That vegetable garden is badass Meeks!
Thanks Gr33n, I have learned a lot by getting hands on with the crops and working with them from seedlings to where they are now!
Ditto what gr33nl3af said. The 8th tomato picture down (if I counted right) is absolutely beautiful. The next round is shaping up nicely as well! Love the way you do what you do, Meeks. You're so very helpful & I appreciate it greatly! ;) Enjoy the rest of your weekend.
Thanks so much Lady Goods! I forgot to switch my light timer yesterday, so the girls got one more day of veg than I was planning. . . they are massive now! Got my timer switched now, should be some explosive growth over the next few weeks with how happy they are looking right now!
Thanks for the pointers nMeeks! Would love to hear your foliar recipes. I have been using
magic green and some other foliars (alga mic) but with limited success. Yet another reason to drop H&G. Been using
ProTekt for a while now and like it.
So does this look right? grams /gallon
Jacks Hydro Pro 5-12-26 3 grams
Cal Nitrate at 2 grams
and Epsom Salts at .75 grams
CaCI2 .07 - .25 grams
MOST .1 gram
ProTekt Silica 2ml / gallon
Drip Clean .5ml/ gallon
I would also use
MOAB powder in final weeks cutting back on the base nutes
How do you tweak it? Light at the beginning then heavy at the end?
Also, do you use their bloom booster and/or
MOAB or something different?
Will be putting up a new journal in a few weeks once I clean and reset. Will be looking forward to your comments. Also, I know the drip clean is a bottle, but I have always notices a huge difference in using it in the pure coco mix I am running. I think Ill run a side by side and see what the difference is. Even though the mighty Capulator told me to ditch it.
My foliar recipes are not set in stone, they change based on what minor deficiencies I think I am reading in my plants, so sometime it will include an FeZn product like Spray n Grow, or a K and Si product like
Protekt, or an N-P-K product higher in P like Jack's Hydro, or a general micro nutrient product like MOST, or even a pesticide like
Azamax if I am seeing too many fungus gnats on my sticky traps. . . . basically I pick a few of those and mix them up in a sprayer and apply without pH'ing anything. I don't like to foliar in the dark, because the stomata are closed the plant can't absorb nearly as much of what you are applying so most of it goes to waste. What I have been doing recently is applying foliars in the morning after the light have come on. To avoid burning my plants when I spray with the lights on I cover the glass of my air cooled reflectors with a white trash bag. I just tape the bag at each corner to each corner of my reflector, and it blocks enough light as to not burn my plants, but plenty of light still gets through to keep the plants happy and they don't notice a thing! Usually I can visibly see improvements in my plants within a few hours of doing this if I applied the right nutrients that were lacking, at which point I pull the plastic trash bags down and the plants grow like they are on steroids! If you ever want to mix up a batch using a combo of those products, shoot me a PM and I will let you know what rates I would use for the combo you are making.
I highly recommend you drop the
Magic Green as soon as possible! That crap is just that . . .crap! They have different dosage rates on the bottle and their website, and if you read their message boards, they recommend a third, different rate! Any company that can't even give you a straight answer when you ask how much of their product to use, and they don't give you a clue what you even have in that bottle to be able to make an accurate guess for dosage on your own, isn't worth the money they charge IMHO!
When it comes to your layout for feeding, I have a few comments. First and foremost, the 3-2-1 ratio can be a bit confusing at first. It is not 3g-2g-1g per gallon as you say, it is just a ratio of those ingredients compared to each other. If that makes any sense. You could run it 1.5g-1g-0.5g per gallon or 4.5g-3g-1.5g per gallon or 3g-2g-1g per gallon . . . . but the basic ratio of "3-2-1" never changes.
Now that I have cleared that up, I want to restate that I have been filling a 20 gal reservoir with enough 3-2-1 ratio for 80 gallons. . . so if you do that math, I have been putting 240g Jack Hydro, 160g Cal-Nit, and 65g* Epsom (*like I said I have been running closer to .75 for this part of the "3-2-
1", would be 80g) into just 20 gallons of water! This is pushing the bounds of concentration without getting lockout, but when mixed carefully it works great! The benefit of having this concentrated reservoir with a perfect 3-2-1 ratio is that I can fill my other regular feeding reservoirs up with RO whenever they start to get low, put a few gallon scoops from the concentrated solution into the mostly RO feeding reservoir, and BAM! I have full 800ppm feeding reservoirs in as much time as it takes my hose to fill it up! No more mixing every time I need to refill my feed reservoir, just once every couple weeks when the concentrate reservoir gets low! This new practice, combined with putting my drip irrigation on a timer, has saved me enormous amounts of time in the garden over the last couple weeks, and my plants look like they are loving it!
Did all that make sense or are you confused now? Assuming you are still reading because you read what I just typed enough times for it make sense, let me get into what I feed specifically, versus what you are saying you plan on feeding.
I don't use
Protekt in my feed water. I don't use Drip Clean in my feed water. I don't use CaCl2 in my feed water. And I use MOST at closer to .005-.01g per gallon. Everything else looks right on with what I am feeding at a pH between 5.5-5.7 and my plants love it between 775-850ppm in veg under a 1000w. My feeding is very simple in veg, and my plants are happy. . . so last round I decided to keep things simple and feed the same thing all the way through flowering. No bloom boosters, nothing other than the 3-2-1 ingredients plus a tiny bit of MOST and everything went great! I know Capulator uses the CaCl2, but I would rather play around by raising the Ca with the Cal-Nit, dropping the Jacks Hydro a bit to maintain the same N, and bringing the P-K back up with MKP or something similar. There is no need for more Cl, and you risk toxicity since there will already be some Cl in your water, plus there is Cl in MOST and Jack's Hydro. . . so that is back to my point about not having unnecessary salts in your feed solution. But he also experiences constant Ca deficiency for some reason, so he has to play around with raising his Ca, and I don't, so I haven't spent much time calculating out how I might choose to raise Ca if I had to. More than likely I would just put some Cal-Nit into my foliar mix if I was seeing Ca deficiency, rather than complicate the 3-2-1 ratio, which works so well!
I hope all this rambling helps. I know it can be tough to decide what mix you feed when you are taking advice from more than one grower, but the more you ask questions and do research, the more you will feel comfortable working these mixes out for yourself!
-Meeks
