I can talk about
Canna Coco nutes in flowering all day long.
My experience with the stuff is that despite Canna's claim that you don't want to go messing with the nutrient ratio when you flip to flowering, I think it is better to go ahead and back off on the N and increase the PK right from the beginning. In addition, I will decrease Calcium and increase Magnesium to change up that ratio from something like a 4:1 ratio in Veg to more like a 2:1 ratio in flowering. Days 12 to 20 after the 12/12 flip I always see an increased need for magnesium, perhaps due to the Potassium increase in the nutrients, or the calcium buffer being fulfilled in the media.
Their Cannazym product is crucial to start running, and not for the enzymes, but for the 0-2-1 PK increase. If not Cannazym, then something else with that PK balance is going to be extremely useful as you proceed into flowering. Canna recognized this problem about 2 years ago and reformulated their Cannazym to be a better flowering supplement. I suggest to, at the very least, mimic the very smart people at Canna and follow suit with the PK increase right from the start of 12/12 (as directed on their nutrient calculator). Instead of Cannazym I've been using
Botanicare Hydroplex. It is the same price per bottle, but it's at a 0-10-6 concentration and contains no enzymes. Instead it's got some b-vitamins, and all that extra snake juice they like to toss in Bloom enhancers like Canna Boost Accelerator, AN
Big Bud, and
Atami Bloombastic. For the price though, all I was really looking for was a P dominant supplement to replace Cannazym. Definitely did a better job for me.
Other elements the system lacks are Iron and Silicon. Sulfur is pretty easy to get enough of, but the chelated Iron and the Silicon are going to require additional supplementation. This almost demands the need for an EC meter so you can dial back all the other nutrients and ensure you're not pushing too many ppm. I have used
Botanicare Cal-Mag Plus and Organicare Huvega as the extra Iron sources and find the
Cal-Mag Plus to be a better fit with coco. Many other people recognize this as well.
Cal-Mag Plus adds 0.1ec for every 1ml per gallon. Like clockwork. It makes dosing your system super easy. The only problem I have with
Cal-Mag Plus has been the extra nitrate it supplies skewing the final ratio to be just a touch N dominant. Over time this will build up and eventually you'll see slower flower onset and some eagle claw (especially if you're running a <5.8pH into flowering). Thus, when using the extra 2-0-0
Cal-Mag Plus you also need to offset this with another balanced PK dominant system. There are a lot of inexpensive products that work but the best I've found is probably Liquid KoolBloom at 0-10-10. By adding just 1ml of LKB for every 5ml of
Cal-Mag Plus I get a nice balanced increase of EC. The LKB carries a little extra Magnesium, which doesn't hurt, and the $18 liter bottle or whatever will last you more than 500 gallons of full strength flowering solution no problem. It's like cents per reservoir change, and it can make a huge difference in the final product when dosing
Cal-Mag Plus for the Iron.
In later flowering I'm running like 1ml to 2ml of the
Cal-Mag Plus, at most, so I don't even use much of the LKB because I'm generally pushing a bunch of the
Hydroplex anyway.
For Silicon, it's all about Potassium Silicate. Actually, I use it as a pH up as well, though I don't necessarily need a pH up... RhinoSkin from AN is a little pricey for the concentration. I prefer
Dyna-Gro Pro-Tekt as a supplement here. You're probably in that same boat, most people are.
At the end of the day you can run the A+B with the Cannazym, the PK 13/14, and the Boost Accelerator, but you'll still need that extra Iron, and the silicon won't hurt.
When you add the extra Nitrogen, and the extra Potassium, you then need to compensate with extra PK, and even more Magnesium to compensate for all of the other cations that element now has to compete with. This ultimately drives up the amount of sulfur in the system, further complicating the chemistry.
And this is why I am getting the hell out of Canna.
In Veg, when you can push an assload of Nitrogen, and run their system at full strength, GOD DAMN does this system produce some of the largest, healthiest and finest vegetative plants a grower has seen so long as it is getting the iron it needs to keep new growth green.
In flower though, it becomes a real mind game. You might get lucky, Cannabis is a very versatile plant and can grow fine in many different nutrient ratio balances after all. For me though I just can't stomach having to add like 6 other things to the system just to get it balanced right for Cannabis. It might grow good Kale, and tomatoes, but for the best quality medicine you're going to need some extras.
Since I find myself constantly going back to
Botanicare for supplements I figured maybe I should just run their CNS 17 Coco/Soil Grow, Boom, and Ripe system. By using a predictive ppm calculator that I built on relational equations in a spreadsheet I mimicked the element ratios suggested for flowering with CNS 17 Bloom, but by using
Canna Coco and a variety of other supplements. I then used CNS 17 Ripe and axed the Canna during the last 4 weeks of flowering.
In addition, I keep my EC under 2.0 the entire grow. My
Big Bud could have handled a lot more, but the Nirvana Ice (I'm familiar with Nirvana strains needing lower ppm) was dialed in perfectly. To help keep buildup a non-issue I would mix up say, 10 gallons of solution at full strength. Then water and collect about 30% as runoff from each 2 gallon planter. This would leave me with 5 gallons of solution. Then I'd add 5 more gallons back to it of clean water. This would keep the NPK ratio pretty balanced, add that extra 30-40ppm in my tap water of whatever it contains, and give me basically a 1/2 strength solution. Then I'd use that the following day.
The results of this experiment were fantastic, lower ppm, lots of runoff, watching the EC in and out to ensure no buildup, and alternating 1/2 strength feedings. Best I'd ever seen.
So, I think if you're looking to not only save a little time but also a little money then the CNS 17 Coco/Soil lineup from
Botanicare has proven itself to me to be a better system for growing cannabis in coco. Nothing against Canna, especially for Veg, but the CNS 17 Ripe did me right for sure.
Good looking plants, Scrogging can be REALLY rewarding. Google: "400w 450g harvest" and find your way to the scrog done by a grower who goes by NBG. He used a canna substra DTW system with a rockwool/hydroton combo. Fantastic stuff from scrog.
I think what it all comes down to is the extra time it takes to fill out a single plant. It might be faster to have higher plant counts and quicker harvests (like a 56 day flower chamber rather than 40 days to fill the scrog and another 60 to harvest). I think Scrogging is a good method for medical growers looking to stay inside of a reasonable plant count with a good deal of experience. In many ways you're putting a lot of your "eggs in one basket" when you grow really large scrogged out plants. As long as you are familiar with the strain and you know what it wants then I think this method is really going to kick ass for you over the long haul.
Vertical SOG is where the real efficiency is though, watt for watt, day for day, dollar for dollar. Sounds like you're hip to that too.
Just one hip cat after another around here!
