If you start a grow journal I can promise you will have much better results. The key is to post here BEFORE you do anything, buy anything etc, and then let us all tag team our thoughts together so we can insure we are all making the correct decisions.
@HornHead skimmed it, I agree CMH/HPS are a boost over almost all LED’s but they are not as efficient and produce tons of heat along side exploding bulbs and changing bulbs out… As is coco its a boost over soil but again it requires more attention and is not as efficient and cost friendly on a small scale as soil.
Soil and LED’s are the way to go for long term home grows to keep costs down and not have to do as much baby sitting, in my opinion at least so far.
I’m gonna try both methods next time. That is a soil mix and a coco mix. 4 plants in each under the same light and same feeding schedule. Will post my results. Gonna be a while though lol. But I’ve definitely learned a lot from both of you. Knowledge is the way and I definitely got that from you guys today. Ty
You can’t feed them the same, coco has no nutrients and soil does, if you feed them the same you will stunt/nute burn the soil grow.
I’ve seen dinafem, who is a original autoflower genetics seed company, suggest 10-20L pots and 1/3 coco to keep your soil airy. I’ve been sticking with the 25% perlite in 5 gallon pots.
So I would as well like to experiment more but the less soil you have the more nutes you will have to add.
I understand how you say LEDs are cheaper in the long run but on the coco side? I can buy a 22lb brick that I can fill up probably 4x 7 gallon pots or more for $10 and I have reused it plenty of times. Just sift the roots out. Compared to a bag of foxfarms soil for $30 bag?
Oh definitely coco is cheap but it takes alot of baby sitting compared to soil.
My main point was that in order to feed a coco plant with the same complex micro nutrients that one can get out of a fox farms bag of soil you need alot of different nutrients or expensive nutrients.
NPK industries to date is the best nutrient I have seen that includes things like a 5:2 humic acid to kelp ratio, that Virginia university proved in a 10 year study greatly improves root growth and plant nutrient uptake, or silica to keep your buds tight etc.
Don’t get me wrong if I was home every day and had the time to kill I would probably go the nute route but with aeroponics or hydro.
Soil is the best way to start, then once you understand more complex things about nutrients, PH, lighting, air circulation, stages of growth, growing methods, strains etc etc then advance onto more complex methods.
Placing a auto into a final pot and just watering/ raising lights until I see the thing start to flower is so stupid easy and nice. Once you get into flower yeah you have to read your run off and prep for bloom nutes with some cal mag in there but that’s about it.
Ok. My first grow I used mg 6 month feed for my nypd strain and never had an issue other than quantity. Which I was blaming on the lights. If you look at my profile pic that was my grow just a bit before harvest. I used a cross between ff Nutes and mg Nutes. Alternating them every second watering. Water twice then feed. I used the mg at about half strength. Stopped feeding about a week and a half before harvest. Just ph water. Quality was very good. Burned clean. Ik It must depend on strain because I’m doing lemon cake this time running into some yellowing in both pots. One with mg soil and the other with happy frog mixed with 1 solo cup of perlite. Doing almost the same feeding regimen again except I’ve started adding molasses. I use tap water with a ppm of around 250 so I don’t think I need calmag. Definitely not sure. I did use Alaskan fish fertilizer once when I wasn’t sure if it was nute burn or a potassium deficiency. It seemed to clear up but now I’m getting yellowing again in my mg pot. Any suggestions. 2 weeks into flower at this point. Oh I also added earthworm castings to both pots when I transplanted
@HornHead that sounds way cheaper than purchasing soil every time. Next round I need to fill 8 3 gallon pots for my grow. Can you give me some advice. Such as after my seeds sprout when to repot into the coco and when and what to start feeding them. I have calmag and ff grow big and big bloom. Also mg veg and bloom. I have Alaskan fish fertilizer. Also overdrive but Ik that’s only at the end. I use tap water that I let sit out for at least a day or 2 before using to let the chlorine or chlorophyll to evaporate. Can’t remember which one it is lol. I also have perlite and earthworm castings.
Your ppm of your soil only tells you how many dissolved solids are in your tap water not what they are, you would need a water test or to look up your city water test to figure out if enough cal and mag is in your soil and I would bet you a pound of smoke that you need to add cal and mag to optimize your grow let alone avoid deficiencies of a thriving plant.
My tape w as Tera 200-170 and is almost all cal/mag, I still supplement.
A bag of fox farms soil Costs me 18$ at the local grow store and it fills four 5 gallon pots, I feed some basic bloom nutes 2 or 3 times and harvest when the plant has almost eaten all the nutes in the soil.
Best of luck with coco, it’s not my cup of tea but if I was I would be feeding NPK industries all in one grow and then bloom with added cal mag of course. Compare their ingredients list against anything else you look at
Try not to use nutes from different manufacturers if you can avoid it. The formulations they use can be pretty different. You can end up double dosing or omitting because the component parts aren’t the same. At the very least by the base nutes ideally that are readily available in your area. Any supplemental stuff you normally dont use lots of anyways so you can get them anywhere. An example would be… growing in coco, coco sequesters calcium and magnesium so no matter what your water source is, unless you get it from an artesian well? , you will almost certainly need cal mag. Then you may want to use General Hydros 3 part base nute system? Or a 2 part system from another manufacturer? After that generally you can choose who’s supplements you like, maybe the art on the bottle of bloom boost looks better? I dont know? Myself, I prefer to keep to the most basic stuff as close to what plants want as possible with the least amount of guessing and work.
See I’m still learning. I thought the ppm meant it was mostly calcium and magnesium. And I have to spend almost 30 to fill the 4 five gallon pots I put outside actually not quite that much. But I’m trying to get away from mg soil. I think the size FFOF around here is about that price but will only fill 2 1/2 5 gallon pots. So I would need to spend almost $40 to fill 8 3 gallon pots. My math isn’t the greatest so I could be wrong. I’m just trying to figure out the most cost effective way to proceed.
To be fully transparent, I’m changing from pure liquid hydro to soiless, so I have to re train my way of thinking with regard to watering and feeding, they are very different. Also, its abit backwards from how growers normally progress. Usually you start in soiless and learn pure hydro.
So I do make distinction between the 4 types of growing. These are general types not specific. We start with pure hydro, which would include aeroponics, DWC and anything in liquid. Then hydroponics in soiless su h as coco, gravel, shale, or any other solid support media. Then supersoils, these are actually hybrid grows because they are comprised of built up components not typically found in organic soils. They are the bridge between hydro and organic. And finally, true organics, made up of mineral soils, compost, and stuff naturally decomposed by nature. This requires nothing more than dechlorinated water. Understanding these differences actually makes it a bit easier to understand the role you, as god are trying to play.
Yeah I’m starting to think I need to master one way at a time before I try another way lol. I’m on my second grow in soil and still trying to figure things out. I get information overload here and it’s great. I just can’t remember it all. I’m a little older now and things don’t stick in my head unless I do it over and over. I started out with cheap grow lights that did the job but now I have a new light showing up Monday that I really hope elevates my grow. Like Nicky said I should probably just stick to soil for a bit until I learn a little more. The basics is probably my best option at the moment
My math may be slightly off to but I can tell you once you start looking at nutrients you will realize soil is cheaper for smaller grows.
Fox farms only comes in one size so again my math may be slightly off, go fill 2 different totes with happy frog in one and ocean forest in the other, then add perlite so it’s 20% perlite.
2/3 of your smart pot should be ocean forest mixed with mykos and top 1/3 should be happy frog mixed with mykos (don’t pre mix the mykos in the totes)
This gives you at least until 4th week of flower to worry about everything else but nutes.
I agree, it makes sense because soil/less media has a buffering ability, pure hydro has none of that. Whatever you do in pure hydro is more or less immediate and PH is stupid important. Soil allows for a wider window of good and bad. Soil also needs way less attention! Once you try pure hydro though you will be amazed at how much faster stuff grows. I would say without exaggeration you can double plant mass in the same time period in liquid, assuming you nail the nutes!
Definitely.
We can learn anyway but to avoid frustration and catastrophic failure along with full time babysitting and the possibility of flooding your floor learn on soil, move to coco, move to pure hydro like you said.
One advantage of pure hydro, that took me a while to realize, is that you can increase or decrease the uptake of a certain nutrient simply by raising or lowering the PH. In soil this is hard to do because of the buffering in the soil. This buffering is mainly because of hydrated lime added to most soil mixtures.
I do plan on a trial run with 2 plants in a big tote with an air stone I seen in the grow bible. Looks pretty simple to make. Just need to research a little more on how to do it as far as feeding schedules and what not. I do know the most important thing is to check your ph 2 times a day I think. I’ve seen some incredible results that way
@Nicky that sounds simple enough. The end product should more than make up what i spent on the soil. Any idea how many bags of each I would need to fill 8 three gallon pots. And is the mykos you talk about the perlite? And I’m a little confused by not premixing the mykos in the totes. Sorry if I’m looking a little dumb. Just want to be perfectly clear on what and what not to do
My bad it comes in 3 sizes, 2 bags and 1 tote size.
Sooo find out what size the bag is and then type it into google to give you the conversion, 3 cubic foot bag gives you 22 gallons basically…
Mykos and perlite are different
Perlite makes your soil airy
Mykos are dried fungi that help grow roots
