StoreBought VS DIY...

[AlterEgo860]

anyone who has saved money making nutes with dry salts.. or any other way that ud like to share.. in order to save money on growing expenses..

also.. any enzymes or pondzyme or anything your using that's not sold at the GROW STORE LOL.. that works well.. or better then the competition.. is welcome..

thanks in advance.. basicly.. im looking to get into making my own nutes so that growing expenses go down.. making me able to spend more on equipment and seeds..

 

[shaggyballs]

I use pondzyme and think it works better than hygrozyme!
treats 1 million gallons too.

http://www.naturesenzymes.com/?p=1613

 

[rangergord]

Aquaponics: feed your fish and then feed and water your plants.

Urine: pee in a bottle and add 10-20 bottles of water. Instant fertilizer can be used in aquaponics as well.

 

[AlterEgo860]

thought ther would be more hits on this one... honestly. im trying to make it so it costs me nothing besides electric and hands on work.. and that's it.. making me able to smoke more and spend less..

 

[rangergord]

I started out very low cost, Still am as far as month to month expenses go. I just have a fancy state of the art system now. To keep electric costs low use a 250-400 watt dimmable ballast. As far as fertilizers go if you grow in soil, it really does not matter what fertilizer you pick, it will cost almost nothing month to month. Fertilizers build up rapidly in soil and so you will not use that much unless you want to kill them. Thats why no one has put much effort into DIY fertilizers. Fertilizer costs really only become an issue when using hydroponic reservoirs.

 

[Cannabis]

Okay the main deal dude is the five main ferts, which are NPK, Nitrogen Phosphorus and Potassium which happens to have it's chemical symbol be K.

Now in addition to this ya gotta find, two other things, mainly: calcium, and sulfur. Now sulfur is used in almost every aspect of all medicine, and fertilizer - boutique ferts, raw agricultural stuff by the ton, veterinary medicines, human medicines - they all come, -well you know what I mean by "they all come" - a whole SLEW of these things come, my friend, as part and parcel of a bag containing whatever SULFATE. And sulfate is sulfur.

Another place to get sulfur is through using over the counter battery acid from the car parts store for the pH down, since sulfuric acid is by far the cheapest and easiest to get acid for agriculture in the U.S.
It's also a very effective agricultural pH down for several reasons, and those include the fact that it never combines and precipitates out like phosphoric acid, and that it's what's called a 'hard' acid which means once it dumps it's protons into the water leaving acid and sulfate, the acidity stays there, longer. Long story, far too long for here.

Now another thing you have to supply often will be magnesium. Ok? Magnesium is what's in Epsom Salts.

What the legal hydroponic people say do, is this: find a water soluble fert like Miracle Gro or Gro More that claims to put in micronutrients.

The micronutrients in say, Miracle Gro, are nearly identical to those in General Hydroponics' Flower. It lacks molybdenum but more than this, it lacks calcium.

In the legal hydroponics art they're a lot less stupid and a lot less arrogant at the same time.

What they do is they start off with a base of Gro More or Miracle Gro, and then they add Epsom Salts for Magnesium and Sulfur, and they add the one thing, ya do have to go buy, that ya normally wouldn't: calcium.

Calcium is bought, in the form of Calcium Nitrate, usually.

Now what this means is, that you only buy one specialty item. Or one TRUE specialty item, the calcium nitrate.

If you google or Bing, "DIY hydroponic nutrients" and other sensible questions, you very quickly see, they all say a similar thing. Buy a good water soluble, then add Epsom's Salt, and Calcium Nitrate.

Now in this case, there's a slim chance, your plants are gonna wish they had some more of something through the course of the grow.

What I personally do is, I put the plant's base, when I first set it out, in a one or two liter bottle of fine, multi-color sand, or rock dust, which I blend with about, 20 or so % regular old, fertile, well balanced soil.

This gives me an assurance that when the plants are eating their hearts out there will be plenty of good mineral nutrition like silica and iron and copper and other really trace nutrients, but which the plants obviously use: because when I chop my plants, man, that dirt and sand I put inside that center is almost always, almost all, gone. Now - obviously quite a bit of it's just washing out down through the holes in the initial little pot I use to hold the roots but on the other hand, if it's all washing down like that, how come there's so little in my perlite at the ends of the grows?

I know this: that type growing has never left me wondering why my plants were the wrong color or not growing.

There is a source of nitrogen you can buy off the shelf at Wal Mart and that's Stump Remover which consists of potassium nitrate. What it is, is very high quality, narrow spectrum fertilizer, that people bore holes into stumps then stuff said holes, with. This extreme fertilization, burns the thing to death and it'll stop shooting up sprouts around the base.

I use the stuff to add potassium and nitrogen to whatever high phosphorus ferts I have, I often add some to my General Hydroponics Flora Nova but I don't really need to.

Another thing that is extremely cheap and yet extremely good for plants, is wood ash. Now - wood ash is legendary for it's many hard core chemistry aspects, like it's extremely high pH. But it's also known as one of the ultimate, free fertilizers.

The stuff's dynamite for growing but in hydroponics you have to use a lot of pH down.

One time I grew some pot in an aeroponic thing I built and I used burned corn cobs and wood ash, and some burned banana peels, to augment some Gro Mor, and that stuff grew like it was on steroids. I had to slap the shit out of it with the pH down, but it still grew like crazy. I was really, really amazed at how potent it was but of course the amount of work, burning the corn cobs and banana peels specifically - what a buncha bullshit.
But wood ash you know, you can get that stuff all over.

So I wouldn't really recommend the fruit and vegetable peels and stuff with the corn cobs unless somehow you already have a wood stove.

Now another thing I've personally grown with several times, is human piss. I just got through telling another guy about this a few days back, so if you want to look around for the thread.

In world war two when the Germans took over the Netherlands they scooped up every last drop of industrial and agricultural chemical stock they could get and this left the Netherlands folks without any commercial fertilizer.

They took the concept of using human piss and applied it to crops because it doesn't have to be aged or treated in any way. When it comes out of a person it's sterile. I know, you don't believe me, and all that, but that's what the deal is. Human waste solids, are a big "Oh HECK no" because solids not only start out contaminated but they breed flies and all this. Doing that is called using 'night soil' and you have to properly and I do mean properly compost it for a good long while. Like a good long while as in, many months to a year or so.
But the piss, that's a WHOLE other story and it grows weed like it was made to do, JUST that.

Here's the scoop I know on that.

After WW2 the knowlege of using pee to fertilize got passed around to various poor folk around the world and it was used in various parts of the world as a fertilizer diluted with water. When it's stored, the stuff stinks like hell.

Except
Except if
Except if, after you piss in your two liter soda bottle, you put it in the microwave oven and shoot it with electron, microwave energy till it gets a dash warm. See, microwaves kill single celled critters the way fucking with me kills the D.E.A's desire to talk about pot.

And the way I found this out was by reading about welders, who clean the tips of some of their equipment, with regular old cheap, generic, white bread off the shelf. Well of course the stuff gets mold and has to be thrown away; but some welder, put the stuff into a microwave oven and shot it for just a FEW seconds and reported it never molded and that he'd had it for several months.
Word got around about this and after awhile you had people saying they had bread thrown into the corner of a work truck tool box for a YEAR and it hadn't molded cause every time they took a piece out, they then folded the bag over and shot it in the microwave for a few seconds.

When you grow pot with human piss, you're supposed to really use it fresh, at about 8:1, to 10:1, to maybe 12:1.

But I was growing in a couple of hempy buckets, grown plants that were drinking a couple of gallons of water per day at the height of the summer so i had a bottle of my own piss in a two liter bottle.

I threw the stuff in the microwave for several minutes, like three or four, and then I put it outside to make fertilizer with by just mixing it, with tap water; When I opened it up there was no mild piss smell like most times.

I just pulled two plants from Hempy buckets that I messed around with. They grew on Flora Nova for about half their lives then I switched to human piss and water, and just a capful of Flora Nova for superstition and good luck's sake into five gallons of water/piss.

They grew great. I hindered their growth by how I treated them my son and daughter in law moved back in, and as SOON as I started the seeds I put em outside and they went immediately into flower, I tried to shock em back then said fuck it, but nutritionally it was just like every other time I've used human piss: no problems at all and indeed I really could hardly even tell the difference between the pure Flora Nova and the diluted 10:1 piss, with that lucky capful of Flora Nova into five gallons of water at a time.

You can get calcium for plants, out of old drywall: that stuff is calcium sulfate. It's not very water soluble but those who are into making it happen, know what's gotta be done.

If you go the old fashioned organic route, there's a lot to be said for that except for all the work and making tea and all, handling the various manures and stuff can be nasty, but it's darn near free. Once you sorta mess with it awhile you see things around you'd use if you were hard up.
For instance, my wife and I took the car for oil change at Wal Mart. Out come the two dogs and we take a walk, and along the back there, where the garden section is, you know how they always have that bag fertilizer and wood chips and soil up on those iron shelves outside, and the pigeons land and nest in it?

I was noticing that if I went along there real quick with a bucket and anything at all like cardboard, I could have scooped up fifteen pounds of really, pretty high quality bird guano.

That's just an example, there's also various concepts of using fish aquarium water but it's really kind of a hassle, although it's rock solid nutrition science wise.

One thing I can tell you saves a lot of people, a lot of money and hassle, is running a standard aquarium filter INSIDE their hydroponic reservoir. It circulates the water and kills odors and root rot to some extent.

But to wind it all up, a LOT of people just use GRO MOR with micronutrients, and epsom salt, and calcium nitrate.

A LOT of people have at one time or another relied on human piss. I have and always will because the stuff's free and it's a fantastic hydroponic fertilizer. If you put the aquarium filter in your reservoir it turns that into standard nitrate ferts just like it does with fishes' waste, so you can guarantee yourself NO odor that way.

I grew this last couple of batches in hempies, and in those there was no odor, ostensibly because the bacteria on the perlite multiplied just like they will on damp gravel, and they converted the piss to nitrate swiftly.

Pot is a plant that can use the nitrogen in piss straight out of your kidneys some plants can't, but when I put the stuff in the Hempy buckets, the odor goes away totally and I do mean, totally.

That's about all I know or can think of. Good luck and be sure and let us all know of any great successes or failures ya have.

 

[Cannabis]

I guess i'm plenty comfortable sayin that if you really want to grow some pot hydroponically, all you REALLY need, is some kind of about a one gallon bucket like the plastic jugs they throw away a dozen at a time at the laundromat,

some sand,
and some piss.

There are going to come along all kind of people with all kinds of ideas but there is absolutely zero question whether you can grow hydroponically, that cheaply.

F.r.e.e.

Is every crop going to be the fullest of the full, the biggest of the big, and all that? No, but then again when it's free, and requires no aeration, no water pumps, makes no sound, makes no heat, like Hempy Buckets,

and every single element of the thing from the laundry detergent bottles to the sand/gravel to the piss/ pigeon guano is so low impact, so low "pot grow" signature that even YOU hardly notice any tracks you're leaving,
that's a very comforting thing if you grow where it's illegal.

 

[OvergrowDaWorld]

IMHO.... any good grow is a combination of both DIY and store bought.
My EZ-Clone 120 cost $475 bucks.
The stock airline that makes bubbles REALLY SUCKS, and the stock air pump is shit too.
The stock 950gph Mag Drive Pump is great though. As well as the whole rez and top.

After replacing the airline that clogs after 2 uses, with 14" blue bubble stones($15) and replacing the airpump with a large 2 line airpump($20), my clones are perfect. All 120.
I spent around $525.00on my clone machine and I couldnt be happier.
Ive seen DIY aero cloners work fantastic, as well as DIY hydro systems.
I would spend the dough on the stock clone machine and I would do a DIY hydro system, if I was to invest in a clone machine and a hydro system (Those store bought hydro systems can get quite pricey. The DIY ones posted on this site are fairly cheap).
Getting good rooted clones is a must for SOG'ers and anyone on a schedule, who doesnt want any stall in there cuts, while rooting and t/ping into desired medium.
The stock EZ-C's are the way to go. After customizing it with a bigger airpump and 2 air-stones.

 

[AlterEgo860]

thanks cannabis appreciate the info..

lol id love to get an ez clone.. but this thread is about making things to make it cheaper.. lol .but money wise . Id much rather spend money on a tote an the ez clone parts.. and have a replica for 1/5 the price.

 

[Cannabis]

After you mess with plants many years you realize how a plant's roots really will help dissolve a mass of mineral it wants, using it's roots. Plant roots exude citric acid and they use the acid to dissolve therefore make soluble in water, elemental minerals.

Well here's an idea I just had and it comes from having grown so many different kinds of plants, so many different kinds of ways.

Like I told ya how when you make fertilizer the NPK are what you of course buy cheapest and in bulk but you've gotta supply the other more important micros like sulfur and calcium, plus the truly trace elements.

If you took drywall and pounded it with a hammer into powder, and mixed it up, dry, in the perlite or coco you were making Hempy buckets with, I have no doubt in my mind at all, the roots would come to that calcium sulfate gypsum and simply dissolve it and consume it without missing a beat.

For the real guerrilla experimenter like me, this would be something I'd have no problem doing at all. I've seen root systems eat into things and a root system doesn't take much shit when the chips go down. They're straight up out to dissolve ROCK if they can, whether they have to, or not.

And here's another trick for when you're trying to grow hydroponically, but don't have full spectrum nutes, that I think I'm probably going to do next round of Hempies I do.

I put my sand, chosen specifically because it wasn't just white and clear but very multi-colored and not white sand, therefore a better likelihood of wide range mineral content,

I put that sand/soil I threw in there into two liter bottles that I punctured with a bunch of holes: but what a friggin hassle and the holes most definitely limited the roots getting out and to water fast as they could:

next time I'm going to simply fill an old sock or maybe doubled sock: with similar mixture, so that it's contained, but my roots can grow straight out into the perlite without any limitation on finding a hole in the side of the two liter bottle.

When you're doing that method, you're helped by the fact that you can dose the plant's root region locally with almost anything: guano, manure, whatever you've got - by putting it into a small, paper or cloth container, and just letting the roots find it.

The idea for that is augmented in my own mind by the way I saw an experienced organic pot guru explaining how to plug soil with concentrated nutrients by simply driving in a spike and applying this, and by digging holes and simply dosing a substantial amount of that - and letting the plants' roots decide how close they got to the actual concentrated stuff: he said as far as he could tell, they'd creep into a fertilized area just far enough, but not too far, and start removing fertilizer material.

In the description the guy was giving, he was saying, that if you're new to organic additions and want to prepare a bed or container but don't know what to do, and what you should mix with what, to just do that: plug the root area around it's medium and perimeter region and let the roots sort out how they want to grow, to get the max from what they are offered.

He also said if it's a container or a hole in the ground, then some of the amendments, he suggested placing in layers.

Well stoned story short, It's always occurred to me that it might be possible to add your trace minerals to a hempy bucket, by just placing a large plastic lid, like a peanut butter jar lid, full of crushed gravel, fine sand, so the roots, on growing straight down, find the puck of mineral laden sand right there below them and at about the water level so the water is always on them.

It's only an idea, but it could be very well, a possibility in a Hempy bucket that a person could drive a 1 inch plastic pipe down into perlite or stick several down in a bucket and pour the perlite/coco in around it,

then just fill it with a mixture of a speckled, multi-color sand, as fine as you can find, or mixed gravel dust from the landscape place, and some Azomite.

Pull out the plastic pipes after filling them, and voila you'd leave several vertical plugs of very high mineral content substance there in the wet perlite all the time. A lot of it would sift down to the bottom by the time the grow was over, but your plants would get a lot of trace mineral nutrition.

I guess that's really a 'make work' version of the idea, of just setting the plant into a netpot lined with cloth so the stuff stays put in a powered hydroponic system,

or in the case of Hempy buckets, putting the plant into the bucket in an old washed, sock, filled with whatever mixture of sand, Azomite, soil one chose to augment the trace/micro nutrient profile.

The Azomite is super flour fine gravel dust and even sand will get through a typical sock, I'll have to line the inside of the sock with say, paper towels, so the contents don't drizzle out.

Just stoner rambling is all man; peace

 

[rangergord]

Awesome info Cannabis! I use my urine outdoors very successfully. As long as I dilute it with water its great. I am starting an aquarium indoors and attaching a growbed of expanded clay to it as a filter. It can be run with fish or fish-less with urine. An aquaponic setup like this is the most natural form of hydroponics for sure. Even the pH becomes self stabilizing after a while.

 

[TheCleanGame]

2.2lbs of MaxiBloom is only $15 or less + shipping.

That's a LOT of nutrient and a LOT you won't have to think about (nutrient wise) in a small bag. It's also all you need for feed to create decent to stellar quality cannabis.

DIY is always a trade off...
As mentioned previously, a high price doesn't always mean high quality and DIY doesn't always mean poor quality.

I build my own DWC and drip through 'whatever' systems for ultra cheap. Drip tables are as simple as a piece of plywood, a couple 2x2's, an ebb and flow drain and some panda plastic. 10 minutes, tops to build it.

I'm not going to make a pump... lol I've built reflectors but prefer pre-built. You just need to pick and choose what you can build... according to your skills, tools and resources available.

Keep it Clean!

 

[Cannabis]

Here are some threads on similar stuff:

Here's one: https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=191007

and, here's one: https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=199034

and I looked at this one, too: https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=181405&page=3

 

[Zen Medz]

Alter Ego, I'm on the same path, trying to figure out how to blend some kick a$$ nutrients with just the salts. Jack's Hydro from JR Peters seems to be a nice basic nutrient and I'm trying to copy that mix. Gonna pick up some water soluble salts and blend my own next month, will let you know how it grows. Here's my recent post about that challenge. Cheers.

https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=275136

Good option for testing out DIY nute mixes:

https://customhydronutrients.com/ze...ducts_id=177&zenid=tdsu2gt3v33bjb4it7a707f381