Just because they are needed in smaller amounts does not mean they are insignificant - quite the opposite actually. If any of the 17 essential elements are not present in high a enough concentration the growth of the plant will be inhibited. This is sometimes referred to as the Rule of the Minimum.

I meant to highlight relative importance. You're absolutely right; everything is important, and one missing piece will hinder a grow. My point is that the bulk of the investment should be in climate control, not not on nutrition.

Up until a week ago, I was gearing up to spend hundreds of dollars in nutes, without much consideration in climate. My growing paradigm (no pun intended) shifted radically, and my knowledge was drastically expanded. I've literally learned more in the last week than the last 10 years - and it's not from lack of trying.

I do not think you can look at the weight of Carbon in the dried plant an correlate it to CO2. JK

Cyrismatic -

I think you are quite correct. Having the "best" fertilizers money can buy won't do you any good if the plant is not in the proper environment to utilize them. Remember though, that fertilizer is part of the environment. Don't forget about genetics either - good genetics are the most important factor in yield and quality.

Most people spend waaaay too much money on ferts IMO. Many of the hydro companies, like Advanced Nutrients, literally just take existing ag products, dilute them, relabel them, and jack the price up by 1,000% or more. Over the last few years I have been trying to move away from hydro nutes more and more, and just use more bulk ag products. The results have been great - I'm getting higher yields, bigger denser buds, and I've been using less fertilizers and spending less money that I was three years ago.

One other thing I have found is that often it is not so much what you feed your plants, but HOW you feed them. This can make a bigger difference that the fertilizers that you are using what from I have seen.

plants don't take up carbon, or excrete - they don't have a digestive system. whereas animals pulverize and digest food, plants really depend on dissolved minerals to pass by their roots. i'm leaning towards atmospheric co2 as being the source for carbon. plants carbon sequester...that's their job...to terraform the planet to make it suitable for animals.

they obviously do take up minerals, at levels determined by genetics and available nutes. i figure yielding 2 lb dry bud per 1kw, would be an equal weight of trim and branches. water is 10 % of the 'dry' matter. 4 lb dry (3.6 lb completely dessicated) would contain 0.8 lb due to nute uptake ~ 20%.

how i figured 0.8 lb: 8 wk flower, maintain 1300 ppm in e&f, 30 gal res. it drops to 900 ppm each week, thus adding back 400 ppm. 400 mg/L x 113 L (res size) = 45 g. 45g x 8 (weeks) = 360g or 0.8 lb.

understand that a month ago, i still thought nutes were everything! then for about a week, i thought they were unimportant (try to wrap your head around that paradox). the 20/80 rule fits nicely here.

does anyone actually know how plants work? or do we just know how to make them grow pretty well? we can produce an intended result, without knowing the actual mechanism. kind of like driving a car without knowing how an engine works. i get the feeling that all industries just learn by cut and try, and a little experimentation. the kush craze came from bag seed...

Hey Guys, you need to look into plant physiology for answers to those questions.

I am in a advanced plant physio class right now, and I believe I can answer all the questions in this thread correctly :)

On average, 5-10% of a plants dry weight is from the minerals it absorbs. The rest is mostly carbon. Almost ALL OF WHICH COMES FROM CO2.

What you need to realize, is that plants are energy producing machines, that build themselves as they go. Without all the proper parts of the machine functioning, ie gears, pulleys, levers, belts, etc, (N,P,K, Micro's) your machine cannot work to produce its primary product (Carbon based sugars).

Blaze is on it with the rule of minimums, aka Liebigs law, basically translates that you're only as productive as your most limiting factor. IE, if you don't have the Boron necessary for Carb transport, the sucrose produced by the joining of glucose and fructose (produced by photosynthesis) won't be fully translocatable within the plant, thus non-photosynthetic tissues like roots won't have the sugars they need for their cellular process. Just one example of many. If you'd like, I can dig up and scan a copy of a chart I have showing the different uses of the minerals in question in plants.

JK, the dried % of carbon in a plant is DIRECTLY proportional to AMT CO2. No other way about it.

Blaze - I am on the same mission right now about changing from using hydro products to ag products. I'd love to discuss what you've found about different nute ratios and strengths for different growth stages.

Crysmatics - Plants don't normally excrete carbon, but it can happen. Plants that have an association with myco fungi will exchange carbon in the form of sucrose for minerals delivered by the fungal hyphae. It is the plants choice whether to accept or reject this relationship, and it will often reject it in fertile soils, and accept it in poor soils. This is due to the overall availability of nutrients. The plant works extremely hard to collect the carbon from PS, and overall its not a very efficient process regarding energy production, so if there are plenty of minerals around the rootzone already, then it will reject the myco in favor of keeping the carbon for its own growth.

Plants normally exchange hydrogen ions for mineral ions at the various ion pumps in the root. This is why your pH will become more acidic as the plants grow, and why farmers add lime to their fields to counter balance the acidity developed by the growing plants.

Hope this helps.

Alaska aka Inuit

inuit, can you go into more detail on proton/ion exchange? i imagine there has to be a surplus of protons inside the plant, and an excess of anions outside the plant...and they permeate the root cells to maintain charge balance. yesterday i was wondering on the significance of pH in the root zone. is it the same pH inside the plant/root?

it may be semantics, but plants are passive robots. they don't have free will or choice. it's just the presence or lack of minerals that drive certain exchanges. now, what is the largest ion/molecule that can permeate roots? does feeding plants sugars, proteins etc do anything?

certainly plants did well eons before humans came along to apply lime. i'd say the lime is there to buffer/balance acidic fertilizers.

YES to the charts :)

blaze - what do you mean 'how you feed them'? i've read that adding bloom booster is the same as boosting your base nutrient to the same ppm. can you link to the bulk ag products you use?

Crysmatic - I'm an organic soil outdoor grower so my methods may not be as applicable if you are growing indoors or hydro. What I meant by "how you feed them" if that the manner in which you feed and the frequency that you feed makes a very big difference. Smaller, more regular feedings are better for the plants - it gets more nutrients to them, and you will end up using less fertilizer than you would if you were doing large feedings all at once. Plants use up the majority of the fertilizer they are going to use pretty quickly - within hours from what I have seen. Doing small feedings once a day, or even twice a day, gets you a much higher growth rate than doing it every few days or once a week like some folks do.

Foliar feeding is also hugely important in my opinion. When you foliar feed, far more of the nutrients get used by the plants. When growing in soil only about 5% of the fertilizer you apply via soil drenches actually gets used. When you foliar feed, the amount that gets used is closer to 70-80% if I remember right. Not only that but when you foliar feed, the plant starts using the nutrients immediately. You can correct nutrient imbalances within hours feeding this way. Finally, it takes a lot less fertilizer to foliar feed you plants than it does to do a soil drench. So when you foliar feed, you get more nutrients to the plants, and use very little fertilizer with very little waste. I foliar feed once a week religiously, and you can do it even more if you want. I've been watching one of my friends do an ID run and he has been foliar feeding 3-4 times a week and the plants are the healthiest and fastest growing plants I've ever seen him grow so far.

As far as bulk ag products go, all my soil prep comes from bulk ag. companies. For my compost I have been using products from the company Grab N Grow out of Sonoma county. You can get yards of well made organic compost from them for between $15-$45 a yard, and organic pre-mixed soil for $42 a yard. Last time I checked a yard of Fox Farm Ocean Forest was almost $1,000 a yard. Look around in your local area and you can probably find good soil company. I live in a big agriculture area, so I look for places that the people running the vineyards and orchards are buying their stuff from rather than the hydro stores. The other things I've been using are gypsum, worm castings, rice hulls, lava rock, and contractor sand - all of which can be purchased in bulk for very cheap, so long as you are buying it from what I would call a "real" ag company rather than a hydro store.

The other big thing I've been doing lately is making my own actively aerated compost teas (AACT.) The AACT's are pretty amazing from what I have seen - they boost nutrient uptake by almost two-fold, and you can replace part of your fertilizer program with them, resulting in less ferts you have to buy. My sap levels doubled after applying it twice over a two week period, and I was using one third less fertilizer. Plus they are dirt cheap to make - it costs me about 50 cents a gallon to brew up - far cheaper than the organic hydro nutrients I use. All the stuff used to make them is cheap and easy to find too. I make mine out of compost or worm castings, Pacific Gro Liquid Fish, seaweed powder, liquid humates, a very small amount of backstrap molasses, sometimes apple juice, and sometimes mycorrhizae spores get added at the end.

For running ferts thru my drip and for foliar feeding I am still using hydro products but at some point I would like to eliminate this. So far though I don't feel like I know enough to start mixing my own nutrients. If you are looking for cheap bulk stuff for this, check out Grow More. I've seen people get amazing growth using their products - BUT they are not organic so I do not use them myself. Grow More works amazingly well though and it is dirt cheap - it is used by many farmers all over the world.

thank you all for the great input!

blaze: do you use grow more's hobby garden nutes (biological, of course)? if not, how do you get the commercial hydroponic ferts? they seem perfect.

inuit: do you have those charts handy? lucas found 100-100-200 (ppm) NPK to be the best compromise in flower. i've seen charts that suggest 30% more P the last 3 weeks. the grow more 12-26-26 came to 109-103-196 at roughly 3 ml/gal. you have to supplement with CaMg.

one thing that caught my eye is the uv sensitive tracer dye...does your friends grow rooms glow under black light? lol

I have not used Grow More's hobby nutes. My experience with the Grow More comes form workign on other gardens and watching friends use it - I don't use it in my personal garden since i try to be mostly organic. As far as cost-effectiveness though it is hard to beat. Most of my hydro stuff is Botanicare products that I buy in bulk. If you know of a company that produces commercial organic hydro ferts let me know.

i learned0 about commercial nutes from you :) i'm still trying to figure out how to buy product from grow more. if AN just dilutes commercial ferts, ask big mike where he buys the base for iguana juice.

I think you can order Grow More direct from their site. If not, I have seen it carried at some of my local hydro stores and nurseries - ask your local nursery to order you some if you can't order it off their web site.

Next time I see my buddy that uses a ton of it I will ask him how/where it gets it. Pretty sure he gets it direct from the company.

Oh and I am not sure how well the GM works for hydro. I've only seen it used in soil.

edit: So I went at looked at the GM site - seems like parts of it are either down or have not bee completed. You may just have to contract the company. I did notice under the "Contact" section you can request samples from them as well.

Blaze said:

I think you can order Grow More direct from their site. If not, I have seen it carried at some of my local hydro stores and nurseries - ask your local nursery to order you some if you can't order it off their web site.

Next time I see my buddy that uses a ton of it I will ask him how/where it gets it. Pretty sure he gets it direct from the company.

Oh and I am not sure how well the GM works for hydro. I've only seen it used in soil.

edit: So I went at looked at the GM site - seems like parts of it are either down or have not bee completed. You may just have to contract the company. I did notice under the "Contact" section you can request samples from them as well.

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thanks blaze.

i was looking at the water soluble hydroponic 12-26-26:

any comments on the lucas formula 100-100-200 ppm elemental NPK in flowering?

when you contact the company for samples, they ask for 'intended use'. do i say 'tomatoes', 'fast growing annuals', or leave it blank?

Blaze, General Hydroponics has a general organics line. Grow More is basically miracle grow, in fact miracle grow might have it beat. I know people that use it...like Blaze said I certainly don't recommend it. It will grow plants, but smoking the shit is terrible. It imparts a really chemical taste to the bud, basically ruins the flavor. But it's cheap!!

Hmm does the GH organic work in soil?

If you do not over-do the Grow More it can produce decent smoke, but you have to be careful with it. I know what you mean though - I've smoked some nasty bud from using too much of it too late in flower and not flushing properly. From what I have seen it does not impart as much chemical flavor as Miracle Grow - that stuff seems to be the worst as far as that goes. A lot of the people I know who use the Grow More will use it for veg to get their plants big, then switch over to something organic during flower to get the flavor and smoothness. I was pretty skeptical at first myself but I've seen some people some decent results quality-wise doing this the last few years. I don't think it was as good as fully organic bud, but they did get bigger yields and spend less $$$ than I do going totally organic.

GM does make some good products though and more and more they are coming out with organic alternatives. I've been hearing really good things about their new organic pesticide for powdery mildew.

Crysmatic - when ever I've contacted an agriculture company I just tell them I am a hop grower. Hops are the closest relative to cannabis and thrive under similar conditions.

Also I have not ever used the Lucas formula, but from what I have read about it, it seems like a solid idea. From my understanding of it, Lucas advocates starting your plants out on full-strength nutes (something I've always done anyway) and not messing with too many additives. More and more over the years I've been using less and less products and thinning down to which ones actually seem to really make a difference and the results have been great. I'm using less ferts and spending less money than I was a few years ago and getting better results.

Canna also has a bio line....House and Garden has the Bio-Component line....both I would highly recommend. GH organic is for either soil or hydro.

i've been playing with the pm/lucas nute calculator, and i might have a go at making my own bloom fert. 4-9-9.5 would give me 103-101-201 ppm. dnf sells diy kits, and they're dirt cheap.

i've seen Ca/Mg ratios from 1.7%/1.0% to 4.0%/1.5% in hobby ferts. aside from adequate levels, do they act as pH buffers?

many ferts have 1/16 of total N as ammonia to keep plants green. advanced nutrients uses urea - i'll read up on it. i think it's grow more's 5% ammonia (42% total N) that makes smoke harsh. making my own will give me their favourable ratios, without the ammonia.

Crysmatic said:

i've been playing with the pm/lucas nute calculator, and i might have a go at making my own bloom fert. 4-9-9.5 would give me 103-101-201 ppm. dnf sells diy kits, and they're dirt cheap.

i've seen Ca/Mg ratios from 1.7%/1.0% to 4.0%/1.5% in hobby ferts. aside from adequate levels, do they act as pH buffers?

many ferts have 1/16 of total N as ammonia to keep plants green. advanced nutrients uses urea - i'll read up on it. i think it's grow more's 5% ammonia (42% total N) that makes smoke harsh. making my own will give me their favourable ratios, without the ammonia.

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Hello and thank you for such a great and intriguing thread. Why is Urea so bad?

Cheers,

Apache69 said:

Hello and thank you for such a great and intriguing thread. Why is Urea so bad?

Cheers,

Click to expand...

my latest reading indicates that ammonia/urea are not necessary in hydro - allhydro dot com. microbes in soil break down ammonia into nitrate to make it available to plants. so nitrate is all you need in hydro.

10-15% of total N as ammonia is good to keep pH from rising in soilless. GH and AN use 25% of total N as ammonia/urea.