WHOA! STOP BUYING WATER BOTTLES! Would you like an alternative? I'll make it easy for you; How about those AN business practices, anyway? Would you entrust your money and precious ladies to a company whose owners have recently been arrested in eastern Europe, for sodomising a little girl (under 12)? How about putting fifty cents' worth of epsom salt in a bottle, calling it 'Bud Factor X' and then charging you NINETY BUCKS?! Or, in order to keep doing this to hydro store customers even when their owners know better, AN instituted a series of 'purchasing policies' that force store owners to buy large quantities of AN nutes in order to get other stuff the company sells, like Badass ballasts, etc. Nice guys! Here's where it gets even easier... repeat after me; Nitrogen Phosphorus Potassium Calcium Magnesium Sulfur Micros That's it. That's all you really need to feed your plants to have great success. And, those ingredients are in damn near every fertilizer out there, so why choose the most expensive?! Greenhouse hydroponics professionals have known better for decades now! Www.jrpeters.com Look for; Jacks professional hydroponic mix, 5-12-26, about $45 for a twenty five pound bag of dry nutrient salts. How much is that? 25lb=11.3kg/4g/gallon=2850 gallons of nutrient solution. Should hold ya. Calcium nitrate, about $40 for a fifty pound bag. Use this at 2.4g/gal and it may well last until your dotage Epsom salt, from the pharmacy section at the grocery store, about $7 for 4lbs. Use this at .5g/gal While you're at the store, grab a bag of; Table sugar, .5-1g/gal of this during the last week with half strength nutes or less and you can call it... 'Finally Flushed AN where it belongs!'
Believe me when I tell you that I can afford any nutrient line on Earth if it helps me produce better product, or more of it. The simple fact is that I'm growing the best quality and quantity ever with the dry nutrients I listed above. Seriously. Add .5g/gal of MKP, aka monopotassium phosphate, in peak bloom. I paid $75 for a fifty pound bag of it- enough for me and all my friends for life, lol. That sounds expensive only until you pick up a tiny little tub of MOAB, they want $27 for Four OUNCES?! AREN'T YA PISSED OFF YET? It's your hard earned money. And the nutrients involved are the very same water solubilized N P K Ca S Mg etc... Advanced Nutrients has proprietary knowledge about only one thing; convincing people otherwise and separating them from their money. For what you're going to spend on AN for just one run of that sexy grow shed, you could have several years' supply of the nutes I mentioned. At least try it.
Triacontanol is a plant growth regulator (PGR) that helps the plant grow. Alfalfa outcompetes most other ground covers because it produces an excess of triacontanol. Extracting this PGR for use in your grow operation is simple, and if you can get your hands on a few pounds of alfalfa growing around your place, it's even free. So, gather fresh alfalfa or get compressed pellets sold for animal feed, then put a pot on the stove with a half gallon of water in it. If your op is small, you can use less. Chop up the fresh alfalfa and put it in the water. The aim isn't to boil, only to get to about 150f and hold for an hour. This releases the PGR from the plant. Since triacontanol has a high affinity for calcium, I'll add a few grams of calcium nitrate to the water. Cal-mag may work, I've never tried it. After you let it cool enough to handle, strain the solids from the water and squeeze them to get as much liquid out as possible. Dilute this mix up to 10:1 and use it as stock for making nutrients, or just add directly to the reservoir, or foliar spray.
It looks simple, because I've beaten at this design and simplified it and removed stuff until I've arrived at what I think are the necessary bones remaining of a growing system capable of supporting a plant that grows up to produce as much as possible; each trellis is 25 ft², and I've pulled four# from that size horizontally. I don't think fifty zips is at all out of the realm of possibility for the right strain once this is dialed in properly. That's fifty zips each for four plants, arranged around two bulbs.
nice i was just gonna say monopotassium phosphate just bought some for cheap..nice tip on the alfalfa too that setup is nice
This I have to see. I know those bastards at the hydro store were fucking people. One look at a $239.99 light bulb told me they prey on the stupid. I have that. Iv got me seat picked out for this show.
MKP for the W.I.N. Glad you liked the alfalfa tips too. Thus far I haven't needed it- or perhaps I should say that I'm not sure what I'd do if my plants grew any faster! The whole dry nutrient salts approach is so much cheaper and more transparent than water bottles that I just shake my head when someone wants me to 'try' something. My op and my approach to life in general are just littered with little odd ideas like that.
Great to see you! Thanks for coming- hope I provide some entertainment and maybe provoke a few good thoughts... I'll have some pics up in the next week or so of my ladies of the first vertical run, and some are already bustin' out all over! Meanwhile, the number of friends, acquaintances and hydro store employees interested in what I've got going on grows daily, lol
Did I mention how nice it is too be doing this where it's LEGAL to do so? Talk about a relief! By the way, the population of Colorado is projected to rise by a million people in the next twenty five years. Personally, if pot legalization keeps dragging its feet everywhere else, I think Colorado will get there a lot sooner. There might be a haze in the air here, but nobody complains about it. In fact, everyone's happy...
I would talk about how I'm slaving away, training or pruning or changing nutes or... but I'm not. I do less than half the trellising work per unit of output as anyone I know running traditional horizontal ScrOG- and while they are thrilled to get an elbow per, I'm disappointed when I don't.
Once they hit the trellis, they're in bloom. I take whatever cuttings I'm going to before they get to bloom. If the question you're asking is whether I have enough clones for a run, the answer is that I take plants through a 6-8 week veg to get them big enough, then I put them on a trellis. I use only one plant per 25 ft² panel, so I get 'em big first.
First, I let the plants grow straight up in veg. I encourage it to grow up more than out by growing it close to its friends so they all compete a bit for height, and stay relatively skinny. After several stages of veg they outgrow their vertical space in my veg tent, at about 3.5' tall. This is when I take them out of the veg area and place them into a trellis in the bloom zone. The plant spends its stretch phase filling in the trellis panel and then is able to utilize the whole trellis to make weight with. Once the plant gets to the trellis, it is pinned into place with vine clips and the branches are spread out to one side out the other and also pinned into place. The only time any of my veg girls are ever topped is when shoots run off the top or sides of the trellis panel itself. Boy, does this help speed up the vegetative growth process!
Aaaaaaaand it's officially as effective as hell; the old trellis achieved full coverage once in several tried, where the new one is currently 3 for 4, and the fourth started with some intent as a runt? It's nearing 75% coverage, better than the old average. Of course it's still too early to tell about quality, but it looks like it's solved the problems I had with my first design. I should have some pics before long, my friends keeps promising me
As quick as I became enamored of the 50 ft² design with one vertical thousands watt bulb inside, I've discarded it already in favor of the two bulb Super Silo, with 100 ft². I have built every bit of my RDWC system and trellis to be modular and interchangeable, so switching from one size silo to the other will effectively be an exercise in Lego for Hydro, using 1" flexible hose, fittings and bulkheads.
They're coming, I swear! My buddy took some good shots the other day with his sexy Canon digital SLR and said he'd email them to me after he cleaned up the images a bit. As soon as I get them, you will.
I was wanting to ask you, if I wanted to buy a small batch of dry nutes what do you recommend? is this a reasonable deal.? http://www.megagrowers.com/jacks-professional-hydroponic-4-lb/?gclid=CI2BwPXsnb0CFQ5gMgod_hgAAg