Hey guys.
Here is some stuff in a little more detail.
Some I have learned from experience, but much of it came from the big kids at this site that left behind all the clues.
Jackmayoffer here, before he was running warehouses, had a 6k room I think with co2 and handwatered 5 gal buckets of 100% coco. He shows pics of vegging, 4 weeks apart. Though some of the last veg growth was due to stretching, it still gives a very clear picture of just what sort of growth rates 100% coco gives.
Coco/perlite is of course better than that.
And I have read in several places from the big kids that coco/hydroton gives superior performance to coco/perlite.
My theory on this is that the structure of the perlite creates turbulence in the slow progressive flow of water through the coco in the mix.
Hydroton is more round and smooth, thus promoting laminar flow where the water wants to run alongside the clay pellet while in the coco. Like water droplets want to behave. So better flow along these clay pellets, creating a very halfass gravity-fed version of nft.
I have other ideas for medium and irrigation that I will need to try out myself first before I could strongly advocate them.
We either grow a bunch of roots and then feed them, or we straight up deliver the nutes to a sufficient volume of root hairs. Check out Krusty Buckets, and Krusty's rants, he explains a lot about theories with nute delivery.
I discuss the nute formula I will be using in a thread in the nutrients section, "my thread can beat up your thread" or something. I go into some detail about what kind of NPK ratio I am looking for(I was looking to copy this smart successful guy)
and how much of each salt to achieve the exact ratio we want. Then others helped fill in the gaps in my knowledge, pretty awesome of them. 120-60-300-120-60-170something for N-P-K-Ca-Mg-S.
And pretty much everybody likes 3-1-2 for a good veg food. I have not engineered that yet out of laziness and the jug veg nutes I still have.
For veg right now, as far as a readily available, cheap, 1 part nute, I like
Botanicare's CNS-17 line. Their soil/coco nute has a 3-1-2 ratio. I have been using it for a while, I like it well enough for veg. It is what I would recommend. I am sure I will tweak that formula later as I learn about the veg nute ratio game.
Now coco will contribute a bunch of K and S. K will give bigger and frostier buds, and S adds to flavor and aroma, and potency due to terpene enhancement I believe.
And 100% coco contributes proportionally more K and S than the 1/4 coco 3/4 perlite mix that I did.
So the 2-2-3
Botanicare soil/coco I used for flowering on several runs did not have enough K especially. So less weight than I should have got, and not as frosty as it would have been.
Jalisco Kid, whose nute ratios I stole, explained to someone that if you use a coco mix dtw,
that you would want at least a 2.5-1 K:N ratio.
So I probably should have ran
Botanicare's CNS-17 hydro food, which was 2-2-5.
The 2-2-3 I ran had too much N proportionally, which grows too much leaf, and leads to more labor in trimming. Fuck trimming labor and fuck scissors and fuck a chair for a week and a half at a time, fuck puppies and rainbows and unicorns while we're at it. I need less scissor swipes per bushel.
For badass rooting, IBA/NAA has treated me very well.
There is a thread here about rooting hormones, it has the relevant info.
Long story short, I simply pour .15-.3 ml/gal of Dip-N-Grow (1%iba, 0.5%naa) into the veg res. It makes roots blow up like we want, for basically no money.
Fuck roots excelerator.
Fuck all that shit.
Dip n grow.
Until you straight up order up yourself some of that iba and naa from the internet, that is.
Then we have bennies. There are beneficial bacteria and beneficial fungi. Lots of other people around know way more about this than me. But I know some.
The beneficial bacteria does lots of cool shit, one thing they do is protect your plants by colonizing roots so bad bacteria cannot gain a foothold. Bad bacteria is usually anaerobic(do not need o2 to live) and thrive in conditions of low o2. We like a well-oxygenated root zone for performance and disease resistance.
Lots of other things they do.
If you make EWC teas and add bennies, a small amount of bennies, then the bacteria will use the molasses and humic acid as fuel for a bloom in population. So you get a ton of bacteria for free.
I like earthworm castings(EWC, I have heard that you get what you pay for with those)
soluble kelp powder
humic acid powder
alfalfa meal
fish hydrolysate
and molasses for my teas. And the beneficial bacteria.
There are good tutorials about teas. Capulator here in the nute section with the bennies has a good tea formula I think. Teas are used at the rate of 1 cup per 5-10 gallons of res.
I get all these ingredients for cheap at the legit ag store.
You may want to add some humic and kelp to the res itself, but go light.
Alfalfa is some wonder shit.
Triacontanol, aminos, macro and micro nutes, more shit than that even. Do not skip the alfalfa in your tea.
Teas will get you more per light. Teas will shorten your veg time. Teas will add flavor and aroma and potency. Teas will make your plants love you back even more. The leftover tea from the tea you make will keep in the fridge for 7-10 days. If it stinks, it has gone bad and you will not want to use it. If it stinks, it does so because bad bacteria took over.
Leaving a lot of fuel, i.e. molasses, in your res with the tea having been added will cause bacteria to keep growing, eating the molasses, then dying off, leaving you with a res full of dead bacteria. Not what you want.
This will also make the res ph drift. Then you will need to purchase and dial in ph management devices to keep your res straight. And sometimes those things fuck up from interference from digital ballasts.
You don't need a constant meter.
I use the 45.00 Hanna ph meter from the NGW catalog. I have 2. I did not pay 45 each for mine. It is accurate to .01. You want that. Get a glass of nutes, set the meter in that, get away from cords. Do not dip the thing in the res, your reading will be off. Calibrate once a week, both of them. Use both for a reading when in doubt. Be sure to store with pH 7 calibration solution in the cap. Not distilled water.
I use the budget HM digital ppm meter from years ago, it was like 30 dollars. I don't even know if it is 500 or 700 scale. I probably should have calibrated it or something. I got 2/light using it. I probably should get a second one.
IR temp device from harbor freight for 15.00. I bought 2. It will teach you lots about performance and canopy temp.
Get a $50 light meter. Take measurements. It will teach you a lot about light intensity, light penetration depth, the relationships between light intensity and yield potential out of a given area.
If you get an anemometer, no one else will know what it is, but you will. You can take relevant measurements with it. It will make you seem even more mysterious.
Read Janus's treatise on growing here at this site. It is required reading for big kids.
Take the time to read as much as you can by Jalisco Kid. Less and less of it goes over your head as time goes by I have found.
We should all take a moment every day to thank JK. Thanks, JK.
I have not played with fulvic acid, but it is supposed to make nutes more available, smarter people than me have been using it for some time now.
You will want to be ordering the 70% fulvic acid powder from the internet. I have no personal experience with fulvic, but I'm sure you can get answers from someone around here.
Capulator here at this site has the straight hookup for you with the bennies.
No one else anywhere that I know of, especially not at a store, has anywhere near the colony forming units or spore count per gram that Cap's products have. His shit is literally 18,000 times more concentrated than
Great White for example. And it just takes a little bit in a tea to make a whole 5 gal bucket full of bacteria.
Cap is providing a ton of value for a stand-up price. No one else is doing this.
Anybody who would try to cockblock his business and therefore our convenient access to these bennies at this price is a bitch. A fucking bitch. Not even joking.
Drip clean is essential in my opinion, I pretty much explained why.
Carefree enzymes has the pond protector stage 2 product that I have used for 1.5 years. It helps prevent any salt buildup. 15 ml/100 gallons. This and drip clean keep things from building up. Apparently buildup sucks and causes problems, I wouldn't know because drip clean and enzymes prevent bullshit like that in my life. Burnt roots from salt pockets and then the roots rot and shit.
Lots of us here are bigger fans of around 1000 ppms at most for co2. Though some still like 1500.
Do not run any co2 last 2 weeks. It will hurt quality, flavor, aroma. And make your shit leafier. And it will piss them off, they will tell you about it. And the nugs will be too hard.
It will make your plants less happy to run co2 during flush, and less happy plants produce worse quality.
At the end, the plants want lower temps than before, different lighting, dryer temps, lower co2. They do not want the same environment they grew fast in before. They want to relax more and have a more chilled out pace. They do not want to be pushed during this time. I am talking about last 2 weeks anyways.
Stimulating SAR(systemically acquired resistance) reactions beefs up your plants, it activates a previously dormant immune system within your plants. This can be accomplished with root zone or foliar application of agents like vitamin b-1(thiamine hydrochloride), aspirin(salicylic acid), chitosan(derived from crabs or something), and harpin protein(messenger is the product name) that I can think of offhand. I do not have a handy recipe for application, I have been slacking on this for a while.
SAR rx make your plant stronger, smarter, faster. Stinkier. More resistant to stress and disease. More potent. More frosty. Fuckin' sexier. I really need to work with this input again. Hella cheap if done right, big enhancer.
In the last 2 weeks of feeding, (6&7of 9 weeks) I like to cut the base nutes in half and use the hammerhead/
moab combo as popularized on by greenthumbdanny here.
2.5 mls/gal hammerhead and 1 tsp/5 gallons or something(the lowest end of the recommendation on the label) for small plants, and double that for big'uns.
There is a formula for hammerhead here that is made from 2 salts. Pretty easy.
MOAB(mother of all blooms) has 2 salts, vitamin b-1, and
triacontanol, but we are not certain how much. I think it will end up being 25 ppms tria for the highest recommended application rate.
Triacontanol causes a second push in flowering that will make you fucking stoked. Serious. Bigass buds. And tria is a safe pgr to use, there is so much shit that is nasty and chemmy out there.
Triacontanol actually enhances essential oil content in my opinion. I would not want to use anything that diminished quality.
I have used a product called Banana Manna, and always have got better meds with it, using 1 oz/gal for weeks 7 and 8. It enhances potency and flavor. I will be substituting my own stuff for it hopefully before too long.
I should have mentioned this earlier, but I always use
Dyna-Gro Pro-Tekt at the rate of 1 ml/gal. I do cut back to 1/2 ml/gal in the last 2 weeks of flowering.
Pro-tekt is 3.something % potassium silicate. I will be making my own later.
BTW CNS-17 I think is short on micros. I feel like it would be better with micros added.
Coco should be fed at 5.8-6.0 ph. Always. Ideally 5.8 through veg until flowers, 5.9 flowering, ending at 6.0 later in flowering.
Never flush coco with water. Ever. Except when you are rinsing out the salts for the first time, and when you flush at the end.
Coco needs to lock up a certain amount of Ca and Mg before it will let the plant have any. Rinsing with water strips that away, and then the coco will get that back the next feeding. Instead of the plant. Leaving the plant with a deficiency.
You will always want to get 20% runoff with coco if you can help it. Every time you irrigate.
Monitor your runoff ppms like LEDhead. It will teach you stuff. It will tell you when you are feeding too strong.
I would advise you to do all coco/perlite in the room.
If you do soil next to a coco mix, you will be pissed because the soil plant will grow slower and will not be ready to flower when the coco plants are. And I don't know shit about soil except that it is hella slow. And it will not yield at all like the coco buds.
Coco tends to produce larger and fewer buds in my experience. Less trimming that way, less scissor swipes per bushel.
I did do sunshine mix #4 for a few years when I was starting out.
I openly laugh at people who use that stuff now, knowing what I know about coco.
I shamed my friend into coco by mercilessly dogging his wack peat buds that I wouldn't even smoke. He will never look back either.
Coco is the one you always wanted to hang out with, and Peat was her fat cockblocking friend.
And Perlite is the one who was down to hang out with you and Coco at the same time.
