Hydroponic fertilizers are a scam

ruen

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Dont buy hydroponic fertilizers. They are basically just bottled water with a few disolved salts.
Instead, as real chemists, mix your own stock solution. I bet you have most of the ingredients at home already, or are able to prepare them using chemicals you have at home.

Here you can find the ingredients of the most commonly used fertilizer

Or you can use this handy tool made by Dr. Daniel Fernandez (i would also reccomend to check that website in general and check his youtube videos). You can enter the npk values (for example from a fertlizer bottle you would like to imitate) and select the salts you have available. The program will then calculate the amount of each salt.

For micronutrients it might be more reasonable to get a fertlizer mix with trace nutrients only, instead of sourcing expensive chemicals like sodium molybdate (also you wont use that much of them anyway). Dont look for hydroponic brands, as they are a rip off and unreasonabely expensive, instead look for brands marketing for "normal" farmers - its most of the time the very same.

For those stubborn growers refusing to copy an existing brand, i would recommend to look into any standart hydroponic solution, and make modifications according to your experience with the particular strain you grow (f.e. more nitrogen for strains that like to stretch a lot), and medium you grow in (f.e. more calcium and potassium for coco). In the end, the commercially available fertilizers are a variation on those as well. One of these standart solutions is for example the Hoagland solution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoagland_solution

Of course, the commercially sold fertilizers have sometimes something extra (some vitamins, amino acids,...), but lets be honest - none of those will magically double your yields. Your diy fertilizers will be at least 10 times cheaper and with the money saved you can then buy the "missing" amino acid. (Lastly id reccomend to check https://phygenera.de/ - they have ABSOLUTELY everything)
 
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mycelium

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While I agree that hydro ferts are dohshit and if you're gonna use that, make your own, I feel that, as a chemist, you should grow organically.

A super amazing chemist named liebig...you may have heard of his invention called a liebig condenser, or used the shit we are talking about now, synthetic manure aka synthetic fertilizers, (which he eventually railed against, yet I digress), he made "the law of the minimum".

The law of the minimum says, basically, whatever you're missing, that's as far as your plant (or your reaction) is going to go.
If you have every element but only a couple grains of molybdenum or copper, then your plant will only go as far as that much copper will take it.
So, if you grow organically and put all of the shit in there, the bacteria will give the plant what it wants when it wants. If you're using chems, you may miss out on something the plant needs at a special time, like calcium phosphate during the flip, etc
 

ruen

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Firstly, of course just as any other grower i am very nature-centred. i look forward to growing my outdoor organic plants in a greenhouse once i get old. But i find organic very unpredictable, and if one runs several grow operations, there is little room for mistakes.
Fun fact: did you know that despite its size the netherlands are the second largest exporter of agricultural products by value in the world? Those "water-germans" seem to know how to grow stuff. Therefore as a grower, my inspiration were always dutch greenhouses. And fact is, most of dutch greenhouses use drip irrigation/coco coir system, due to unmatchable control (and therefore yields).

Secondly, i assume if someone is confident enough to make his own nutrient solution, he knows what nutrients are neccesary in which stage and is able to recognize nutrient defficiencies and toxicities, so he can adjust the solution as neccesary. (This is also a huge benefit of coco and hydro - the plants react much faster to nutrient adjustments, instead of waiting for the microbes to do their job as in organic growing.)
The point of making your own fertlizers is to squeeze as much as possible from your plants in the most optimal way. (By the way, with this i dont mean feeding the plants 2,5ec in mid-flower, in fact ive achieved with various strains (including heavy feeders) the best results with a lighter approach. I believe the 2,5ec schedule is a conspiracy from nutrient manufacturers for us to buy more of their products.
Also, fact is, microbes convert organic matter into the very same chemicals that are in mineral fertilizers. Its basicaly the same but with extra steps.

One could argue, that organic has better taste, although there is no hard evidence for this statement.
I would love to start a discussion about this, what are your opinions regarding this? Do you agree or disagree? Do you have personal experience you would like to share?
I personally think its not neccesary due to organic growing style, but due to the variety of inputs. If you think about it, when you feed with mineral fertilizers, the plant just gets like 4 salts during its whole lifetime. Instead when you grow organically, you have a much bigger variety of inputs, a variety of different microbes, the intermediate products of the microbes, and much much more. I believe the plants reacts to each of those inputs by making either a cannabinoid, terpenoid or flavenoid, and therefore the resulting taste is much richer. The same analogy can be used for light spectrum (its proven that full spectrum leds are much more beneficial for plant health and quality than hps or blue-red leds), air composition or soil composition. Therefore i believe, adding something like vermicompost to the coco would result in much tastier buds. But this is only my personal opinion and you are welcome to prove me wrong.

I look forward to reading everyones insights regarding our beloved plant and i thank all in advance for sharing their precious experiences!
 

SoldadoDeDrogas

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I do concur with Mr. Mycelium,
Alot of this stuff seems to boil down into marketing and what some might call hyper-capitalism. Where you are suggested into buying stuff you don't really need. Consider what you pay versus the results.. It is a racket. The majority of the sales are from people who don't know the difference, people just trying their hand at growing for the first time - people from the city that don't have any understanding of nature to put it bluntly. If you don't know any better you go to the garden store or look on ebay for "NUTES". When you realize you can go find farms where they have community compost dumps and stuff. Literally piles of cow and horse shit or composting organics - woodchips or cut grass and stuff you can just go shovel into your truck or bags and you can take off with em, if not.. just try ask private farms, I am sure they'll let you or make a deal. Start you own thing at home with your garden. The left overs from prepping salads. Your coffee grounds, egg shells, banana peels etc.
Me personally, I don't have enough experience experimenting with different things. I have always grown in soil in pots or the ground. The only synthetic feed I've used is miracle grow, either high nitrogen veg or high potassium and phos for flowering. Like with my mushroom growing, I figured out how to get it to where I was satisfied and I never did much with it after that. After I started training my plants into manifolding and got my trimming and feeding down I never had to think much into growing weed. So I default to you guys when it comes to innovations or techniques to optimize the experience.. if something seems like it is worth the time and there is a system or science to it then I will give it a chance. When it comes to buying snake oil for your plants.. I say, get some grows under your belt and get to an point where youve done all you can with what you have. Then if it is still sub-standard, THEN you can start looking elsewhere to spend money to try to improve on your grow.
I am all for doing as much as you can by your self and with what nature provides without needing anybody or anything else.
 

mycelium

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I personally think its not neccesary due to organic growing style, but due to the variety of inputs. If you think about it, when you feed with mineral fertilizers, the plant just gets like 4 salts during its whole lifetime.
_ruen

(Can't figure out how to quote from a post...)

I agree with this, although if I was a chem grower I'd add more.
In the way I grow food and cannabis, I put everything in the soil and let the microbes do the work, and supplement with teas. I'm not a chemist or even a real plant biologist, but I know the plant needs more than just N,P, and K. It needs calcium hydroxide to regulate pH, it needs calcium phosphate to promote bigger fruitset and flowers, it needs calcium carbonate and calcium nitrate and calcium sulfate.
It needs Mg and Ca in a certain amount, if you're force feeding the plant.
In organics, I throw in some gypsum, some oyster shell flour, some basalt, some glacial rock dust, and some azomite, 1 cup of each per cubic foot...and a similar amount of neem cake, crab meal, kelp meal, and a half cup of alfalfa meal and fish bone meal.
One 50 pound bag of each amendment will amend 8 yards of homemade base soil(I recommend equal portions of peat moss, compost, and pumice.
(This is "coots mix", available on almost all weed forums, with the addition of fish bone meal and alfalfa)
Add bacteria and rock out with my cock out.
All essential macronutrients, micronutrients, etc are present in this soil mix to just add water, all the way to harvest.
However I made teas.
Using a 250 gallon IBC tote, I added around 4 gallons of amendments, added kelp for everything it does, and alfalfa for the N and the tricontinal during veg, and neem for the N and the (whatever the word is, the ingredient in neem.... azacharachajrnfn or something) and insect frass for the npk and the chitin or maybe even chitosan made from the chitinase enzyme-the plant thinks it is under attack by insects with chitin in their exoskeleton and ramps up it's defenses.
Yet I digress and forgot what I was talking about...one more cup of coffee and it will be light enough to go start big leafing the rest of the ladies before the rain and cold comes.

Oh yeah, I eyeball the teas, based on what time of the season it is, but I also use a PPM meter to check the ppm to make sure I didn't go overboard. Even with all of the food in the soil, the ladies can handle 700-800ppm of whatever nutes are extracted in a 36 hour brew(a 1/6hp pump running occasionally to mix it up



(Pictures to come from this seasons work, why I've been gone all summer)
 
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