

[TorturedSoul]

<ARGH!> My stupid anon proxy keeps loading these pages with me not logged in and checking the keep me logged in box doesn't help. It also won't let me just click on the Quote & formatting buttons in the message editor.

How many CFL's (26watt?)

Right now I've got three 26-watt 6500Ks running. BtW, whoever said those puppies don't put out heat has never tried to unscrew one to read the base after it's been running all day lol. And whoever said they didn't put out as much heat as a good light does... Has apparently not done the math. Looks like (penetration issues aside) it'll take about 34 of them to equal the lumens my old 430-watt HPS put out. That's probably enough to bake a pizza - or at least enough to run an easy-bake oven . And they aren't all that effecient either - that works out to 884 watts! How depressing is THAT? And as to the heat that they DO put out, they aren't in a sealed air-cooled enclosure that I can just vent any way I like (because there wasn't the "garden" smell) and then deal with venting the room-at-large separately. Right now I've got the three bulbs right on the action in an open space (unheated bathroom) because they're tiny enough that the lights are adequately covering them. And the unheated bathroom is staying at 74°F - when the rest of my house is kept at 58°F - so I can just guess that when I get a small box built and start adding bulbs it's going to be hot enough that I won't need my stove to cook on. Oh well...

[/QUOTE] how big ana area to grow in do you have?[/QUOTE]

I live alone - the sky's the limit. I know about not trying to grow monsters in an open room with the light serving unintentional double duty as an area light lol. I'll put my carpentry and paint skills to work as (/if) the plants actually start growing. Or I'll just stick everything into a 30-gallon aluminum trash can (and paint it flat white) if I can't get MANY more bulbs. My goal I guess is like everyone else's, to grow the Amazon rainforest in a small box with a little bit of light. But I am trying to be realistic about the whole thing: I realize that I'll never get good results like I did when I ran hydro and big lights. Or even the 8-12 oz. I got in an 8 sq. ft. box with the 430-watt Son Agro HPS "hobby setup."

I hope that I can approach the yields that I got way back when I first started the indoor thing with a SCoG setup under a tightly-packed bank of 4-foot flouros but we'll see I guess.

Start out by using the mix above as you stated for the soil medium. If that is your choice of ferts to use, the 7-7-7 would do as an all around. In small or as needed doses along the way.

Thanks. That's pretty much what I was thinking would be my best option for a veg fert. And then maybe using the African Violet fert for flowering. And to just leave the Miracle Grow in the box until it's time to plant the vegetable garden outside in the Spring lol.

I also no longer have my digital TDS & pH meters. I can take water & fert-mix samples to where my buddy works, his pH meters probably cost $10k as they're for testing municipal water supply. I know his scale cost thousands, measures accurately to .0001 gram, and is in a glass box on top of a 600-pound granite table so that someone walking through the room five feet away won't cause vibration and/or airflow to add an extra .0001g to the sample lmao. And as for TDS, they do it the old-fashioned(?) way by taking a sample, cooking the water out, and then weighing it on said scale. I'm hoping that I can figure out how the weights of my fert solution would translate to in terms of PPM but right now I'm too stressed to even attempt it.

The hope of fruition will come when you apply some basic assertion to make it happen. There is hope, and you have it.

Well, no, but I've a lifetime of faking it for practice. Got way too many people depending on me to just give up. At least that's what I tell myself on a daily basis. So far it's worked lol.

Anyway, I have seen the results of growing with inadequate light intensity, of hopelessly screwing things up, etc. Either very leggy plants that yielded next to nothing or buds that actually looked like buds (more or less) that seemed to have a negative THC value (IOW you had less of a buzz after smoking them than when you started ha ha.) And as it's true what they say about the penalties for getting popped growing crappy plants being the same as for growing decent ones, I would like to have some amount of success. There is NO provision for MMJ in this state and the fact that I'd be giving much more of my results to people who actually need it than I'd be consuming myself wouldn't help either. That's just the way it goes, I guess.

Maybe I should have named this thread "Once-Experienced Former Grower Feels Like a Stupid Newbie Again."

I wouldn't even be trying but I've been perusing some of the grow journals and the one person's I've read that actually used CFLs seemed to have a harvest that looked ok and seemed to be happy. Although by the end he'd added enough of them that I found myself saying out loud, "Why not just get a small HPS, it'd be cheaper to run and produce more lumens?"

But then I remembered that on a good day I get to eat TWO meals and that going hungry a few times might get me a CFL or two, but it won't get me a real light... And then I understood.

Anyway, thanks for the answer on my fert question, for reading my posts, and for any future help you can provide.

And I'll try to keep faking that "hope" thing that everyone talks about; maybe some day it'll become real when I'm not looking.

 

[TorturedSoul]

I just recalled (CRS lol) that I found a box of the geolite or whatever it's called (expanded clay(?) balls). And it's simplicity itself to construct a tub hydro system with some air stones and a good aquarium pump for aeration.

Has anyone ever been successful in using one of the three ferts I mentioned as a hydro fert? Probably not as they're all most likely incomplete, but I felt like asking.

Once upon a time several years ago I learned a lot - which I've mostly forgotten - from people that used to post in the alt.whatever.marijuana.cultivation(?) newsgroup. One of them went by the handle of NPK. Anyone know if he hangs out here?

 

[zolar]

on the cheap free ferts old aged well diluted urine google urine as fertalizer mix it with compost tea winter yard leaves in 5 gal bucket dilute it a lot 1 part black tea mix 15-20 parts water

add tiny amout either of the liquid ferts you can use lemon juice or citric acid as ph down with this to adjust but if your compost tea has lots of oak leaves it should have enough tannic acid to keep ph low cheap phosphorus boiled clean bones

crused upand cooked the soup stock broth down dilute well

what do you think they get steamed bone meal etc from....

you really want astinky messy one burn broken up bones in a really hot clean hardwood fire and use the ashes in your compost tea
been doing compost tea and old urine regularly with occasional epsom salts and molasses and if i dont splash leaves and cure slow it tastes fine and i can't beat the price

i know i've seen some other organic homegrown hydro formulas around some where but these work ok for me on dirt and passive wick experimental hydro basil grow last year .....

re ph try sciplus.com a surplus store for lab&science stuff i think paper test kits under 5$ and saw some cheap meters too

am on ssi so you know i am independently poor with a wealth of time but here's some other cheap help jerry baker's garden
books lots of stuff you can make out of stale beer dish soap oilsoap amonia sp etc