My well water is about 1ppm and is as pristine as it gets flowing from a uninhabited mountain range
I start at 6.3 so already slightly acidic and luckily only have to tweak a little.
If my water was not perfect I’d reverse osmosis it and build up from there.
I currently - last 10 years except for when I’m getting bored and trying something new, run GH Flora series with a modified Lucas formula for coco with Cal/Mag.
I’ll let my results speak for themselves.
I personally didn’t enjoy my runs with Maxibloom in Lucas although the numbers are almost perfect.
I did kick some ass with MaxiCrop however I highly modified the formula to get the numbers within the Lucas parameters and it worked.
Once I burned through the 20lb bag I switched back.
My experiments with Athena Pro were very disappointing.
Hey @Chuckeye do you mix your maxigro as needed and use it all at once. I mixed me some up and did not use it all. I like to mix a 5 gallon batch at a time and i run a small garden. When i went to use the rest of it it had turned brownish and stunk like sewage. Seemed to grow some nasty bacteria.
yeah the maxigro and jacks 5-12-26/10-30-20 can get smelly and brown in a couple days. That happening will also cause the PH to rise drastically. I usually add a smidgen of calcium hypochlorite in the bucket every couple days to keep it clean and prevent that from happening.
Ive been eyeballing this for veg. Looks pretty well rounded. It has a warning about using cal/mag products with it…says it could create gyspum and clogg hydro equipment. I dont use hydro. I wonder if thats the only reason. I currently add gyspum to my veg and flower feed. I use maxibloom for flower. They sell their own calcium additive. @HolyAngel whats your thoughts on the contents of this stuff and if i should use gyspum with it? You seem to be a bit of nutrient calculator nerd. No offense.
I don’t think gypsum would be an issue with that stuff Seems a bit hot tho…
I use gypsum for my calcium with the maxibloom in veg and flower and not ever had any issues at all.
If you have the maxibloom and gypsum already, a bag of jacks 10-30-20 and maybe some epsom salt would be all you need for a great veg mix. ~1.3g/gal gypsum, 5-7g/gal maxibloom and 1g/gal jacks 10-30-20. Might need 1g/gal epsom on top but i don’t always.
Thanks for the advice. I do already have epsoms. Im about to hit up amazon for some jacks. The green house powder is not as widely available in the states as jacks.
Are you recirculating your water, adding microbes to your nutes, or leaving your mixed solution under a light? I usually mix up a 40-gallon batch once a week and don’t get any funky growth nor smells in my rez with either jacks 321 nor Maxicrop 2-part. I do add some microbes, but still don’t get any brown growth nor res stinkiness
Maxigro and gypsum in tap water. 6 gallon bucket in my basement. No lights on unless im down there. Stays dry down there too. 2 days later it was discolored and nasty smelling.
When I was growing dwc I would put 1-2 milliliters of hydrogen peroxide in the bucket when topping off every few days and it worked great to fight root rot. Maybe that will help?
I’d say the low ph of ur well water is caused by sulfur, it’s a non metal and is not conductive so it won’t show up on a EC meter.
For a cheap nutrient line I would probably recommend making ur own somewhat, the startup is kinda high but it’s cheap once ur started. I used to use the maxi bloom line but have switched to the flora line and I supplement that with stock solutions that I make from just pure nutrient powders like nitrogen sulfate, potassium sulfate etc.
Using equal parts of the grow and bloom you get 5-5-5, you can tweak the ratio with the stock solutions an use less of the grow bottle when in flower but you’ll need a nitrogen free cal-mag like TPS.
