Tomato Recipe Experiment
These tomato recipes trip me out, but I’m going to experiment with similar targets and see how it goes. I think cannabis and tomatoes share a love of calcium that is not normally reflected in other formulas. Interestingly, they use a pretty low amount of N during veg.
Secondly – what they consider to be ‘low’ calcium (144ppm) is very high in comparison to what off the shelf formulas provide. High calcium and low nitrogen is difficult, and they accomplish it by using calcium chloride. I’ve always been wary of CaCl2 – chlorine isn’t needed in high amounts. But if I want to get calcium up that high, I’m going to have to use it.
Here’s what I’ve settled on for “stage 1” – a bit more P and N and less Cl. I’ve replaced the MKP with grow clean for the polyphosphate and higher K ratio.
Here’s the 250gal amounts:
These formulas are fairly simple in some ways. They keep P, Mg and the micronutrients fixed for the entire grow, while N, K and Ca are gradually raised.
That means that I can start with this base mix, and increase CalPrime, calcium chloride, potassium nitrate and potassium sulfate in the next stages of the grow. I’m a little uncertain about the high levels of nitrogen toward the end of the grow, but we’ll just see how it goes.