Weigh them out prepackaged bags. Then the directions are: add this entire bag to make X gallons of stock solution. Protects your ip to a minimal degree and it’s as idiot proof as anything else for the wooks
Tissue analysis would be a much more useful tool if someone was in a position to make changes.
That makes a lot of sense in regards to pre-packaging nutes. Now that you say it, testing doesn’t seem as useful without the ability to make changes on the fly. It seems counterintuitive, but it would probably be the first place they would cut costs if something goes wrong.
I got the test results back for the Athena Grow. Thanks @DeltaFine for sending me the sample! Twice because the USPS lost the first one for quite some time.
I have abandoned my plan to use Athena, the plants just looked horrible on it again. When I get the same result twice, I call it good. This isn’t meant to be a knock on Athena, it is obviously amazing when used in the proper conditions like @Medicine.grower is doing. I grow in Sunshine Mix and with my soft and chlorinated tap water and for whatever reason that doesn’t seem to be optimal with Athena. I’ve gone back to my old standby Jack 321 and the plants look great.
I’ll post the old Athena Bloom and the new Veg test results. As you can see not that different. You get some more N in Veg and slightly more P in Bloom.
Those really are similar…
Thanks for getting this info!
Can I ask what your target EC or pwEC is when flowering with jacks?
I try to have my input TDS not be over 850 ppm (500 scale) and my runoff be under 1350 or so. Any higher than that and the plants usually don’t like it.
@emdub27 could you share what ratios you like for NPKCaMgFeS etc.?
I recognize you from your other name on another website and I have learned so much from you over the years. Wondered what you liked to use these days and if it has changed from your earlier years.
I don’t run any fixed ratios. I try to achieve the tissue analysis sufficiency ranges and DRIS that I have established over the years. That data cost me and my business partners a lot to develop. For that reason is doesn’t get shared. At some point it will probably be published, but I don’t know when.
What I can tell you is that I’ve achieved the same targets and approximately the same yield at anywhere from 1.5ec to 3.5ec feed. The ratios in solution vary wildly from the lower end to the higher end to achieve the same end product. The necessary ratios also change drastically based on the environmentals. In my opinion, based on tissue and yield data over roughly 60 facilities at this point, every tissue sufficiency study published for cannabis is wrong. Every published tissue study has focused on averages, and nothing else. Cannabis is not special and it’s tissue analysis should look similar to other dicots. I’ve also never walked in to a new facility that wasn’t low on potassium.
Here’s some info I found on DRIS, I hadn’t heard of it before:
"Nutrition and fertilization are important factors in determining fruit yield and fruit quality. There are several methods for plant nutritional status diagnosis, among them, two are relevant and named as Sufficiency Range Approach (SRA) and Diagnosis and Recommendation Integrated System (DRIS).
The DRIS method expresses results of plant nutritional diagnosis through indexes, which represent the effect of each nutrient in the nutritional balance of the plant.
The working premises for DRIS are based on: (a) the ratios among nutrients are frequently better indicators of nutrient deficiencies than isolated concentrations values; (b) some nutrient ratios are more important or significant than others; (c) maximum yields are only reached when important nutrient ratios are near the ideal or optimum values, which are obtained from high yielding-selected populations; (d) as a consequence of the stated in (c), the variance of an important nutrient ratio is smaller in a high yielding (reference population) than in a low yielding population, and to the relations between variances of high and low yielding populations can be used in the selection of significant nutrient ratios; (e) the DRIS indices can be calculated individually, for each nutrient, using the average nutrient ratio deviation obtained from the comparison with the optimum value of a given nutrient ratio, hence, as pointed by Jones (1981) and Walworth & Sumner (1987), the ideal value of the DRIS index for each nutrient should be zero.
An important limitation of these methods is that, especially in some annual crops, the established standard sampling period many times occurs too late in the growing season, so that fertilizer application will not be effective to correct a nutritional problem, or may not match the sudden symptoms of a nutritional disorder, when the producer mostly need the information (Walworht & Sumner, 1987). To overcome this problem, it would be necessary to get nutritional reference values for several maturation stages and, as a matter of fact, some of these standards have already been established for a few crops. Although simple in theory, this procedure is of difficult application."
After reading that last paragraph I understand why emdub27 doesn’t freely share the ranges he has established for Cannabis.
So what dicots should I be looking at to get an idea of what sufficiency ranges and ratios would most apply to cannabis? I know @emdub27 suggested Tomato’s and, peppers as a start. I did check out a few published articles that gave ratios for Tomato’s but, the Ca usually seems to high to directly apply to Cannabis. I couldn’t find a lot of published ratios on peppers.
Tomatoes usually have Ca compositions of youngest mature leaves of around 1-2%, this is common to most dicots (see here HS964/EP081: Plant Tissue Analysis and Interpretation for Vegetable Crops in Florida). Averages for most labs on cannabis will usually be above 4% Ca.
However, Ca in tissue depends strongly on the age of the leaves and as cannabis leaves grow old, they usually accumulate very high amounts of Ca. The youngest mature leaves in week 8+ of flower are usually several weeks old and can be even 10% Ca.
Since people send leaf tissue from all over flower for analysis, averages tend to be much higher and people take this to mean that a young cannabis plant should have Ca values this high in leaves, which is wrong from a plant physiology perspective.
I would also like to note that in terms of nutrient interactions cannabis behaves a bit different to other dicots. I have developed a nutrient interaction chart for cannabis with my clients that has taken over 500 tissue samples to figure out to a high certainty (like a Mulder’s chart but with actual numbers to represent the strength of relationships). Several of the interactions commonly assumed to be facts are different in this plant. For example the interactions between Zn and P.
My tissue data agrees with everything @danielfp said in the last 2 posts. It is also pretty awesome that he has more or less correlated DRIS data to feed ratios. I’ve never attempted to do that.
@SeymourGreen a combination of pepper and tomato data is pretty much where we are. But @danielfp pointed out the ion interactions are quite different and as a result you can’t look at pepper or tomato feed data.
Man this shits hard lol! It sucks from my perspective because I’m just a simple home grower. I’m in a no rec state, trying to grow cannabis hydroponically, that tastes as good as the weed I grew outside in soil mixes, picked up from the growers bible and high times articles, 25 years ago. I don’t have access to tissues data, and probably couldn’t afford it if I did. This is where @danielfp idea for his website and feed ratios based on DRIS and plant sufficiency, would be like an epiphany for me.
Looking over some charts I see that si antagonizes ca, I’m now finally using agsil and was wondering what’s the most recommended before it starts to have an effect on calcium?
It was suggested to me by @emdub27 to set Si at 15-20 ppm.
What you’re doing, using it as a ph increaser for Athena, you would see issues with precipitation before you would see calcium issues.
Could you share the nick endub77 in another forum, I am interested in your presentations. If you want by private message.
Thanks
As far as I can remember, I’ve never used a different screen name on any forum. I’ve used it since AIM, it’s my initials and old football number.
@emdub27 I apologize for any misinformation, the parallels were pretty astounding even down to writing style. He also loved brix and had a great knowledge of cannabis nutrition that seemed very like you. Maybe all the greats love brix haha.
Although one difference is he thought Jacks 321 had too much K and you say most facilities have too little K in their plants. Thought it could just be a natural evolution of ideas.
No worries.
And plenty of those low K testing facilities actually have tons in solution. It’s just not absorbable due to antagonization.
