Nute Schedule

[steelyeyes]

Which nute schedule to you follow?

I've seen people mention what brand or whatever and that they use an additive or cal-mag but it's not very specific.

One exception is Malachi's thread in Micro Grows

I also get the impression that pretty much everyone needs cal-mag even though the people selling base nutes claim they have everything your plant needs. I've been having problems trying to feed my plants right and could use some specific information vesus general "use joe blow's nute line" kind of stuff.

I have found out that if I run more than 700 ppm no matter which brand it is my plants don't like it at least for the first month plus. Higher than that and they burn.

 

[j wizzle]

i run my stuff over 1000 PPMs always, i have some OGs 6-7 weeks in veg that are just beautiful. RO water with GH 3 part and botanicare Cal Mag+ with hygrozyme, add liquid and powder kool bloom in flower. just follow the instructions on the bottles and you will be fine. then you make little adjustments as you go depending on you grow style and setup to fine tune your feeding schedule


i say go around 400-500 ppms 1st week of veg, then go up 100-150 ppms per week until you put into flower. im going 1200 ppms 1st week of flower and raise it to 1800-2000 by the time i flush

 

[entrails]

First are you using a .5 or a .7 conversion on your meter? Also, if you are vegging under a HID light of some sort you can nute higher if however you have the plants vegging under say T-5's or anything other than some kind of HID you will need less intense nutes as you can not feed the plants as much. Also what is the exact nutrient profile of your base mix? For many companies you can calculate it out with the help of some online resourses.

One gallon of h2o with a low starting EC when mixed with 8ml of gh micro will contain 5% calcium or approx. 130 ppm at a .7 conversion.

GH Bloom contains Mg at 1.5% or 73 ppm at a .7 conversion.

Im not sure about Cal but as far as Mg is concerned, on average, but not always, and not with every strain of Cannabis, during flowering under heavy lights, as a rule of thumb, consider Mg requirement to be somewhere on the order of 75 to 100 ppm per gallon as a base. Add more if deficiencies are noticed.

 

[steelyeyes]

I'm using a 400 watt MH light for veg. I actually use EC when dealing with things in my room but most people only speak ppm so I convert using the .7 conversion.

I'm using H&G Aquaflakes and haven't searched out their nutrient profile. They aren't as upfront about it as GH but then again when I follow GH's formulas the ECs come up smoking hot and nearly burnt my plants to cinders. I had to cut the stuff to 60% or less of their recommended values and still then didn't see anything remarkably different for growth or over happy plants.

Grpwing in dirt is getting more and more attractive about now. So far I've grown a lot of frustration and some sad little plants.

 

[entrails]

Sorry about the lack of success so far.

Have you tried the basic Lucas formula at any point?

 

[steelyeyes]

I looked his up but his ppm rates are like 1500 and any time I've gotten over 1000 I start getting nute burn. I did have a thrip issue I didn't know about. It looked a lot like a burn and my eyes aren't the best up close (that over 40 thing sucks) so they got to the point they looked like a herd of wildebeast on a nature show before we found them and started to attempt to kill them off. We knocked them back with a Doctor Doom bomb and followed up with some organic spray that seems to be working.

We actually have three plants that made it through all that and seem to be recovering well. The rest look like they're circling the drain but we'll doctor them until they flat line for good just in case. They seemed to rally after the initial thrip reduction but then stressed and looked like textbook (as in layed the leaves on the pictures in the book) cal-mag deficiency. I thought the stress caused them to pull all of those minerals out of the nutrient so we added some back and haven't seen a huge improvement yet.

It's weird how you can have say a dozen plants in the same system under the same lights and everthing and some just take off and the others stand at the starting line like they didn't hear the gun go off. Clearly the ones with the good growth will be our clone donors next time since they seem to like what we're doing and the others don't.

 

[steelyeyes]

Things are picking up, especially with the younger plants that didn't have the thrip problem. They're shooting up now, even the ones that are lagging are showing good root growth. There is some hope yet...

 

[entrails]

Good. I hope things progress well. Whats your current ec or ppm and your ph?

 

[steelyeyes]

We're running .9 EC and pH around 6.0 I've heard and read everything from 5.5 to 6.5 on the pH but 6.0 seems to keep them the happiest. I'd really like to boost the EC a bit but I'm getting good growth, tight internode spacing, big fan leaves, and no burn. I'm concerned that once the roots get burnt recovery of the plant just isn't going to happen so I'd rather be safe than sorry for now. Maybe my next run in the veg room I'll boost the EC once the roots are well established.

I also have an issue where not all the plants in the same system are nearly the same size or development. Some of them just kind of parked there for a couple weeks not thriving or dying and finally they're starting to go. Part of that was that my pots don't fill evenly on the 15 minute fill cycle. I know it's bad form but I put two 30 minute fills a day out of the five I have and that allows gravity to even up the water levels to the roots on the small plants and now everything is growing.

I actually have six pots of plants in dirt in there too and they aren't exactly kicking butt on my hydro stuff. I have good soil and feed them 18-18-18 full strength once a week and they're fine but not better than the water fed kids. I bought them as clones and the starter plugs they were in weren't the kind I coould take apart and repot them in hydroton so I ran them in dirt.

To be honest I had the best veg growth on four 30 minute cycles a day with an EC of 1.2 on a 24 hour light cycle under 124 watts of LEDS and some flourescent tubes for a total of under 200 watts. I haven't gotten there yet with the 400 watt MH but time will tell. A friend of mine swore my problem was the lights but those things put out some bushy, dark green plants with great growth rates and since switching I don't see an impressive change in growth. I might find a way to add a couple tracks of them back in the room since nobody seems to want to buy them. More lumens in the right spectrum wouldn't hurt anything.

 

[Seamaiden]

Sorry about the lack of success so far.

Have you tried the basic Lucas formula at any point?

I was just gonna mention that.

Steely, I finished up a run of girls on which I used what I'll call the Knucklehead/BR formula. Just Floranova Bloom and Fox Farms Big Bud, supplemented weekly or bi-weekly with powdered Koolbloom (early in flower, it has nitrogen) and liquid Koolbloom (0-10-10). I can't say it was my best run, but it was my best indoor run by far.

I'm still learning, but I can say that the basic recipe was very easy, but STILL had to be cut down hard. Had to cut down the Floranova by 2-3mls/gal, had to cut the FF-BB down from 15mls/gal to 5mls/gal. You just can't go by formulas to the letter all the time, ya know?

I'm not so sure it's the lights, either, I think you're on the right track.

People are on my nuts lately to get glasses. I hear you on that >40yo thing, it's why I missed a spider mite problem and it almost got out of hand.

 

[steelyeyes]

One of my young plants is kicking butt. It's over 14" tall and showing white hairs already. I have some others in the room I use for flowering that seem to be over the thrip damage but aren't growing in leaps. I'm tempted to just put them together and flip the lights to 12/12 and see what happens. I could wait for more of my small plants to get a bit bigger too. I have a few promising ones right behind the one showing the hairs. Maybe in a week they'll all be ready. It would be nice to have a group so I can manage the N, P, and K like I hear you're supposed to in flower.

 

[steelyeyes]

Things are going really well so far. I just got some plants under 12/12. One is a heavy indica dominant strain called Da Purps. It's bushy and has fans bigger than my hands. Problem being is they're shading bud sites so they're going to have to go pretty soon.

The other plants that are doing well are Big Bud and the few Blue Widows I have in soil are also looking good. I'm sort of using the soil plants as a control to see which environmental factor is having the most impact, the lights, the temp, or the nutes. I have some Blue Widow clones I'm going to run hydro as soon as they root well enough to pot. I guess I'll feel my way around to see which strain likes what I do the best and rewards me with a heavy yield....:)

 

[paulycali]

Its the PH level of the water he's using

 

[entrails]

Good to read things are going well for you.

Keep the canopy even at all costs!

 

[steelyeyes]

Way cool! I checked them this morning before work and saw white hairs on all the right spots. The one ATF that was kind of sickly had me fooled for a while. The whole top of it's all healthy and stretching up and budding out. I totally forgot it had been a problem plant until I peeked down at the older leaves. I still have two white widows in the corner that are kind of lame. All of their sisters got tossed outside next to my grapes due to failure to thrive. Oddly enough they're starting to rebound too.

Last week they looked a little hungry for Mg so we added 2 ml/gal of Cal Mag and they just took off. I might push a hair more of it on the next rez. turnover. It feels like we're getting this thing dialed in a bit at least to early flower.

I have some Kool Bloom liquid I'm thinking of adding a bit of since I'm seeing evidence of buds. I'm going to go slow with that and back off my base nutes and add a tad more Cal Mag and see how it goes.