Making Your Own Nutrient Concentrates

[Skybound]

To answer your earlier question @Skybound

Guess if I had a mix I'd like to try, it would look something like this.

N = 150 *(105 being Nitrate, 45 being Amonical)
P = 60
K = 280
Ca = 120
Mg = 40
S = 100

*The Nitrate and Amonical blend of N is specific to my 150ppm tap water. I've used MC with nearly all Nitrate with no issues, but supposedly using 30% Amonical for 150ppm water is better for the pH stability of your growing medium.

Edit - Since mainly my tweaks are just to K and S over stock Mega Crop, I did a little search. Potassium Sulfate is 50% K2O and 17.6% S. By adding .5g of Potassium Sulfate to 6g of Mega Crop I'd end up at my proposed mix (other than the types of Nitrogen). 5lbs of Potassium Sulfate is $15. At .5g a gallon useage rate, that's a lifetime supply. Might have to buy some salt for an experiment.

Edit to the Edit... I guess I already have some Potassium Sulfate in a watered down jug, it's called Terpinator. Since it's diluted, it takes 6.25ml of Terpinator to equal .5g of powder. I'm sitting on close to 5gal of the stuff from POTM prize packs. Maybe I should just do that, it's free.

First time in a long time I wasn't able to hit the targets spot on, anyways. HB got really close, but it used silica for K, lol. I presume 65ppm of silica would somewhat buffer the 45ppm of ammonical N, lol. Is what it is I guess. TBH, I think that much NH4 will be catastrophic quickly in cannabis, but there's no harm in crunching numbers for shits and giggles. I've ran low NH4 back when I didn't target it, and also tried 10% NH4 and that was slightly too far, but 30% would be catastrophic IMO.

Even at 31 ppm, I would be expecting N tox quickly. That mix won't use MKP, and I even tried switching out MAP with ammonium sulfate, but that sent the S up to like 160, and though IDK what would make sulfur toxic, I presume 160ppm might be in that neighborhood.

 

[Skybound]

shit. True. I knew there was something wrong with what I said.
I should know better than to try to pin names on my deficiencies anyway. I’ve probably got the whole alphabet.
The newest flowering plant- the one I‘m keeping the closest eye on, had some damage from previous bad mixes which makes it harder to gauge. I checked it all over tonight and whatever the rusty spots are, if they’re progressing at all, it’s not by very much. So, still happy about the latest mix overall. But admittedly my standards are pretty low right now so ‘not completely fucked’ is the new ‘good‘.

You might not be wrong at all. In fact, I believe my Ca is a bit too high, yet my experience and research lead me to believe (but not know) that I should leave my Ca in higher concentrations and to move every other number around it so to protect that higher level. I predict your lower Ca experiment will yield fruit but might also cause other problems. IMO, the rusty spots are PH swings in the soil. Ca D is more of a systemic expression, mostly in the branches resembling wet noodles. Also, the leaf damage is more encompassing of the leaves, whereas rusty spots just appear on a few leaves and only spots within those leaves.

Looking at the deficiency/excess charts, it's like a lot of symptoms are identical to other symptoms and in some cases symptom X could be construed as deficient of this or toxic of that, so it's very much a fluid feeling around in the dark process. But the more of us doing to feeling around, the sooner we'll discover ideal feeding habits for canna. I'm in my own mental box and it will take other growers experiences for me to learn things outside of my box. We'll get there.

 

[farside05]

TBH, I think that much NH4 will be catastrophic quickly in cannabis, but there's no harm in crunching numbers for shits and giggles.

Even at 31 ppm, I would be expecting N tox quickly.

Dyna Gro Foliage Pro is 1/3 NH4. Ran it for years prior to switching to Mega Crop. Worked just fine. The table at the top of page 2 that specifies matching the types of N to your water source. The whole series is quite good really. I will say that you can run slightly higher ppms of a fertilizer that is almost all Nitrate Nitrogen than one that's 1/3 Amonical before you see some tip burn. But as InTheShed found out, with longer grows, a higher ppm water source (say 150ish), your pH of the substrate will increase over time with using almost all Nitrate N. The recommendation to rebalance his soil-less mix, given straight to him from Pro-Mix, was to feed for a couple weeks with a higher Amonical N fertilizer (Jack's 10-10-10). He did and it corrected his problem.

 

[Skybound]

Doing some looking back and here's a regimen that's near total opposite what I'm doing now, and with about the same strains, only difference is media and my garden looked great back then. I wonder if rockwool numbers will do well in peat moss? Looking back at past performance has also got me thinking of going back to hydro, but with hempy buckets to keep water weight low. I wonder how much a shit load of perlite is.

Skybound's Journal

 

[Skybound]

Yeah, I'm definitely switch mediums ASAP, lol. This was my beloved Triple Cheese. I miss having to rip duck tape into strips to fashion custom length branch tie offs to divert all supported weight to a fat ass center trunk.

 

[Skybound]

These are the numbers I ran in rockwool back then. I'll consider finding the middle ground between my current regimen and past regimens and try to come up with just 1 for veg and 1 for bloom. I'm also going to look into getting a lot of perlite or maybe another crushed stone. Unless mistaken, perlite is just structural material the roots can grab onto, so any rock that doesn't influence PH should do I would think.

 

[Weaselcracker]

Kind of disturbing when you figure out that you’re jealous of your own plants hey? I looking back at my journal from five years ago recently and thought they looked better than a lot of mine do now ha ha ha.

Perlite must be super cheap where you are. And you could reuse it if you wanted to.

 

[Skybound]

Kind of disturbing when you figure out that you’re jealous of your own plants hey? I looking back at my journal from five years ago recently and thought they looked better than a lot of mine do now ha ha ha.

Perlite must be super cheap where you are. And you could reuse it if you wanted to.

I know the fine perlite is cheap, but only Home Depot sells it that cheap. I'm considering pea gravel too, but I'll have to research to see what can be used. Whatever it is, I hope it cheap, but demand it be reusable.

 

[Weaselcracker]

I think Tead used the larger size perlite and I do think that would be better.Perlite has a tendency to crumble into dust anyway, which makes a sort of sludge when wet. That’s not really a actual problem but the larger chunks would go further and maybe have less sludge, which is just useless stuff you have to scrape out of the bottom of the pot.

 

[Skybound]

I think Tead used the larger size perlite and I do think that would be better.Perlite has a tendency to crumble into dust anyway, which makes a sort of sludge when wet. That’s not really a actual problem but the larger chunks would go further and maybe have less sludge, which is just useless stuff you have to scrape out of the bottom of the pot.

I watched a video using pea gravel and that was a horrible idea. That shit is super heavy. I'll go see if our other hydro store is still open and try to grab a few bags of the medium chunks of perlite if it's available. Do you know if Tead used the big chunks for small plants?

 

[Weaselcracker]

Ha ha I was thinking that but it seemed too obvious to mention.
I don’t really know but I think he said he just used the large stuff for everything. But I’d have to go back and actually look at his perlite again. Anyway I don’t think you can really go wrong with whatever size.

 

[Skybound]

This is informative. This guy reuses the shit out of his perlite and that's what I need. I won't try to clean it as much as he does, just to break up old salts. The root fines should be okay to stay in there and just go heavy on the bennies throughout.

 

[farside05]

We had six, cast concrete benches, about 12 inches deep, back in the family greenhouse. They were filled with a mix of Perlite and Vermiculite. We used to use them for rooting geranium cuttings. They were watered via an auto mister system. The control had an arm that was made of a fine wire mesh and was counter balanced. Worked like a teeter-totter. The water droplets would weigh down the arm which would make it turn off. When it dried out, it would raise and trigger the misters. No idea how old those benches were, and the medium was never changed. They were there from my first memory and were still there and in use 28 years later when dad sold the place. We weren't running nutes through it, just tap water, but Perlite itself never really goes bad.

 

[Skybound]

We had six, cast concrete benches, about 12 inches deep, back in the family greenhouse. They were filled with a mix of Perlite and Vermiculite. We used to use them for rooting geranium cuttings. They were watered via an auto mister system. The control had an arm that was made of a fine wire mesh and was counter balanced. Worked like a teeter-totter. The water droplets would weigh down the arm which would make it turn off. When it dried out, it would raise and trigger the misters. No idea how old those benches were, and the medium was never changed. They were there from my first memory and were still there and in use 28 years later when dad sold the place. We weren't running nutes through it, just tap water, but Perlite itself never really goes bad.

I'm going to get 10 - 2CF bags today while the inventory is up at my local HD. I'm looking forward to a change of media, one that is endlessly reusable, lol. Only down side though is I'll have to PH my ferts again. I reckon between silicate and phosphoric acid I could develop a reliable PHed formulation. When I ran GH, their Si ppm was roughly 25, so I'll be looking to go a little higher, than wrestle it back down with the rust remover.

 

[Skybound]

 

[Skybound]

 

[danielfp]

Congrats on your videos SkyBound! I'm very happy to see you're using my software and trying to teach others how you use it. Perhaps the biggest issue with your approach is believing what the labels of these fertilizers say. If you read my latest blog post at scienceinhydroponics you'll see a detailed analysis of how badly companies misrepresent what's in their actual bottles Vs the labels. When you do this, you should use the percentage composition derived from lab analysis, not from the labels of the products

 

[Skybound]

Congrats on your videos SkyBound! I'm very happy to see you're using my software and trying to teach others how you use it. Perhaps the biggest issue with your approach is believing what the labels of these fertilizers say. If you read my latest blog post at scienceinhydroponics you'll see a detailed analysis of how badly companies misrepresent what's in their actual bottles Vs the labels. When you do this, you should use the percentage composition derived from lab analysis, not from the labels of the products

Hi Daniel, thanks for chiming in. I was given the impression that I have no other choice but to rely on the information that is provided via the GA on their labels. I will read your blog post to see if you're suggesting a means to gather more accurate information, but whille I have your ear on the matter, I want to ask you if the precision of the percentages listed on the various GAs are that important? What I mean is that we cannabis growers have learned that our sweet leaf can thrive well in a fairly broad selection of nutrient regimens, so isn't all of the space between all of those numbers "breathing room" for loss of accuracy? Perhaps other plants require surgical precision of ferts, but cannabis is very forgiving in a lot of circumstances.

Edit - I read your article now and see what you're saying about the errors in my Reverse Engineering video and posts. I will now start combing through the database entries to see if any of our favorite brands of nutes are listed and correct my own custom solutions in HB and create corrected charts to share. I've been misreading GH and several other brand charts for years now, lol. Thanks for setting me straight man!

 

[danielfp]

I'm glad I could help

The main issue is that the errors are not small at all, sometimes they can be off by a big chunk, say 30% for N, P or K, which can be the difference between plants doing amazing and just being ok (or in the worst cases dying). It is especially problematic that the errors are also not systematic but they will purposefully report some accurately and others with big errors, so that you get the ratios all wrong. Having 30% more or less P for example, can make a huge difference.

The Oregon database is a good place to start, but if you can afford a one-time 100-150 USD expense per bottle you can send them over to lab analyses and get more accurate results for yourself.

The DB contains all the most commonly used nutrients GH, Advanced, Canna, etc. Although you will need to comb through all the files to find each one of the fertilizers you want, depending on the year they were tested.

 

[danielfp]

These are the average errors per element for all the GH products registered/tested from 2014 to present (25 products total). You can see that for some elements they aren't small at all. Some, like heavily under reporting P and S, are classic ways to make reverse engineering from raw salts harder.