making your own nutrient formula

I was wondering if any of you growers could help me, I want to formulate a hydroponic line of nutrients for my garden, I read all 20 pages of this thread, and would like to find more information, thank you

Farmer jon has a thread here I do believe, he uses raw salts to run a pure hydro setup, most of the nute mixes we are talking about in this thread require media to really work.

Hello again,

I am very curious about phosphorus levels. The phosphorus levels in the Analog's original recipe are very low compared to the recommendations by some "hydro store" nutrient manufacturers. Specifically FoxFarm, who recommends, if I did my calculations correctly, somewhere upwards of 300 ppm P and K when adding their soluble salt flower additives. The P seems ridiculously high, higher than I am most of the time! Whats the deal? Does piles of P make for greater weight? If so, at the expense of quality? Or is someone just trying to remarket a nutrient for which most all other production crops don't use more than 50 ppm? I got fantastic results with an EC of ~1.5, about .45 g/w on the original, low P recipe. If one were to keep to the N:K and K:Ca:Mg ratios, what would happen with increasing P, say up to 200 or 300 ppm? And what role does ammonia play in flowering? I know of an interaction between NH4+ and P, and there is a decent amount of both of these in FoxFarm's 3 part bloom additives. I know soil has a greater CEC than coco coir, and rw has no CEC. If using soil would one want to add a lot of fertilizer simply to reduce theft by carbon?

eh?

Most of the raw salt people are playing around with something like 100-50-150 with most of the effort going into getting enough calcium to the plant, which points a lot of people to liming a peat potting media. People report brix levels at or around 14 with a fuzzy line.

Buy a used text books from college for cheap at University bookstores or Amazon....1st recommended is Indoor Greenhouse Management...it's a hort book. 2nd is a basic botany text called intro to botany and between the 2 you will start seeing formula's as all this stuff was worked out hundreds of years ago with a simple lab formula to supply nutrients (really only vitamins as lights FEED plants and we only give them their Flintstones) this was worked out for Orchids first as they are very hard to grow and some are worth more than weed and certainly was years ago like many other plants......C HOPKINS CaFe Mg B Mn CuZn MoCl is every element that EVERY plant needs in the order it needs it...there are slight variations during different stages but this is an acronym that got me through many years of college! GH does all this so well and is so customizable that I have never seen the need to try and improve upon what works the only detail is you must mix it in a special order and use care every time so you don't lock them out as plants need nutrients in a very specific ions and complexes or it is totally useless to the plants??? Hope this helps....Peace, Steve Tuck

The issue with GH is is a lack of granular control over NH4 and Si Which lead to Media pH control issues when dealing with water alkalinity. Also who wants to pay for shipping water when it either you or GH that can mix the same raw materials. Your right most of the heavy lifting (as far as fertilizing plants) was done about 50-75 years ago when the advent of the 'green revolution' (industrial fertilizer production).... And if I could also make a book recommendation, Understanding pH Management for Container-Grown Crops By William R. Argo & Paul R. Fisher.