Absolutely no offense taken, I am not that kind of person. You are obviously coming at this as wanting to learn and not trying to "bash" my schedule so no worries at all. I applaud you for sticking your neck out there and asking.
I will say this, I have only been growing for a few years now but I've probably got about 20 grows completed. My first grow was soil and then I switched to coco and have gone that way ever since. Because coco is hydro, you need to know about nutrients like in DWC or anything that requires reservoir changes. When I did research on it a few years back I came across a Youtube series that I can't find anymore from a guy who owns a hydro shop. He compared a few of the lines to each other and the conclusion was that they all had the same ingredients in them, they just had different amounts. Basically the only difference was marketing and if you know how to calculate N-P-K then you can indeed use different products from different lines.
I had 2 things influence coming up with the N-P-K values on a weekly basis. The first was from a different forum where a guy who was an agricultural major (I dunno the specific major but he majored in growing normal plants). He had turned to growing weed and used a lot of the same concepts that he learned when growing normal farm crops. He then made a schedule and it just made sense to me, although it only changed the N-P-K values once every 3 weeks. The 2nd thing I did was to take a couple different manufacturers recommended schedules and to average out what the N-P-K was by week since most of them have weekly changes. When I used this new schedule I came up with my plants yielded nearly double and I've just stuck with it ever since. Call it lightning in a bottle but I feel like my plants are almost always looking healthy in terms of the way the leaves look. I'm not saying it couldn't be a better schedule but it works for me and a couple people here use it and have increases in their yield. It's a small sample size but so far it's been all improvements for people that were just following the bottle or something basic like the Lucas Formula.
In the last couple years a lot of products have come out and I don't know enough about them. I also don't have the time to research them all out and I'm pretty stuck in my ways. I still very much believe that plants should get boosts at certain points in the lifecycle and they should happen on a weekly basis and not a monthly basis. Magoo already made a good point about nutrient burn and all that so I don't need to reiterate what he said but he took the words out of my mouth. If it isn't causing burn then you are also likely wasting nutrients because why give plants nutrients when they don't need them? Often times this will cause salt buildups and those salt buildups can cause roots to burn unless you flush the plant. I almost never have to flush my plants unless I let them get too dry and that can cause salt buildup as well.
The last thing I'd like to say is there is kind of a reason I decided to stop preaching about nutrients. In prior journals I talk a lot more about them but really this is a good schedule for General Hydroponics 3 part series in coco. That's all I can really vouch for. I think other people have had success manipulating the nutrients lines they use but really there could be a number of factors on why a grow is better and it's hard to attribute that only to manipulating a nutrient schedule. My schedule has just worked for me and when I change nutrients lines then I will have something better to compare to but it's tough to change when I keep having pretty successful grows. That's why I am backing away from pushing the whole nutrient schedule thing now in this journal in this new chapter.
Quadlining is what has benefited people the most and there is too many things I don't know about other nutrient lines to be a fair advocate for telling people to follow my PPM and N-P-K ratios with those lines. I did a lot of research on it initially and once I put it together and had much improved success I really just went with that and haven't looked back since. At the time I remembered the science of it all much better and I did tweak the schedule about 10 different times before I really finalized that one but it's more work than I've got time for to dive back into that. With nutrients I've gone the "If it isn't broke then don't fix it" route as nutrients really aren't even in my top 3 most important things. You can give plants a basic schedule and have great success and you can give it a more detailed schedule and have great success and maybe the only difference will be wasting less nutrients or no burn vs just a little burn. This is why I tell people to just keep the N-P-K changes in mind and see where I boost things and mainly just follow the bottles recommendations. If you do that and just adjust the bottles recommendations a tiny bit I bet mine and theirs are mainly similar. I just feel like mine wastes less and gives the plants what they need in the ratios they need it the whole time. Rookie growers really should just do what the bottle says for a grow and then try some different boosts on the next grow and see if you notice a difference, but I bet you will. Sorry that's probably not a good enough answer but it's really all I have for ya.
Glad you made it home safe. I hope you had a great vaca!
