Great thread LH very useful info. bookmarked! I had used this method for years and more than a year ago I went with using Yara Kristalon Brown which does not have any calcium, negligible amount of mag and very low N. I add to it magnesium sulfate and magnesium nitrate and calcium nitrate. It simplified the feeding while keeping it flexible enough. I still have to get a source of silicon though…
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everything you have wrote has really opened my eyes and has taken me to a higher level of understanding about mixing your own nutrients to get more desirable numbers in better forms. I wanted to thank you for posting this here. Going to mix up my own nutes based on your notes here in the near future.
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Oh so they can buy it because they’re a “legitimate business” but when I buy it all the sudden I’m getting raided by the feds.
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Does tap water naturally contain enough silica?
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Very interesting! I wasn’t aware of this one, but it looks good. It’s much like masterblend, but without the ammonium. I think their orange/brown formulas could both be made to work well for cannabis.
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Yes, it can. Up to 100ppm though most is much less.
Some places add it to water to raise pH and increase corrosion resistance both through elevated pH and depositing a silica layer in pipes. If that place has lead pipes still this is a good thing.
Most groundwater has plenty. If your water comes from a surface reservoir or a river it may not have much.
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The brown formula is designed for hydro. I think the orange is for soil
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2017 Tests
2018 Tests
For completeness. Looks like dynagro does pretty well at providing the amounts they say on the label, although their P seems to come in a little low in more than one instance.
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State of Oregon tests
https://www.oregon.gov/oda/programs/pesticides/fertilizers/pages/reportspublicationsforms.aspx
Useful link for anyone looking to try and find actual analysis of claimed nutrient analyses in various products.
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CNS17 Coco Formula Study
Here’s a quick study of a discontinued formula from botanicare. Their “CNS17” (commercial nutrient solution 17) formula. It allegedly contains all 17 major nutrients, though they fail to list most of the micros.
Here’s the analysis of the 3 parts of the formula, grow, bloom and ripe from the state of Oregon tests. As you can see, what’s shown on the label is off by significant amounts in many cases.
This is a comparison chart, showing all of the macros + calmag, provided at their peak amounts (20mL Grow, 25mL Bloom and 25mL Ripe).
N, Ca high to low
P, K low to high
In general, N and Ca start out high in the formula. Likely this accomplishes 2 things. It ensures that the coco is well buffered with Ca at the start, and since nitrate is provided mostly by calcium nitrate, high amounts of both in this case go well together. Calcium is lowered in subsequent stages, probably because it will not continue to be needed in high amounts after the initial loading. Since N is low at the end of the grow, it may be unlikely that high Ca is still required, since the vegetation of the plant is being diminished, and the development of plant tissues is being restricted in favor of providing higher cannabinoid concentrations.
Secondly, P is increased through the grow. I am unsure about why they increase P so heavily toward the ripe phase, when S could also be provided instead to add K. K is greatly increased at each step.
Finally, in the ripe phase, we see a major dropout of Ca in the cations and a sharp increase in K, switching from a roughly 1.4:1 ratio in early-mid bloom to almost 3.5:1 in ripe. In order to push a large amount of K at the end, it must have a large representation in the ratio of cations.
The NH4 levels appear to come only from the amounts supplied by calcium nitrate. It would seem that they are not interested in using it for pH control in the root zone.
Here’s how I would imitate, using only 5 fertilizers:
Calcium Nitrate
Epsom
MKP
Plant Prod Chelated Micros
Potassium Nitrate
Grow (1.5EC)
Bloom (EC 1.9)
Ripe (1.4EC)
*Bloom/Ripe parts of the formula may not have adequate Zn/Cu from plant prod micros, due to high P levels.
Edit: fixed mistake in bloom comparison that showed low K
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LHS MicroMix
For 1000 gallons @ 0.2g/gal
Today, I’ve made a micronutrient mix to rebalance the plant prod, which I felt could benefit from a rebalancing to make it more cannabis and high P specific.
Here is what the plant prod looks like at 0.2g/gal (which is the high end of recommended dosages):
You can see the biggest changes I’ve made are slight reductions in Fe, Mn and major increases in Zn and Cu, and about 50% increase in B. Based on the amounts of other hydroponic formulas above, recommendations from other online sources and specific requirements of nutrient solutions that use higher amounts of phos, I feel that this will be a pretty good balance. I tried not to go to any extremes. With micronutrients, more is not necessarily better.
I have a bunch of plant prod chelated micros, and it’s good chelated stuff, so I opted to just use it as 50% in the mix and the other 50% of measures to balance it out. Everything I used is chelated, and if you’ve been following along, you probably know why.
But to reiterate, chelated iron is the most difficult nutrient to keep available in solution. Iron sulfate quickly becomes unavailable, and it is not good. If you use something like zinc sulfate along side of iron chelate, they will swap when you mix the solution. The iron will bind to the sulfate and the zinc to the chelate. Then it is only a short period of time until the iron oxidizes and becomes unavailable completely. It is best to use chelates only if you are feeding from a reservoir. Sulfates (like Peters STEM or TM7) may be ok if you mix and feed immediately. In general, they are better when used in foliar application than in a nutrient solution reservoir.
I used 0.2g/gal as a target and mixed 1000 gallons worth. That comes out to 200g total. The reason to mix this much is because some of the nutrients (specifically sodium molybdiate) are used in VERY small quantities. I also calibrated my 0.01g scale with calibration weights beforehand to be sure.
Another thought I had is that by mixing 50% plant prod, I can at least reduce my own errors by half as well. It’s important to be precise and careful with micros. Plants don’t tolerate big goof ups very well because these are used in tiny quantities.
One thing I learned is that boric acid is a bit clumpy. This was a concern to me, so I grabbed a sifter screen from the kitchen to make sure no big clumps got through. A clump of any significant size could really mess you up here. As you can see, there are still some little white bits in there. They’re nearing the granule size of the rest of the powders though, so it should be fine.
And that’s it! Now I have a micro mix that I can use at 0.2g/gal in place of the plant prod mix. Next I’ll find out how it goes.
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Here’s a great recent article on effects of P supply. Lots of great information. They found P <30ppm is where it drops below the sufficiency range, with 30-60ppm being what they considered “ideal”.
They also reinforce another point I’ve talked about here in relation to the yield vs concentration:
Cannabinoid concentrations decreased linearly with increasing yield, consistent with a yield dilution effect, but the total cannabinoid content per plant increased with increasing P supply.
Here, we can see that all cannabinoid concentrations decrease with yield (negative slope); however, in all cases, the magnitude of the slope appears to be much less than 1. This means that although increasing yield decreases cannabinoid concentration, the total cannabinoid plant yield has increased.
This is a great figure for understanding phosphorus I think. The lower left/right shows ‘elongation rate’ for the two strains they tested, which is “stretch”. We can see that most of the differences due to P supply occur during this time.
This indicates that P is most important in early growth and up to bud onset in order to maximize the rate of photosynthesis. After stretch has completed, the plants seem to be fairly established in their shapes and sizes… specifically, the number of nodes will not change.
They use a constant amount of P from start to finish, and I think that perhaps the way to optimize the anion nutrient formulation is to provide high N & P with low S until stretch has completed, and then switch the anions to provide high S and low N & P during bud swell and finish. In theory, this could establish large plants with the most nodes through stretch, and then by dropping out N & P in finish, help to balance a slightly reduced yield in order to get higher cannabinoid concentrations.
I think I will try starting plants at something like 160 N and 60 P through stretch, and then reduce to 80 N and 30 P, shifting the rest of the anions in to primarily S. Some Cl would also be acceptable here, since it actually helps to inhibit N/P, and with calcium chloride can also provide calcium.
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Very good. I like it. I push p at the start. I believe it helps with pests also.
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@lefthandseeds I finally made it over here! And I’m with @HeadyBearAdventures im a little lost 
I don’t have hydro buddy and wouldn’t know how to get the ratios right anyway. If I was going to use jacks ‘12’ (not 11) with their part b and Epsom salts. How would my ratios change (g/gallon) when adding monopotassium phosphate in the beginning of flower? (0-52-34)
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@lefthandseeds will get you going.
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I’ve never really understood why the Jacks schedule uses so much mag. In coco, I’d think it would only create problems for the calcium.
Anyway, here’s what I’d try:
On their site, they say 3.7g Jacks, 2.5g calcium nitrate, 1.1g epsom, but 90ppm magnesium seems outrageous to me. I think a lot of people don’t use epsom at all, and I probably wouldn’t either. But it should be ok up to 0.5g – 75ppm tops. Magnesium phosphate is better than MKP because it doesn’t mess with your potassium.
If you’ve already got MKP then something like this would be about right:
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I don’t have it yet. I couldn’t make up my mind, got busy, and here I am lol
Looks like in flower, you could drop that calnit even lower. Or no? Just say im working w jacks 321 on it’s own. There’s no way to manipulate that ratio on its own?
I’ve been doing 421 in flower. Some strains seem like they take forever to start flowering tho. Like they just don’t have the fuel to get there. Maybe it’s genetic related. Who knows.
I use my tap and it’s around 7.7ph and 130ppm. I wish I knew exactly what was in it. I found it online once to make sure there was no chloramine in it. I didn’t see any nutrient info tho. Surely it has some calcium/magnesium in there 
Lefty I used this at the start of flower. It’s really just a guesstimate from other peoples charts I’ve seen. I diluted it down to 600ppm. Sorry for crappy pic and handwriting.
@lefthandseeds I’m working with Gen Hydro Flora Series and curious if you have a lead on a calculator or something you can point me towards to play around with…thanks!