Making Your Own Nutrient Concentrates

[Pondwater]

the yellowing is N def. K def is when the edges burn or the intervenial areas get little slits or holes. More severe K def is when the leaves gnarl and get dry/crispy. I'm addressing 2 minor deficiencies in my feed adjustments. That is a major perk of using salts, I can change things feed to feed if I want. It's easier now that I mix drain to waste, but when I was recirculation, I still could make changes weekly, or sooner if I didn't mind wasting 10 gallons to start a new.

Leaves dry yelloish pale in colour bi dry wrinkles. on full nutes noway n can be low they normAly lookin lush.
Leaves seem a lil dry.thaught it for a while
Ida said it was my mc side but my advanced side also looks same. Thye look "dry"


Lookin at that id say i got a bit of k maybe p but due to vpd id say il do humidity and see anyway they need it lol

Low levels of VPD combined with high relative humidity (light red zone) may cause nutrient deficiencies, guttation phenomenon, different diseases or weak growth; while a high SPD value combined with low relative humidity (dark red zone) it could cause wilting, curled leaves, poor growth or crisp leaves.

Maybe not k i just thibk there dry but if i dont sort it it wil not pan good

 

[Skybound]

I only have one atm but I will probably expand my laser cutting rig with a Z axis later but my printer started out as an Creality Ender 5 Pro, the only thing left on it that's Creality is the framing and steppers. I run it with a 32 bit SKR 1.4 Turbo board with Marlin 2 and a DD extruder I printed for it. Next upgrades for it will probably be a geared dual drive extruder with more precise stepper.

Ender 5 is a nice printer, WAY nicer than my shitty little Tevo. E5P is basically a Hypercube. I printed a Hevo, but never bought any of the metal or electronics. I have an SKR 1.4 on my Tevo with a TFT35, but one day I would like to build a HevORT which is a Hevo with 3 independent Z steppers for true bed leveling during G29. Ultimately though I want to gravitate away from printing and get into CNC milling and plasma cutting. These cheap little MPCNC's can be outfitted with a plasma cutter and that's when the party begins!

 

[CraZysWeeD]

Ender 5 is a nice printer, WAY nicer than my shitty little Tevo. E5P is basically a Hypercube. I printed a Hevo, but never bought any of the metal or electronics. I have an SKR 1.4 on my Tevo with a TFT35, but one day I would like to build a HevORT which is a Hevo with 3 independent Z steppers for true bed leveling during G29. Ultimately though I want to gravitate away from printing and get into CNC milling and plasma cutting. These cheap little MPCNC's can be outfitted with a plasma cutter and that's when the party begins!

Well now when I have removed almost everything that's Creality its starting to behave and perform like a printer in this price range should... had a lot of problems with it right from delivery and was almost forced to learn to speak and write Mandarin language....

I think G29 works ok with a BLtouch but I print on mirrored glass and it never uses the meshing profile when printing though I got ABL active, this is thanx to the regular glass slates true flatness apposed to borosilicate that wants to curve during the making process.

Hope you get that plasma cutter one day but do be careful, this is truly a never ending sword that cuts anything in its path...

 

[Weaselcracker]

Hey Sky you’ve posted a lot of great info here but I don’t think I’ve ever seen what one of your feeding mixes actually looks like in terms of ingredients. I understand there’s more than one way to skin the cat using different salts- but I’m curious what a typical feeding mix might look like in ml.gallon.

Something like-
X ml of calnitrate
X ml of MAP, etc
-per gallon of water

if you know what I mean. Just curious what and how many salts you use to get where you want to be.

 

[Skybound]

Hey Sky you’ve posted a lot of great info here but I don’t think I’ve ever seen what one of your feeding mixes actually looks like in terms of ingredients. I understand there’s more than one way to skin the cat using different salts- but I’m curious what a typical feeding mix might look like in ml.gallon.

Something like-
X ml of calnitrate
X ml of MAP, etc
-per gallon of water

if you know what I mean. Just curious what and how many salts you use to get where you want to be.

I come up with a micro mix I want to try and whip up a concentrate of only micros. In HB, I set my target ppm of each micro and tell HB I want to make 500 gallons and whatever it tells me to weigh out each micro, I weigh out, then add it all into a half gallon jug of water leaving me with a 1000:1 concentrate. Every gallon of feed I make after that, I add 3.8ml of the micro concentrate.

Micros aside though, it gets MUCH simpler. In HB, I only target the macros, Ca, Mg and Si. The micro mix only changes maybe every 6 months, or however long it takes me to use the whole half gallon, but the macros I might choose to tweak from week to week, or at whatever frequency I see fit. Here's my current Bloom targets for example.

And here are the salts I use. You might need to use other salts depending on what you can get your hands on, you know the routine, but down here in the lower 48, I am fortunate enough to be able to easily get my hands on which resolves my targets flawlessly.

You can see my crafty naming conventions to keep everything grouped together. That makes for easy access. So after I click Calculate, I go over the the Results tab and it tells me how much of each salt complex I need to make my 1 gallon of feed to the desired ppm of each element.

What makes it so damn easy though is because I have already mixes each salt complex into a 10:1 ratio ml:grams. so instead of having to weigh out 2.255 grams (x number of gallons) of AA-Haifa Cal Nite, I merely shift the decimal over 1 position and now I know I need 22.5ml (x number of gallons) of liquid Cal Nite. I can be super stoned and still do the quick math in my head to make the feed correctly.

I have salts in jars, but I only have to use the scales when making concentrates. I also do a lot of rounding up or down when making concentrates. I feel our plants are very forgiving, so if my concentrates are +/- by a little, it won't make much of a difference, so I do my best when it is reasonable to do so, but forgive myself of every short coming.

Beyond that, it is just a matter of tracking the grow characteristics, doing a lot of research and making educated guesses of how to tweak the feeds relative to what I've been doing prior that didn't give me the best results that I always seek.

 

[Weaselcracker]

Thanks! I didn’t realize it was as easy as letting HB do it for you. I’ve always had trouble with that function.

I finally got time to sit down with the computer for a couple hours. I entered all the substances you just did, or as close as I could find, and- bingo, right on the targets. Very nice.


Usually when I enter more than about three substance HB seems to get overloaded and fail to compute properly.

Using the salts I have, and Flora Micro for the micros, I managed to get very close after various issues. The only thing that’s off at this point is Mg- at about 70 instead of 60. From what I read that may or may not be a problem and might lock out the calcium I’ll mess with it more though and see if I can get it closer before mixing anything up.

 

[Skybound]

Thanks! I didn’t realize it was as easy as letting HB do it for you. I’ve always had trouble with that function.

I finally got time to sit down with the computer for a couple hours. I entered all the substances you just did, or as close as I could find, and- bingo, right on the targets. Very nice.


Usually when I enter more than about three substance HB seems to get overloaded and fail to compute properly.

Using the salts I have, and Flora Micro for the micros, I managed to get very close after various issues. The only thing that’s off at this point is Mg- at about 70 instead of 60. From what I read that may or may not be a problem and might lock out the calcium I’ll mess with it more though and see if I can get it closer before mixing anything up.

Too much mag will likely do what you said, though IDK how much is too much. Do you have both Epsom and Mag Nite? I can't imagine the app having difficulty resolving Mg with 2 sources of it. I remember having trouble hitting my targets when using branded blends, but once I went fully salt, those troubles vanished.

 

[Weaselcracker]

Yeah it seemed to prefer the raw salts. Usually it rejects several of the ingredients, and gives me a wonky mix with the rest, then I have to get there by trial and error adjusting the concentrations by weight.

I’m going to update it to the latest version again and see if that helps at all.

Edit- got the new version, but couldn’t find a way to update the older version and retain all the info I’ve entered. So I went back to the older version 1.62 and have managed to tweak things nearly to perfection now through trial and error.

 

[Skybound]

You can't retain the old info, so you're going to have to buck up and reprogram all of your products. Also, Flora Micro is made with salts, just like the rest of that and every other brand. I know you meant the liquid, but it's just a vehicle for all the salts contained inside. Sadly we can only pinpoint the basic 6 and none of the exotic stuff like cobalt or others. What you should do is load up the Micro only, and set the weight to how many ml GH recommeds per unit of water (Gal or Liters) and see how much Fe that gives, then write that number down so you can use that, plau all of your macros to target. If you want to adjust the Micro up or down, just tweak the Fe and the rest will follow as the Micro is the only product that has Fe, so HB will move that independently.

Edit - scratch that, I just input Micro into HB, then set it to 4grams(ml) per 1 gal and the Fe looks weak AF, plus has lots of N, K and Ca which might interrupt the other targets. I'll try to help you formulate something with it if I can.

 

[Skybound]

I just did up a batch targeting Fe to 2ppm (still weak, but I've used 2 with good results), and all of the macros hit the targets spot on. 7.5ml of Micro (per gal) and shift the decimal for everything else.

 

[Weaselcracker]

Thanks. That’s a big help- shows me that either my version of HB is at fault, or I’ve entered the values wrong for Flora Micro.
I’ll reenter my info into the new version of HB and see where that gets me.

Using the version of HB I’ve always used before, this is what I get when entering the same substances in the same order (using regular calcium nitrate instead of Haifa).

C671616F-90D5-453B-9940-316651F1DF77.jpeg

• Weaselcracker
• Dec 17, 2020

 

[Skybound]

It looks like all your targets hit perfectly, but because you didn't target Fe (or another micro), HB only used a little of it for the Ca and No3. Also, I've learned that once you input all of your substances and save them, the folder that HB is installed from can be saved to your hard drive or thumb drive and put on other devices and your saved contents will still be there. It would be nice if your saved contents rolled over to newer versions, but we take the good with the bad I guess.

Edit - also check the formulation of that Cal Nite. The default formulation is for YaraLiva which has a good amount of NH4, but I use Haifa brand which has more calcium and less ammonical N.

YaraLiva === No3=14.5%, NH4=1%, Ca=19%
Haifa Cal===NO3=17%, NH4=1.1%, Ca=23.5%

 

[nivek]

They're fading out quick now. The Trip Cheese that's all yellow is about 7.5 weeks in, I don't even think I should let her go the full 8, let alone the 9 I was giving them all previously.

goldarn it that look looks so familiar to me.

so glad i popped in here

no pseudo, just science

i have no , as in zero knowledge to add to this discussion

but i so look for an explanation and a resolution to this look. perhaps unnecessarily to the degree i do

my look perhaps a bit earlier in flower than this,, but perhaps not as well

weasely,, gotta tell ya,, perhaps mega crop is not for you. i bet for sure you are thinking that as well

 

[Skybound]

goldarn it that look looks so familiar to me.

so glad i popped in here

no pseudo, just science

i have no , as in zero knowledge to add to this discussion

but i so look for an explanation and a resolution to this look. perhaps unnecessarily to the degree i do

my look perhaps a bit earlier in flower than this,, but perhaps not as well

weasely,, gotta tell ya,, perhaps mega crop is not for you. i bet for sure you are thinking that as well

If memory serves, that was a minor N deficiency that didn't show itself until late bloom. I've since corrected my feed and no longer have that problem. My plants still fade in the final 9th week, but to a much lesser extent.

Edit - also, don't think of me as one that is deep into the science, I leave all of that shit to the app, and without it, I would be totally lost. I know the app uses molar math which uses lots and lots of zeros, and powers etc. I knew by looking at it that I would never comprehend it, so I didn't even try to learn. I'm just a stoner doing my best to reign in my ferts.

 

[Weaselcracker]

you didn't target Fe (or another micro

Ahhh shit! Yeah I’ll check that Thanks again. Sometimes I feel like someone who takes their car to the mechanic and then finds their long lost cat in the air intake.
The calcium nitrate is whatever version I got from you (?)

You might be right Nivek. Or it may come in very useful along with some tweaking. It’s sort of gotten the job done for the last few months for me, but it could be better. You know where the dividing line is- it’s when I look at other peoples’ plants, especially newbies, and they’re way better than mine! Can’t really live with that No no...

 

[Skybound]

Ahhh shit! Yeah I’ll check that Thanks again. Sometimes I feel like someone who takes their car to the mechanic and then finds their long lost cat in the air intake.
The calcium nitrate is whatever version I got from you (?)

You might be right Nivek. Or it may come in very useful along with some tweaking. It’s sort of gotten the job done for the last few months for me, but it could be better. You know where the dividing line is- it’s when I look at other peoples’ plants, especially newbies, and they’re way better than mine! Can’t really live with that No no...

that's why I clarified, I use strictly Haifa for the increased calcium in it as that is my only source of calcium, all the other major elements have at least 2 sources.

 

[nivek]

If memory serves, that was a minor N deficiency that didn't show itself until late bloom. I've since corrected my feed and no longer have that problem. My plants still fade in the final 9th week, but to a much lesser extent.

Edit - also, don't think of me as one that is deep into the science, I leave all of that shit to the app, and without it, I would be totally lost. I know the app uses molar math which uses lots and lots of zeros, and powers etc. I knew by looking at it that I would never comprehend it, so I didn't even try to learn. I'm just a stoner doing my best to reign in my ferts.

interesting,, a n def,, looks like i might possibly need to resurrect 'urine man' ,, ninth week,, perfect

one does not need a degree to be a scientist. it a character trait

i know for sure weaseley is a scientist,, amongst so very many other things

i think you might be as well,,

cheers friend

 

[Weaselcracker]

Haifa calcium it is then. I couldn't find any here with tolerable shipping rates.

As an extra bonus when I went back to page one to clarify something for re-entering Flora Micro, it’s right there- as your example.
Though you don’t seem to have entered the NH4 that mine shows on the label.


Nivek you should start a small journal...

 

[Skybound]

I used the label I have on file.

 

[Weaselcracker]

.

I was referring to this. Hardly matters a shit at this point .
Got everything more or less lined up in HB v1.8. The only result that shows much different than yours is the amount of MAP, but I think it’s probably not very important. I’ll research it more tomorrow as the version I saw online has different values then the one I have entered. My eyes are shorting out....