I grow organic in soil with dry amendments only. I top dress in week three of flower, cal mag week 5 and that’s it. Water only always. I use RO and bottom water with a top splash. No water ever leaves my cloth pots. Seems fine to me and a lot less work.
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I can swing $20 a cycle for ipm as margins are pretty good for us.
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I hear you, man. My time is money.
EDIT: A quick work up and this is a suitable substitute for Pure Crop 1:
80% glycerin
15% corn/soybean oil
2% insecticidal soap (SLS, Dr. Bronner’s)
2% aromatic oil (vanillin, rosemary, thyme)
0.5% guar/xanthan gum
0.5% citric acid
Heat on low and stir until homogenized. Add aromatic oil while cooling and make sure fully incorporated. pH will be ~10.
Use @ 1-2 oz/gallon H20. Spray until beading on leaves.
(I still do fertilizer and IPM for fun!)
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One of the problems with the employee mixing is when the mess it up. Not sure I want to risk 1 or 18 rooms trusting an employee. Its a lot easier to sleep at night knowing all they have to do is add 2oz of this in one gallon of water.
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How long is the process, 1hr?
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It took me 20 minutes to read the patent, take some notes, 20 minutes to gather supplies from my fertilizer room and heat everything through. 20 minutes to cool and I just hit some clones in the dark with it for an “idiot test”.
I don’t expect a ton of people to do this, but at least the information is out for everyone to share.
EDIT: I had to laugh. The only reason water is on the SDS is because glycerin and guar or xanthan gum is hygroscopic. “Technically”, it’s a colloid, but only in trace amounts.
Also they leaned real hard on the “micelle” marketing, because it contains glycerin and a surfactant
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40 min then to mix and cool X 18 rooms. This would take an employee 12hrs a week for all rooms. Cali minimum wage is $12, so $144 a week + ingredients im going to guess puts me over the $156 for the purecrop1. If its your own time and you have a few lights then mixing is viable. Once you go commercial it turns into a numbers game and then do you trust a minimum wage employee to mix and administer products on high value crops.
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I totally understand. You’re really sharp with business and understand numbers. At the end of the day, I just wanted to challenge the information gate keeping that happens with the hydro store “green tax”, even though time definitely is a cost that goes into the bottom line.
Watch out for my upcoming 4-part soluble powdered nutrient lineup that I’m working on that includes veg, bloom bases, biostimulants AND IPM soon. It will be for the commercial facilities saving time and money and producing some fire en masse.
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“Green tax”, if I grew a pound for $385 should I only mark it up 5 or 10%?
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@AgTonik Have you used organics alive solubles?
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Hell no. Manufacturers/producers (like cultivation facilities) should make at least 5-10x markup to cover infrastructure and equipment investment. I’m talking about hydro stores that take an existing Ag product and double or triple the price just because it involves weed.
@Hansel The soluble fertilizer line might be a commercial product. If not, I’ll crowd source it.
And yes, Organics Alive is a great innovative company with their dry solubles. It’s cool their fulvic is fermented versus mined, although the testing percentage is very low like Ful-Power. Anyways, their solubles are excellently designed, executed and effective products.
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Im sure I can get the cost way down of I buy on an AG level but then I would need to store thousands of gallons on site. Its like grow store nutrients being mixed and stored for you so you just need to pick it up and use it.
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I agree. Cost per gram for us is about 75 cents. I no you guys don’t wanna hear it but advanced nutes through rockwool.recirculated. Trimmer cost way more than good nutes.
One of the places I was consulting for called me in the middle of an ice storm because they couldn’t get their brand locally. They needed 6k gallons worth of stock solution (about 6-20L containers) for their UnderCurrent house. I have an R&D room just for raw fertilizer inputs and storage. They got it mixed up and delivered the next day for the same price as retail. I will absolutely go out of my way if someone asks me for help or simply for kind people!
I ran a hydro store for a few years, so definitely biased. It just made me really sad seeing new growers buying Terpinator and CX Tanlin for top dollar with sideways marketing and ingredient list claims. I tried to teach people what goes into that bottle and ultimately their garden. It’s still nice to have a place to pick up tools for grow business just like a HVAC supply warehouse.
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I think that the hydro store should be more like a construction supply house where you can email or place a order for will call. Anyways if you flush to a raucous you can see when ppm stops rising so that does tell something.
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Cannabis grow coops need to take off. Hemp might help.
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I agree completely. 
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