I’ve been using Megacrop for my bonsai mothers and young clones/seedlings, they seem to like it.
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Yeah, I agree. I dont think there is anything wrong with Mega Crop. There is just something in my water/environment that really likes ANY of the nutes I have tried so far. Ive had the same blooms with AN nutes and Fox Farm nutes.
In fact, that CalMag I was using may work fine for someone else, but it also seems to have something in it that bacteria love.
The theory at the moment is that its something organic thats triggering the bad crap. The Jacks arrived early, but I dont have time to mess with it yet. We will see how it does in a few days.
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I just noticed there is a ton of frost on the bottom sides of some of the leaves. I dont remember seeing this before, but I never took the time to check either.
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I tried ordering the jacks off amazon and it came up in red letters that it could not be delivered to my location. Is there a way around this? I live in the states if that matters.
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I’ve never seen that, so it’s hard to speculate on how to get around it other than ordering direct from the manufacturer or one of the many online hydro shops.
Out of curiosity, does it do that for this product also? I ask because it’s very similar chemically, which might help elucidate whether the problem is related to weight/freight or regulations, etc.
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Which one did you try to get? The Jacks I see on amazon are all sold and shipped by Amazon, meaning they keep it in a local wearhousesomewhere.
Is it possible you were on the Canada Amazon page or europe? I dont even know if this is possible, but maybe the seller was in Canada or somewhere else and wont ship across borders?
Seems wierd to me.
You might consider ordering some from that guy I linked to above. They are cheaper than Amazon and the shipping was pretty fast for me. I ordered it over a holliday weekend, and he had it in the mail Tuesday and I got it wednesday. He sells the kits or the bags in several sizes
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Im kind of doped up, but I wanted to post this.
Its another bad point for the CalMag I have been using and a plus point for Mega Crop.
I mixed up a fresh rez yesterday with Mega Crop, but NO cal mag stuff. I set the PH to 5.6, and went off to my surgery.
I just got around to checking it this evening, and its still 5.6, and perfectly clear!! Thats unheard of for a fresh rez. The PH ALWAYS goes up initially. Usually .5 to .7 points over 6 to 8 hours. Then it settles down to a slow creep up.
Im pretty sure Im gonna toss his calmag in the trash.
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Just for a point of comparison, when we had looked at buffering the MC awhile back, we had noted a slight 0.1 PH rise over an ten hour period or so when utilizing just MC + RO water.
Don’t know, perhaps the additional calcium was contributing to the carbonate cycle as calcium carbonate.
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No, that product does not come up with any restrictions. That does peak my interest though. Do you have any experience with it? Seems pretty close to jacks.
No, I checked and it’s the U.S. site. I was going to order one of those 7lb kits off ebay but, didn’t want to risk having the feds at my door cause of the calcium nitrate or something lol!
No experience with that specific one, no. I did use a “clone” of Jack’s for two years with no discernable difference in results, though. Most of these guys use the same base ingredients and stuff, so that might be an option. I’ll try to find a link to the stuff I was using before, in the morning.
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Day 61
I need to go back and look at that again. Ive forgotten - was that with your RO water or mine? Aerated or not? Im still recovering from general anesthesia/surgery, so not all together up stairs 
The PH has risen to 6.0 since I last checked, but Ive allowed the temp in the rez to climb to almost 70. Ive been keeping it in the low 60’s. No smell and not cloudy. Im ready to blame most of the current bacterial blooms on the Cal Mag at this point.
Im still going to switch over to Jacks as soon as I can think straight enough to do the mixing correctly.
Progress report:
The plants still look good up top but some leaves look a little pale even though I running at EC 2.0. Other leaves look really dark and I found a few more with the ‘damaged root’ look.
Its interesting to me that there isnt a consistent or uniform look to the plants. You would think that if there was a nute defeciency it would effect the entire plant the same way rather than a leaf here and a leaf there.
I was originally thinking it was the air pruning of the roots causing the random issues, but that doesnt seem likely now. The damage to the roots was and is wide spread, so should have effected large portions of the plant. At least thats how it seems to me.
The roots continue to look ok. Its easy to see in these shots where the roots are air pruning and where they have lost fuzzies - they look off white or tan colored. The fuzzies are still brilliant white.
Im still facinated by the differences in the tap roots. I cant wait till I can manage a “clean run” without half killing the roots so I can see what they look like when they can grow more or less normally.
Remember how this one looked 3 weeks ago?
I may have to do the harvest in stages. There is a big difference in bud development between the various bud sites. Some places they are dense, frosty and stacked up very tightly with all cloudy tricks and the pestles are turniing color and shrinking. Others have almost no frost and look weeks behind.
Its also interesting to me that some stems have still been stretching as much as 1 to 2 inches a day, while others have stopped growing longer.
I wish I could tell if these things are related to the root issues with poor nozzles coverage or just a trait of the plant or what.
I also found a single leaf with this odd damage to it. I suspect some type of bug, but didnt see anything when I used the USB scope to take a quick look.
I tried to look at the lower branches to see if I had any seed pods forming yet, but its almost impossible to see down in there. This is the only really open spot.
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That was my RO water with the MC. Being stirred to estimate the drift.
Hope you recover quickly…
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Ah, thanks for the memory boost
I added a bunch of pics to the post above.
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Holy rootporn Batman! err… Larry. 
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That one with the massive tap root is cool. Overall, looks like they are doing well. Nothing wrong with harvesting in stages.
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Day 62
No big news, but I did finally get around to mixing up the Jacks kit.
@Howard.Crane - I did the same ratios you did for the base mixes, but I increased the concentration so that I could use 10ml/gallon to reach the same EC you shoot for. I only mixed up one quart container of each concentrate. At 10ml/gallon. Thats roughly enough to make up 96 gallons.
Of course, that assumes I did the math correctly 
Part A = 946 ml RO water + 333 gm Jacks hydro part A
Part B = 946 ml RO water + 108 gm of epsom/Magnesium Sulfate
Part C = 946 ml RO water + 216 gm Cal Nitrate
The calcium nit and epsom dissolved nicely, and both are a perfectly clear solution. The part A is being stubborn. Its taking forever to dissolve completely. It is going to be either light green or light grey or light tan depending on how the light hits it.
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Well, I may have screwed up somewhere. I just finished mixing up my first rez with Jacks and the results are not what I was expecting. Not bad necessarily, just surprising.
First, I ended up with an EC of 2.2 instead of the expected EC 1.4 or so that @Howard.Crane gets when he does it. Its entirely possible I messed up the measuring or the math. Im a bit stoned, but the math still looks ok to me for using 10ML/gallon. I’ll review that when Im less fuzzy headed.
Second - the PH out of the tap was around 6.7 tonight, and EC0.1. After adding the Jacks parts, it wanted to lock in at PH6.3. It took a good bit of extra PH down to get it to drop down to where I wanted to start at 5.5. More than with the Mega Crop. Thats not a bad thing, just unexpected. I am more interested in seeing how the stability works out over time.
Third - my rez looks like it has pure RO water in it! Its basically perfectly clear at a final EC of 2.1 - I added an extra gallon of tap to lower the EC.
Fourth - no smell. The Jacks has no smell that I can detect with my stoned nose. After adding shock at 1/2 my normal dose, it smells faintly of chlorine, but thats it. No fertilizer smell at all.
Mixing it all up was a lot more trouble than using Mega Crop, but I will only have to do that every few months at the rate I use nutes, so no biggie. Having to add three different things each time I top off is not really that much extra trouble now that the concentrated jugs are mixed up.
Im off to bed and more recovering. We will see how it looks in the am…
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Its been about 10 hours and the rez is still clear, no smell, and the PH has only gone up from 5.6 to 5.7.
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Woke up sick, so can’t brain right, but a few quick points…
Took me a bit of periodic shaking to get the Jack’s to dissolve too.
I get 1.5 to 1.6 E.C. now, I must have forgotten to update that part.
My tap comes out at 35ppm. Unusually pure for tap, and has almost no buffering ability, which could account for our starting pH differences. I wonder how much pH down goes toward just nullifying your taps buffer?
My pH ends up around 5.8 after mixing.The manufacturer states somewhere that it’s formulated to come out at 6.0 and recommends leaving it there even for hydro. I’d look it up, but too sick. In any case, seems to work well enough for me.
Wow, high EC! Did you measure EC after adding pool shock and pH down? I measure before, and pool shock addition wasnt factored in to my estimate of final pH as I didn’t consider it as important. Still quite a difference, very curious about that.
Will try to respond later with more when I can think properly 
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