Making Your Own Nutrient Concentrates

Skybound said:
I'm not understanding your question the way it's asked.

Tracking conductivity, at least if done with sensors and code would likely not be possible as we have no way of knowing at all times the health of the roots or when each plant will choose to uptake from the water that's running over it's roots. For me, I observe, but don't track if you can comprehend the difference. Generally speaking, I notice this fall between weeks 3 till about 6 of bloom. Also in mid-late veg, but this is not a science that can be predicted and is likely reliant on my ability to keep the roots in supreme condition at all times which itself is beyond my ability to guarantee. Of course I will always intend to give/do my my best, how my efforts are realized is between the plants and God and is out of my control.
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I meant monitor or observe. In a few weeks I'll be able to monitor a plant in DWC and see this process in action when I think its roots are sufficiently mature to go in.
 
This is the BOM of my entire lineup including the preservative for the micros found on Amazon/eBay. Everything else I linked to Custom Hydro for ease of ordering, but Epsom can be found in every pharmacy, not to mention nearly every ingredient can also be found on Amazon/eBay. As far as I know, brands aren't all that important, even if their percentages differ slightly, so long as the contents can be found, as they need to be input into Hydro Buddy.

Hydro Salt BOM

4LB Calcium Nitrate $6.50

4LB Magnesium Nitrate $8.32

4LB Magnesium Sulfate (Epsom) $6.21

4LB Monopotassium Phosphate $14.21

4LB Potassium Sulfate $12.50

1LB Potassium Silicate $16.64

-----------------Macros Total $64.38

1LB Iron DTPA $18.50

8OZ Copper EDTA $12.50

1LB Manganese EDTA $15.20

8OZ Zinc EDTA $10.75

8OZ Boric Acid $5.52

8OZ Sodium Molybdate $14.20

-----------------Micros Total $76.67

1LB Sodium Benzoate (preservative) $14.18

Macros Total $64.38
Micros Total $76.67
(preservative) $14.18
Total ----------$155.23
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So, recently I have adopted heading towards a new goal with my nutrients. I now wish to try to achieve a high brix feed schedule, or at least high brix plants through use of highly refined feeding objectives in conjunction with incorporating organic inputs when it's practical to do so. I've learned that when using the fulvic/humic/kelp blend, my PH was a little harder to keep yoked, or controlled, but also that blend would fall from suspension and leave a nice blackish brown film on the bottoms of the totes. It's these little added PITAs that puts us each in the position of considering adding something new. Just yesterday I began using granular Amino Acids, and also just ordered Calcium Carbonate. I'll continue to investigate, but as far as I know, it's water soluble and ionic, so is good for immediate uptake, but like I said, I need to confirm that before use. I learned the hard way that Biomin Chelated Calcium is not ionic and needs to be used as a foliar spray. If Cal Carbonate is the same, I will just hold onto it, but I DO need to locate a viable secondary source of Calcium to pursue High Brix. The reason being is that to get higher brix, I need to increase Ca, K and dial in the nitrates to a higher degree of precision. At 90ppm, my plants were showing N def signs, so I raised it to 100 and left it there throughout bloom which then made dark green leaves. So I know my levels will be in that 10ppm neighborhood. I'm raising Ca up to 120 from 100/105 and raising K to 200 from 170. N, I've since lowered to 95 and I will begin the high brix hydro search. I got this new meter for testing the PH of leaf sap. My 2 plants in bloom both are at 6.1 PH and according to this chart, I have some issues to address, and I can as soon as the Cal Carbonate arrives, assuming it's ionic.

First Test.jpg
sap-ph.png



Edit - ah damn, I just noticed adding 5 LBs of Calcium Carbonate just increased the cost of a decade's supply went up from $155 to just under $185. If including the organics, that's likely up near $220.
 
In pursuit of higher brix, I am learning the value of calcium. The only problem with that is that Cal Nite was my only source of it. I recently picked up 4 LBs of Calcium Carbonate from Kelp4Less, but after making the concentrate to my standard weight, I would estimate that upwards of 50% of the solids I added did not dissolve which is alarming for lots of obvious reasons. That said, I am quickly losing confidence that CaliCarb is a viable alternative for calcium and I need to continue my search.

I found this video in that search and wanted to memorialize it into the content of this thread. After watching the reactions, I am more confident in that process and as long as I can cheaply discover how much calcium is in there, I can create a custom solution in Hydro Buddy with those results. FYI, Hydro Buddy already has CaliBarb in it's library, but I have no way of verifying or validating the product I have against the numbers that is saved, so I feel like I'm flying with a blind fold on. My hope is that I can further process my CaliCarb with vinegar to separate the calcium from the carbonate, even if only to a more predictable degree of error than what I now know I lack.

My studies also suggest that I may have gotten a little frisky with my Ca and K additions to my former feed charts, so I expect I may soon need to dial those back slightly. I am still happy that I decreased the nitrate slightly. I'm learning high brix will come from;
  • the right ratio of calcium to potassium,
  • nitrates makes for fast growth, but too much will greatly hinder ability to make and store carbs and sugars
  • magnesium is responsible for the creation of chlorophyll as well as the creation and movement of sugars.
The leaf sap chart touched on all of those bases. In the pursuit of perfect nutrient ratios for our grows, we must also pursue high brix to a certain regard as high brix growing also seeks perfect harmony between plant and environment/media. I also learned that in the production of higher brix, the roots can't be so wet as we get them in hydro, and we already knew the reason why hydro grows bigger plants is because of the frequent waterings, so a balance between maximum tolerable water in the root zone that would still also challenge the roots enough to keep the concentrations of sucrose in the phloem in a happy medium which I expect to be much less than Doc Bud's HBB, yet still much more than every single nutrient brand on Earth (sorry sponsors :peace::oops:).

I don't do DWC, but I still believe high brix can be grown in DWC if O2 is kept high, EC low, bennies frequently added and I also believe personal experimentation with other organic additives such as aminos, B vitamins, fulvic-humic-kelp etc to see what will work with synthetic nutes. To recap, the reason for synthetic nutes is because we can almost roboticly predict the exact elemental involvement which is the highest import IMO to hydroponic growing. It's the whole point! I'm a fan of what works best without being constrained to anybody's definition of what is considered proper, but as best I know, all organic means of feeding plants totally lacks the ability to predict the exact ratio or ppm of available nutrients at the root zone at any given moment in time and must fully rely on natural processes to make that determination. With this kind of hydro, I am solely making that determination. I add in bennies to make my environment better which of course skews my knowledge of my nutrients, but I know that I am close enough before hand w/o the bennies which gives me a lot of peace of mind, lol. So my bennies are only succeeding in making my great feed better. In organics, the bennies are everything, the farmers, harvesters, processors, preparers, bakers and servers.

Edits coming ...

 
Regarding calcium: if you pre-treat your water down to the desired pH with nitric acid, you will make the already dissolved natural calcium bioavailable by converting it to calcium nitrate, which is often used by hydroponic food makers anyway. I'm integrating this fact into my method. There's a bit of maths involved working out how much nitrogen I'm adding with the acid but it seems workable. Using the Flora Trio, it seems I can do away with the Grow part and just use the Micro and Bloom and keep the nitrogen part from being excessive. Anyway, you could look into calcium nitrate in your search as a possibility.
 
YellowBelly said:
Regarding calcium: if you pre-treat your water down to the desired pH with nitric acid, you will make the already dissolved natural calcium bioavailable by converting it to calcium nitrate, which is often used by hydroponic food makers anyway. I'm integrating this fact into my method. There's a bit of maths involved working out how much nitrogen I'm adding with the acid but it seems workable. Using the Flora Trio, it seems I can do away with the Grow part and just use the Micro and Bloom and keep the nitrogen part from being excessive. Anyway, you could look into calcium nitrate in your search as a possibility.
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CalNite is my only source of Ca prior, and it got to the point where I could no longer get more Ca w/o also getting more N. Go back and read page 1, you'll see what I mean. I am now in pursuit of the lofty ambitious goal of high brix hydroponics and as a result need more Ca and less N.
 
Skybound said:
CalNite is my only source of Ca prior, and it got to the point where I could no longer get more Ca w/o also getting more N. Go back and read page 1, you'll see what I mean. I am now in pursuit of the lofty ambitious goal of high brix hydroponics and as a result need more Ca and less N.
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Another possibility: chelated calcium - calcium EDTA. BASF make it under the Librel and LibFer brands
 
YellowBelly said:
Another possibility: chelated calcium - calcium EDTA. BASF make it under the Librel and LibFer brands
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Chelated Calcium is only a soil amendment or foliar spray and is what I' just started to use in the spray. Calcium EDTA used to advertise that their product was toxic with sodium. They've since removed all language denoting any sodium in their product, but I'm not going to spend top dollar to learn that lesson the hard way. I'll look up the BASF to see what I could find out, but so far I've tried 3 different calcium alternatives in the water, and it would've been 4 if I tried the EDTA, but as it turns out, adding extra calcium into the root zone is not as easy as I once believed. It would be awesome if a chemistry major jumped on this thread and enlightened us some. I'm just a researcher trying to condense my findings.

Dissolvine Sodium.JPG
 
YellowBelly said:
Green House Seeds do one, if you want look on their site. I just got some from a UK company and they do sodium-free chelates but there is no calcium version. Reading a Science in Hydroponics article, it seems as long as you don't do a hydro for more than 3-4 weeks before changing, cannabis is quite tolerant.
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Can you elaborate or link me to that post? Or even tell me the year and title as I have SIH/archives bookmarked for frequent reading and research. For the record, I grow in hydro, so I can't never not be in hydro.
 
Skybound said:
Can you elaborate or link me to that post? Or even tell me the year and title as I have SIH/archives bookmarked for frequent reading and research. For the record, I grow in hydro, so I can't never not be in hydro.
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Some things you should know about sodium in hydroponics – Science in Hydroponics

scienceinhydroponics.com

I go there too as a technical resource. Sodium is a ubiquitous element and, as such, plants have adapted to its presence in varying degrees. It seems, the important thing is to have techniques and routines that don't allow its accumulation to harmful levels.
 
FWIW, EDTA at elevated ppm is also toxic to plants. To my knowledge, all synthetic chelators are.

Dufková19 studied the interaction of EDTA with photosynthetic organisms and found that EDTA is toxic, since it inhibits cellular division, chlorophyll synthesis and algal biomass production. It is interesting to note that the same concentration of EDTA chelated with micronutrients did not present these toxic effects.
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EDTA: the chelating agent under environmental scrutiny

Also, on a side note, I am kind of aiming my intentions in my formulation to lend itself to the pursuit of higher brix levels in hydroponics. For the most part, the consensus across the web is mostly against pursuing higher brix levels in hydro, and that such an amazing fete is only possible in an all natural organic environment, I still believe such is not the case, so I want to pursue that while also pursuing the ideal hydroponic nutrient solution, and even though both of these goals I feel to be on the same street, it's possible that other hydro growers reading this thread may have other desired end goals, and as such might want to put together a different formulation.

To further clarify that, I am coming to accept that to achieve higher brix in my plants, I may have to cut back on my feeding frequency, the result of which might be lowered yield than what I would otherwise normally get, so my targets and general growing practices might be different to better achieve my goals. I ask you look at my thread in my sig for that, but generally I'm aiming for more calcium and potassium in the diet, a bit less nitrate which I did, possibly more ammonium, but also maybe less of that and always more sulfur. For high brix, it's important to get those ratios right, and also a lot more organics have to be worked into the plant some way some how. In my res, I also use yucca, fulvic, humic, kelp and amino. I'll likely add aloe to that as well. I mixed the amino chelated calcium with some seaweed and yucca for foliar spray, and that should give me 25ppm more of calcium, though with the application only once weekly, I have a difficult time trying to understand how that relates to a hydroponic grow. I periodically pluck some leaves, crush them with a garlic press and measure the PH of the leaf sap, as well as put that sap in a refractometer which uses light to measure the sucrose percentage of the sap. Avg brix is 12, Doc Bud's high brix soil gets it up to 18, and my tests so far maxed out at 7, but most tests were around 5 brix. Ideal leaf sap PH is 6.4. My fist test was 6.1 which denoted a cation deficiency, Ca, Mg, K deficiency. After I changed my feed charts and ran that for about a week, the sap PH climbed to 6.3 and that was last week. Here's the chart so you can kind of see the direction I'm heading with my grow.

sap-ph.png


Oh look at that, I also am showing a bit deficient of sodium, lol. Remember, leaf sap PH has nothing to do with reservoir PH. Leaf sap PH just shows the ionic levels in the blood of the plant. There are other very meters that test for individual elements, Ca, N, K etc, but I'm not intending to buy those. I just want to get my leaf sap consistently ideal at 6.4 to know that the ratio used to produce that result is the closest to ideal as I can get and IMO, should be the benchmark for all future cannabis feed, at least for me.

It would be after this point that I would consider adjusting feed frequency and playing with more organic products, teas, sprays etc to try and further hone in my brix goals.
 
So I’m slowly picking my way through this and have entered all info on the bottles I use most. Though I do have a few other odds and ends on the shelf which I’ll enter later. I just want to see what I get with my usual suspects.

So this may be a stupid question or I’m getting ahead of myself here and missed something- but in the ‘substances database’ list there are a whole lot of elements listed, which came with the program. I don’t have any of this stuff, except as contained in the bottles which I’ve entered as custom options.

Shall I delete all these other preset nutrient options -to simplify the calculation?

I was hoping it might output something along the lines of ‘use X ml of this bottle and X ml of that bottle”, etc.
Seems to me that’s more or less the type of answer you were calculating for me when you ran a couple of my bottles through the system on your journal at one point.


Also I’m a little unclear on whether some of my N is NO3 or NH4 since most bottles just list N. I’m guessing it’s not too important for what I’m trying to calculate. When in doubt I entered it as NO3
 
Definitely keep all of the solutions that came with the app, you'll likely be theoretically trying those in the future to see if you want to spend the money or not.

When adding a custom solution, just do exactly that and it will add the new solution to the list of the presets. I name stuff I use to begin with some AAs to group them in the beginning, plus it's a good way to group other things, like a brand of something. Because you're formulating a liquid, you tick the Liquid box. Density is Kg divided by volume of bottle. This info is on the front label on the bottom. For the record, a thousand ml of pure water (0ppm) weighs exactly a thousand grams, so if a 1 liter bottle of Nutrient X weights 1250 grams, or 1.25Kg, the math is 1250/1000=Density. Sometimes there are 2 listings for N, in fact there usually is, but because it's not on your product, just enter it all as NO3. NH4+ is ammonium and if it was all ammonium, plants would not grow, but if all NO3, they definitely will grow. P is almost always listed as P2O5, K>K2O, and Si> SiO2, so you'll have to use the drop down menus to select the right naming. Every once in a while a product just has it as flat out P, K or Si, and in that case I would not use the drop downs, but every other time it's needed and those 3 elements require added math be applied to resolve correctly.

Once saved, you can add it to the "Substances Used" list. Once there you have 2 options. If you want to dictate the dose, understand that grams now directly relates to ml, so you click "set weight", enter the desired number of ml into the grams field. You'll have to go through this for each solution, and when done, X out the window, and on the main page select the number of liters or gallons as desired, then tick the field Concentration from Weights, then click Carry Out Calculation.

The other way is to not set the weight of each solution, and close out that window, then on the main page, with the "Input Desired Concentrations" field still ticked, set up your units in Liters or Gallons, plus how much you're mixing for, then over in the elements field, input your desired ppm of each element. A quick bangup blend would be

NO3=100
NH4+=0
P=60
K=150
Ca=100
Mg=50
S=50

and if ya got a silica product in the list, you can target that to about 25. The click the Calculate button and see how close to your targets your nutes can get. Next to the Main Page tab is the Result tab, this is where you'll see how much the app is saying you need from each bottle. Be mindful of how you set it up, albeit ml/gal or ml/your whole res. I've done it both ways and it really doesn't matter, as long as you're conscious of both. It is convenient when making a number of volume that isn't a multiple of 10, so when I mix 6 gallons of veg, but want that cut down to 4 gallons to skimp on EC, the app makes that convenient.

add custom.png
custom formulation.png
substances used.png


Edit - It is super important that the Purity be set to 100 when adding custom liquids.
 
Ok cool. Thanks a lot. I had everything entered correctly I believe- just wasn’t sure how to calculate anything using only those options. I’ll stare it it more later on :thumb:
 
One way, you tell it what the dose from each bottle is and it tells you the combined ppm of each element. The other way you tell it how much elemental ppm you want and it will tell you what the dose from each bottle is.
 
Hmmm... Well the good news is I’m having fun plugging in different nutes and mixing and matching. Bad news is it seems impossible to come up with a decent mix with what I have. If I enter more than about three bottles the program will only use a few bottles and reject the rest. And then it tends to come up with a mix of everything at higher levels than I want - giving me a bunch of ‘gross errors on X are too high’ errors along the way. Funny thing is sometimes it will mix things so that every nutrient level is way high.


I can see why it’s tempting to have the raw ingredients. But surely there’s a way to mix these jugs in a way that gets me close. I mean- I have been growing with variations of these bottles for years and my plants look ok at least some of the time. :laughtwo:
I’ll keep on pissing around with it. Seems fun so far I just wish it would tell me what I want to hear.I thought it was supposed to be my buddy.

Edit- I’ll try going at it from the other direction and input amounts of the bottles and mix things that way till I maybe get close to what I want*

*I’m just using one of the Mid Bloom formulas you posted earlier in the thread.
 
Back in my previous install, I had the whole line of GH, and like one other brand, but I was able to load them, input their ml/Gal doses as grams, then Calculate to see what the resulting elemental ppm was, and that's how I got to put GH in my Example Charts to compare it against other regimens like Jack's 321 (both versions) and Megacrop (old and new).

As to the gross errors, I often got them when A) the density wasn't calculated, or B) I didn't have the mixing Volume and Concentration Units set correctly.

Megacrop New.JPGExample Charts.JPG
 
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