Hydroponic fertilizers are a scam

[ruen]

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

Open Salts - Open Salts

opensalts.wikidot.com

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.

HydroBuddy v1.100 : The First Free Open Source Hydroponic Nutrient Calculator Program Available Online – Science in Hydroponics

scienceinhydroponics.com

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)

 

[mycelium]

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]

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!