Homemade Nutrients: Cheaper Hydroponic Gardening

Nice stuff which guide to make a homemade nutrient solution.

There are a few different things you can realistically do, but it all involves you being kinda savvy.

You can buy calcium nitrate for one thing and it’s a low profile type thing, because sometimes, people throw calcium nitrate into yards where they want grass to grow but pines have made the ground acidic. It’s just not the stuff the gub’mun’t thinks is gonna make baby go boom boom, it’s harmless stuff, that covers two things for ya, some nitrogen, and your calcium.

Ok? But these are the secondary nutrients and it’s the several micronutrients you want to invest to your plants.

If you grow in a hydro system there are various ways, in which you can introduce very, fine, rock flour, or rock dust, for your seedling to grow downward through in a small tube, or form an initial root ball in, but your hydroponic system has to be able to manage, to keep the stuff in motion.

In using passive or drip hydroponics, that part’s easy: you just plant the seedling into a one liter bottle, of the most varied and, fine sand, you can sift the rocks out of. That’s enough minerals for your average yearly to feed on, and then the roots, leave your bottle via a piece of fabric or paper, you stuff in there : you can’t just drill holes in the bottle, the plant will get quite root bound, unless you split the bottle, but this gets hard to handle for me, and I actually take old tee shirts, and just pull those over the cut off one liter bottles of sand, with the necks split at the top,too. If the plant’s gonna be pretty big I use two liter bottles of sand, then stick that, into a five gallon bucket, filled with perlite and vermiculite or more commonly nowadays, that goes into coco husk coir which is the stringy coco husk stuff, it’s really good for cation exchange, and you can dust that with fine, flour sand and put that in your perlite but it gets kind of mushy.

You aren’t supposed to get, white, or very ivory colored, sand. You’re supposed to go to, an area where, there is a river, and there are spreads of fine, dry sand on the banks if possible.

Now; if that’s not possible, there’s a way to harvest a very, very high fines quality rock dust, infused with dead leaf matter. Think about what I say to you, don’t mess this up, and don’t drown. You’ll figure it out quick.

All creeks: all of em from mine to Mississippi – flood repeatedly. Now listen: when this happens there are rushes of water where there is major, major, sand, rushing in it : but because, it is some distance: at the rivers around here it’s about eight or ten feet above the regular water level –
at that height there’s gonna be, this silt, which is very, very, very fine and dusty seeming: and it’s going to be amazingly devoid of any rocks whatever.

This is what you want. It’s called, ‘river fines’ or river silt and it’s basically very free of clay. There’s some dead matter in it, several percent but it’s okay to use to a certain degree in your hydro system when you screen it, and then have the seedling just grow down through that.
The citric acid oozing out of the sand, and repeated waterings through the sand, keep the plants doing okay for me.

Now there’s still, magnesium which you dose in, with epsom salts, and there’s sulfur a secondary nutrient which often, is in the whatever sulfate, your lawn fertilizer you are augmenting, is made with. Choose a wide spectrum fert, is one thing, a good rule of thumb is, you need to at least, be seeing some iron, and some magnesium, sulfur, and manganese, in a reasonable amount.

See you have the first three, NPK then you have the widely considered secondaries, Calcium and Sulfur. Behind those, rock dust covers all, except I guess Magneisum which is your epsom salt.

Now: listen. Let’s say you have to buy ferts for a little personal hobbyiing and you wanna feel exotic. You buy, flowering/bloom fertilizer off the shelf then you didi-bop down to the – listen to me: stump killer, and it will be there by whomever, in a little brand color scheme dominated about… a quart or so plastic bottle. Granules.

It is : potassium nitrate. It says so on the bottle, those words: Contains: Potassium Nitrate. Ok?

When you dose the bloom fertilizer with it, you can more closely match, then dominate the phospherus fert, with more K – potassium – and nitrogen – that’s N.

And that means that later you can simply use the bloom/fruiting ferts with a higher phosphorus blend.

Another thing. Your pH down, should be the cheap battery acid from the car parts store, it’s the recommended greenhouse pH down, because of it’s sulfur addition that doesn’t mess with NPK ratios.
Battery Acid is often thought of as really corrupt stuff but the fact is, contaminate your sulfuric acid, in your battery with just a smidge of anything else, and it makes it perform more and more poorly; and, battery acid when it is manufactured, isn’t derivative of things that naturally leave heavy metals in it; it has to do with what the processes are leading up to making it. Sulfuric Acid. You get water and pour some into it, then use that to adjust pH to add sulfur, and, seem like you’re a real smart gardener.
People see the calcium nitrate,
they see the potassium nitrate by – let me get my bottle: it’s from Wal Mart – the doggone yard sprinkler’s on sorry, it’s in the lawn and garden just cruise up and down the aisle looking for “stump destroyer/stump killer.” The Wal Mart I go to used to carry a bright green brand name bottle now the brand is different and the bottle is high gloss black with a little conical cap and a cut-to-pour spout.

You pour some into water, you measure ppm change, it’s potent due to the high conductivity of potassium.

Then when they see you tell them you got “rock flour” or “river fines” and make the tap root/main rootS grow d.i.r.e.c.t.l.y. d.o.w.n. into it for the “other 10/whatever micronutrients – you’re friends are gonna be sayin’ wow, uh, what about those Yankees, this year, wow! They’re gonna think you know your stuff and really, that kinda is, knowing your stuff.

Oh, and your Epsom’s salt sitting there beside all that other stuff.
The high phosphorus ferts ”with some secondaries”
the stump killer for potassium and nitrate “to balance my primarys”
The rock flour from a special number of feet above the normal level of the river so the “sharp granular sand falls out of solution leaving the flour sand the citric acid from the roots can dissolve faster”

you’re gonna be the talk of the local hydroponic growers.