What PH for HGV Nutrient Salts?

[Anthem]

The first thing people (New Growers) need to understand is that all these bottle nutes etc Jacks , HGV Athena are really one size fits all, and you the grower do not dictate how your plants like there food and the ratio's they eat it at, that is set by many other factors lighting intensity, LED vs HPS temps RH, rate of water uptake etc etc, so when using these products they will works differently for everyone, so your really trying to find the point that it works best for you, and that will mean different EC etc for everyone, but its so, that different ratio's will require a high EC to get proper uptake IE. HGV Athena

@Aqua Man I have never used those so I'm not sure there accuracy or how good they are.

If I was going to build a solution that had to be spot on for my setup there is really only one way I know how to do it, and thats water analysis and tissue samples, I'd start by setting my N to the amount of light temps ,C02 etc then set the ratio of Ca off that, a little under or over N ,if over you will most like not see N tox, to much Ca you'll get purple to low you will get whiteish on new leaves, k Mg etc to balance for time of grow, I would do micro's separate because I'd want to set Fe, Mn B etc individually. I'd then lab test my solution to see if the individual PPM and ratio's are mixing to what I wanted.

The only way from there to see if the plants are getting it in there optimal ratio's is tissue sampling, either every week or every other week, that will tell me exactly what my plant has in it, and what I need to adjust in my formula, I'd do one for veg and one for flower. as long as your grow environment, lighting media etc stays the same it will be good. fulvic, silica etc will all be foliar spray.

depending on the scale i'm not sure i'd spend thousands on a pens to tell me whats in my solution, I can get lab tests done for 40 buck i'd go that way but you may not have that option
edit I took a better look at those pens and they do, do tissue as well , if they are accurate and will last a long time maybe but there a lot of money, again depends the need and scale, the balance for me is lab testing can be done cheap. I don't know what the cost would be where your at

@Dr.Green55, I tried running EC up with Athena. I found never get it above 2.4 before the plants started to burn. I know Athena is stating an EC of 3.0 from start to finish. Every time I tried using Athena I had to still addCA to the formulation in early flower. I always had problems with Athena. It just seemed in balanced

 

[Aqua Man]

@Dr.Green55, I tried running EC up with Athena. I found never get it above 2.4 before the plants started to burn. I know Athena is stating an EC of 3.0 from start to finish. Every time I tried using Athena I had to still addCA to the formulation in early flower. I always had problems with Athena. It just seemed in balanced

Indoor or out? I run based on VPD taking leaf temps into account and high light. My transpiration rates are very high. So i find i need a much lower concentration and just tweak my ratios. But there is so much at play that i feel like @Dr.Green55 is bang on with the forst you essentially need to establish transpiration rates through light, vpd and co2 and then ratio and concentration as a whole.

So to truly maximize a nutrient will be absolutely unattainable to most growers

 

[Anthem]

Indoor or out? I run based on VPD taking leaf temps into account and high light. My transpiration rates are very high. So i find i need a much lower concentration and just tweak my ratios. But there is so much at play that i feel like @Dr.Green55 is bang on with the forst you essentially need to establish transpiration rates through light, vpd and co2 and then ratio and concentration as a whole.

Yes but a large scale operation will pay for the testing and this is the point where big business can produce better product than a small craft farmer

 

[Aqua Man]

Yes but a large scale operation will pay for the testing and this is the point where big business can produce better product than a small craft farmer

Absolutely

 

[Dr.Green55]

@Dr.Green55, I tried running EC up with Athena. I found never get it above 2.4 before the plants started to burn. I know Athena is stating an EC of 3.0 from start to finish. Every time I tried using Athena I had to still addCA to the formulation in early flower. I always had problems with Athena. It just seemed in balanced

yes your exactly right it didn't work for you, thats the one size fits all, that goes with any all bottled pre made nutes, not everyone of them is going to work for everyone, your environment didn't like the ratio's of the athena nutrient profile so you couldn't find that happy medium, but that doesn't mean Athena is not balanced or missing anything into. I know a commercial grower doing very well with athena , his stuff looks amazing. its just finding the right nutrients for your application

 

[N1ghtL1ght]

Or do it the organic way with soil that has a lot of long-lasting fertilizer depots contained in the form of organic macromolecules or waterinsoluble stonemeals. If in need, a plants root can secrete "sugar", organic acids or phytosiderophones to help nurture bacterias increasing mineralization, ion mobilisation & assimilation.
Mineralic feeds are highly forcefully in that regard - the ions are already dissolved in the water and will be taken in either actively or passively as the plant drinks.
Actually it's far more detailed and not as that black n white as the 3 above sentences may depict it now.

 

[markcannabinhumanoid]

EC is way to high. I can’t say much without pics.

Thanks for giving me some advice man, I really appreciate it. I did some reading with your guys comments, so would you recommend an EC of 2.0 or 2.5? Also, do you think PH has anything to with it? Like would it be better to increase my PH from 5.7? I think maybe my plants aren't intaking the proper nutrients.

 

[Anthem]

yes your exactly right it didn't work for you, thats the one size fits all, that goes with any all bottled pre made nutes, not everyone of them is going to work for everyone, your environment didn't like the ratio's of the athena nutrient profile so you couldn't find that happy medium, but that doesn't mean Athena is not balanced or missing anything into. I know a commercial grower doing very well with athena , his stuff looks amazing. its just finding the right nutrients for your application

Do you know what type of lighting your commercial friend is using?

 

[Aqua Man]

Hi, I'm using HGV salts and on their schedule it recommends a PH of 5.7 and EC of 3.0. And that's what I've kept it at pretty much exactly and I'm at week 5 now. My problem is that my plants now how deficiencies. I adding other nutrients like potassium and phosphorus, mainly from Big Bug and Carboload. So it might be a Magnesium/Calcium deficiency, as my PH is very low and my nutrients probably don't supply it enough. About half my buds aren't growing or gaining any sort of mass, they are still nearly perfect in quality, beautiful-white without any sort of damage. But the leaves in the upper part of the plants are now yellow and browning in spots. So it's clear my plants have some form of deficiency which has stunted their growth pretty bad. How would I heal my plants in this stage? Should I increase PH for the Magnesium, or would that harm the plants. A buddy told me that higher PH with salts can damage roots and stunt growth even more. So my only other options is doing a flush with AN Revive, to supply the plant with Magnesium/Calcium. What do you guys think? Any kind of advice would help me at this point because I'm at a loss.

Personally i think your adding to many different product’s and its creating issues

 

[Dr.Green55]

Do you know what type of lighting your commercial friend is using?

I don't know anyone using LED in bigger grows, my assumption would be knowing led's require more Ca, that and Mg would need a bump, but I think that goes across the board with led's, but its not just lights there is many factors medium playing a big part

 

[Dr.Green55]

Personally i think your adding to many different product’s and its creating issues

Yes your !00% correct as soon as you start adding stuff it can easily mess things up worse.

 

[N1ghtL1ght]

The first thing people (New Growers) need to understand is that all these bottle nutes etc Jacks , HGV Athena are really one size fits all, and you the grower do not dictate how your plants like there food and the ratio's they eat it at, that is set by many other factors lighting intensity, LED vs HPS temps RH, rate of water uptake etc etc, so when using these products they will works differently for everyone, so your really trying to find the point that it works best for you, and that will mean different EC etc for everyone, but its so, that different ratio's will require a high EC to get proper uptake IE. HGV Athena

@Aqua Man I have never used those so I'm not sure there accuracy or how good they are.

If I was going to build a solution that had to be spot on for my setup there is really only one way I know how to do it, and thats water analysis and tissue samples, I'd start by setting my N to the amount of light temps ,C02 etc then set the ratio of Ca off that, a little under or over N ,if over you will most like not see N tox, to much Ca you'll get purple to low you will get whiteish on new leaves, k Mg etc to balance for time of grow, I would do micro's separate because I'd want to set Fe, Mn B etc individually. I'd then lab test my solution to see if the individual PPM and ratio's are mixing to what I wanted.

The only way from there to see if the plants are getting it in there optimal ratio's is tissue sampling, either every week or every other week, that will tell me exactly what my plant has in it, and what I need to adjust in my formula, I'd do one for veg and one for flower. as long as your grow environment, lighting media etc stays the same it will be good. fulvic, silica etc will all be foliar spray.

depending on the scale i'm not sure i'd spend thousands on a pens to tell me whats in my solution, I can get lab tests done for 40 buck i'd go that way but you may not have that option
edit I took a better look at those pens and they do, do tissue as well , if they are accurate and will last a long time maybe but there a lot of money, again depends the need and scale, the balance for me is lab testing can be done cheap. I don't know what the cost would be where your at

I wonder if one could enrich such a "high ppm/low N formulae" with some extra N (like +50ppm urea) couldn't that mean to be able drive a less high EC?
I mean, why are they doing that in the first place, the motive to have way more K than N?

 

[Dr.Green55]

Thanks for giving me some advice man, I really appreciate it. I did some reading with your guys comments, so would you recommend an EC of 2.0 or 2.5? Also, do you think PH has anything to with it? Like would it be better to increase my PH from 5.7? I think maybe my plants aren't intaking the proper nutrients.

The first thing i'd do is run it as recommend, with nothing else, make sure Ph is dialed in, whats going in, whats coming out, I'm not sure what medium your using, if you have dry backs make sure there not getting to dry or still to wet, so if your 3 ec and everything else is on spot for me the next move would be to decide if i'm over or under feeding and adjust EC, if i think under feeding i'd up ec a touch as athena runs low N and Ca, P and K I wouldn't even consider upping, that will make it worse, otherwise if you didn't up EC I would up Ca and Mg, on IG and stuff there is guys saying they run it 3.5 4.0 etc.

 

[Aqua Man]

I wonder if one could enrich such a "high ppm/low N formulae" with some extra N (like +50ppm urea) couldn't that mean to be able drive a less high EC?
I mean, why are they doing that in the first place, the motive to have way more K than N?

Depends on the media and microbes but ammonia/ammonium is the hottest source of nitrogen and can burn plant quite easily when compared to nitrates . It also cause the PH of the media to drop when taken up since the plants release an h+ ion in that process.

If you are running a living media then more than likely your added ammonia will be broken down into nitrate within hours of adding it. The conversion is around 1ppm ammonia/ammonium will break down into close to 4ppm of nitrate and as i say this can happen extremely fast. I have seen and tested this in water myself

 

[Aqua Man]

The first thing i'd do is run it as recommend, with nothing else, make sure Ph is dialed in, whats going in, whats coming out, I'm not sure what medium your using, if you have dry backs make sure there not getting to dry or still to wet, so if your 3 ec and everything else is on spot for me the next move would be to decide if i'm over or under feeding and adjust EC, if i think under feeding i'd up ec a touch as athena runs low N and Ca, P and K I wouldn't even consider upping, that will make it worse, otherwise if you didn't up EC I would up Ca and Mg, on IG and stuff there is guys saying they run it 3.5 4.0 etc.

They must be running a low VPD? Curious if they are using high co2? Cause thats about the way i can contemplate this even taking the rest into account

 

[Aqua Man]

I mean, why are they doing that in the first place, the motive to have way more K than N?

I have some ideas but id like to hear also

 

[markcannabinhumanoid]

Personally i think your adding to many different product’s and its creating issues

Yeah, it could be that, the flowering salts probably already has a hefty amount of PK and I'm adding Big Bud on top of that, last 3 weeks I'm going to be adding shooting powder. Half my buds are fine, beautiful-white and other half are stunted, growing like a mm in diameter in 2 weeks now. Maybe I'm getting calcium/magnesium deficiency and excess PK. Anyways, thanks alot for your advice man.

 

[Aqua Man]

Yeah, it could be that, the flowering salts probably already has a hefty amount of PK and I'm adding Big Bud on top of that, last 3 weeks I'm going to be adding shooting powder. Half my buds are fine, beautiful-white and other half are stunted, growing like a mm in diameter in 2 weeks now. Maybe I'm getting calcium/magnesium deficiency and excess PK. Anyways, thanks alot for your advice man.

Honestly while he is in here id be picking @Dr.Green55 brain on this… i know i am because he knows his shit and anytime that man talks i listen

 

[Dr.Green55]

I wonder if one could enrich such a "high ppm/low N formulae" with some extra N (like +50ppm urea) couldn't that mean to be able drive a less high EC?
I mean, why are they doing that in the first place, the motive to have way more K than N?

well there are definitely reasons to run a wider ratio of k then N in commercial setups, but the higher EC isn't all K, I read on IG they may use a product like Pekacid that would add to the EC

 

[Dr.Green55]

Honestly while he is in here id be picking @Dr.Green55 brain on this… i know i am because he knows his shit and anytime that man talks i listen

Thats to much credit my friend, I'm not a expert on HGV or Athena, but I know some guys running it and killing it with it, so I've been trying to learn as much as I can from them about it, even though I always mixed my own I've been on the jacks side of ratio's but I find Athena/HGV very intriguing. HGV is basically the same , but this is really the way I see it there is a couple way to skin a cat, each has it own way and methods and is done a little differently but in the end both gets you to the same place.